Throwback Thursday!When we first went public with Eitr a few weeks ago, we were already a few months into development. From the start, we planned to show you guys what we were working on when it was in a presentable state.
Because of this, we never got to show you some of the things we had done in the past, things that got scrapped and just generally parts of our initial "Dev Log". So what we're going to be doing,
every now-and-then, is showing you guys some of our old work to showcase how our game has developed over the past months.
As we've shown quite a bit of our main character, the Shield Maiden, our first throwback is going to illustrate how her art has developed from start to now, my thought process throughout her creation and give a little insight as to how I work as an indie artist.
The Evolution of the Shield MaidenThe Shield Maiden from the beginning has been the driving source behind Eitr. We came up with the idea for the game whilst watching the TV Show "Vikings", it literally all began with the words
"Would'nt it be dope if there was a game where the main character was like Lagertha?"
Lagertha Lothbrok is a Shield Maiden in the TV Show, The Vikings. For at least a week, we went on a Vikings marathon, we fell in love with the show and it's characters, we watched every episode and during this time we often talked about the idea of a game centred around a Shield Maiden.
At the time, we were already prototyping a different game, one that we weren't particularly excited about - and after finishing watching Vikings, it was obvious to both of us what we wanted to do, we wanted to make a 2D Swords and Shields Viking game where you play as a Shield Maiden. Almost immediately we sent our previous project to the good old external Hard Drive and started development on a game soon be be named,
Eitr.
As the artist, my first job was to come up with a prototype of the main character. We planned on pixel art and originally the game was going to be mostly side-scrolling like Golden Axe / Streets of Rage / etc, also I had an idea of how I wanted the character to look... the problem at the time was, I had essentially no experience in pixel artwork. So I looked to the internet for some inspiration, one of the first things I found was the game "Swords and Sorcery" I really loved their art style, but I didn't want to completely copy their style as it is so unique, so I searched more for art that wasn't really directly from a game, but still looked somewhat similar to Swords and Sorcery, eventually I found these fashionable pixel characters.
Out of all the reference I was looking at, I really liked these and as I had no experience in pixel art, I wanted to start with something simple, and these looked simple enough - so I decided to try emulating a similar style. So I took to photoshop, put some pixels on the screen and after a little while I came up with the first prototype version of the Shield Maiden.
Looking at it now, kinda looks more like a UPS salesman than a video game heroine, lol. But at the time I thought it was pretty good! However, I did want to change her colors because I wasn't too happy with the
all brown look she had. So I went back and looked at Lagertha from Vikings and based our Shield Maidens colors on one of Lagertha's blue outfits.
I knew this probably wasn't going to be her final iteration, but being so happy with it at the time (I was new to pixel art!) I settled with it and started to animate her, we used this character in our prototype game for quite a while!
Whilst animating her and drawing her in different directions and poses, there were times where in some animation frames, the character was a few pixels smaller or taller, but as we were just prototyping I didn't worry about it too much so I just carried on making more and more animations, but I couldn't help but think she looked better when she wasn't as tall...
This was her original attack animation, notice her her dress isn't as flat and she isn't as tall and some of the frames just outright make her look better than when she is standing idle. I kept all of this in mind for when going forward with improving her.
When I drew her combat walking animation, her whole stance changed from her idle combat stance, she got a little smaller again, her shield became visible and changed completely into a shield that looked more like a viking shield.
Most of her prototype animations were done at this point and I moved onto making enemies and some environmental content for a while. Whilst doing the environments, we had quite a game changing few days where we decided to make the maps fully isometric, whereas original plans were that the levels would be linear and horizontal, like the original Golden Axe games. This meant that we would need 8 directional walking and running for the character, as this was such a big addition to her sprites, I decided that I was going to redesign her.
Instead of jumping straight in, I took some time researching and reading pixel art tutorials, I wanted to improve my skills before remaking the Shield Maiden's sprites. This tutorial in particular helped me a tonne! If you're new to pixel art and want to improve, I highly recommend reading this tutorial: (
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299)
One problem I always had with the prototype character, was it never matched what I had in my mind, so I set myself a task to draw a concept of our character in a style that I'm more comfortable with, this task ended up being quite a high quality peice of work that we plan on making into a poster in the future.
Please note: This image is incomplete, rough around the edges and a fraction of the actual image size.I spent a solid week in Photoshop painting this concept/poster (It's actual size is 4000x4000) and it still isn't finished! At the time of painting it, I really wanted to continue, but I had to get back to making sprites and animations, so armed with my new pixel art knowledge and a huge concept poster, it was time to go back into photoshop and draw up the new Shield Maiden!
This is what I came up with, in comparison to the prototype version, she's even shorter, she has a bigger shield, her legs are two pixels in width, she has shading, some dithering and she has hands! I was really happy with her improvements and was ready to start animating!
So I did, I spent the next week redoing all her animations in her new style, when I had finished, I couldn't help but feel like she was missing something and after a while I realised it was her hair... to put it bluntly her hair was boring and I found that it was too short to make good use of it in her animations, so I gave her longer hair and set up a color chart which I also showed to a few people and asked which they preferred.
Note to self: Make sure to be more than happy with your final concept before going onto animations, otherwise it could mean making additions to every single animation frame later on! Not to mention your 4000x4000 poster! 
If you notice the bottom row of sprites here, she also has two-pixel armoured arms.The red and ginger options were the popular choices, my favourite was always the ginger, haha. I did really like the red and I'm sure some of you will too, but I felt it was a little too cheesy and overused, so I ended up merging the red, ginger and one of the brown hues to come up with her final hair color. As for the two pixel armoured arms, we all seemed to agree they looked better than the one pixel naked arms.
Since then she has had some slight pixel adjustments, like the removal of the "ear-pixel", some shield tweaks and contrast adjustments, nothing major, she's come a long way from her original sprites, I feel like she is now at her final stage, but only time will tell if I get picky again!
All together now!That's the end of this throwback, thanks to anyone that took the time to read! 
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