Hello! I'm new here, and hopefully this is the right place to post this. A friend (Michael) and I are working on a top-down, twin-stick shooter (where the left stick makes you walk and the right stick makes you shoot), inspired by the classic arcade games Smash TV and Total Carnage. We're going for similar levels of ultra-violence and humor that those games had. We've done quite a bit of design work on our Trac site and are currently making a prototype of the first level. We both have coding experience, but I convinced Michael to use GameMaker since we'll get the game done faster that way.
We don't plan on violating any copyrights with this (so no ripped sounds or graphics).
Neither of us was planning to draw the sprites, but we didn't know any pixel artists so I decided to give it a shot myself. I'm enjoying it so I think I will stick with it. Which means Michael will probably end up doing most of the GameMaker work.
We're tentatively thinking of running the game at 800x600 and using 32x32 sprites for basic enemies. There will be dozens of enemies onscreen at once so the sprite size seems appropriate. The player character will be a little bigger.
So anyway, here are the sprites I've drawn so far. None of them is considered complete; rather, I'm cranking out sprites that look "good enough" that Michael can start trying them out in GameMaker. We'll add polish later.
First enemy: Knifeguy. You'll be fighting dozens of this guy at once, but you get a gun. Here are his two diagonal walking animations.
We've tentatively decided to let regular enemies only walk diagonally and draw 2-frame walks. That way only 4 frames need to be drawn per enemy for basic movement.
Since pretty much all the weapons in the game are excessively powerful, everyone just explodes when they die. It's way easier for me to draw a few gibs than an actual death animation.
So imagine these body parts rotating and scattering as the knifeguy gets shot.
A grass tile and a water tile. Not very good, I know.
You know how in old games like Contra and Metal Slug, enemy bullets tend to flash? These are a couple of attempts to recreate that effect.
Finally, I just drew this guy for fun, but he'll probably make it into the game somehow.
I'm using Pixen for the Mac to draw and animate these. Cool program.
Community
