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 reviewing some reference images, I settled on a few details to start out with when drawing the farmer: A straw hat and a piece of wheat sticking out of their mouth. These features do an excellent job of utilizing the limited space available to me because they’re very exclusively associated with the concept of a farmer.
As I continued with the lineart, I did something that I usually don’t like to, which is introduce a third color into the palette. I think it was justified though, as distinguishing the wrinkles from the other facial features like the eyes and mouth really assists the readability of the sprite, since those elements are so close together. I also tried to recreate that frayed-edge look of many straw hats.
Finally, during the coloring and shading process, I added a little pink ribbon around the Farmer’s hat, just because it felt like something she would have! I feel that this character really came to life as I drew her, which really sped up the whole process. I experimented with adding some more texture onto the hat using a second off-white shade, but I wasn’t very happy with those results, so I opted to just leave it as a solid color. I feel that the silhouette of the hat alone is enough to sell the idea of the straw hat.
Scenario Customer Sprites
Now that I had my fancy Knight sprite all done, it was time to put him in the game!
Getting him to be the right size on the phone screen took some playing around, but I eventually got him taking up as much space as he could without cutting anything off horizontally. It works at different resolutions too!
This implementation was mostly done so that the artwork would be in the playtest. Now that we’ve pivoted to smaller character portraits, I’ll have to go back and revisit this next sprint. Although it shouldn’t be terribly hard.
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