Sean Gibson's ePortfolio

Farmer Sprite The next character joining our roster of hand-drawn sprites is the Farmer! You may notice that this sprite is only a 32 by 32 resolution headshot of the character, rather than the full-body treatment that the Knight got. This is because we as a team have decided to pivot from doing 128 by 128 full body character art to smaller scale headshots that I can complete much faster. I would love to do full body artwork for all of the characters, but sadly the time we have left to finish this project wont allow for it. Pivoting to headshots is overall easier, but it also presents its own unique challenges. Before, I was able to convey a character’s personality and profession through a depiction of their entire body, but now I have a much more limited space to try and depict as much as I can about a character. This is proving to be a challenge as I work on the Scholar and Maiden sprites currently, but for the farmer I actually didn’t have too difficult of a time. After revi...

  This sprint, I worked on improvements to the enemy AI, solving the issue of players having to search for the last few stragglers at the end of a wave to move on, and making the Weapon HUD functional! Enemy Auto-Chase Throughout the project’s development thus far, all enemies’ AI were initialized to the Wandering state upon spawn, meaning that they would navigate to random nearby points, waiting until the player entered their sight radius before chasing and attacking. This sprint, we decided that we want enemies to instead start in the Combat state. Thankfully, due to the way that I set up the enemy AI in previous sprints, this was easily accomplished by initializing the AI state to Combat upon spawn, and plugging in the player character as the attack target. Super Easy! This worked great for the light enemies, who would now immediately book it toward the player. However, this implementation had some undesired effects on the behavior of ranged enemies. With ranged enemies,...

  This sprint hasn’t been my most productive due to some external circumstances, but I still did manage to finalize our first customer sprite, the knight! This guy proved to be quite a challenge. I haven’t had much experience doing character art, only winging it as best I can when a project calls for it. While far from perfect, I’m still really happy with the result! I began the process by building out the pose I wanted with a sketch. I took a very loose approach to this as all I wanted was to get an idea of the features and idea I was trying to convey. After this sketch, I kind of jumped the gun by going straight to flat colors. I tried to refine the details of the sketch while also figuring out the basic coloring, and I wasn’t very happy with where it was going, so I ended up tossing this attempt and restarting this step. I realized here that trying to properly work out the details and color at the same time was biting off more than I could chew, so I decided to limit mysel...