Thursday, October 20, 2005

A bit more game update

Here's two more characters from the game (tiny equipment-select portraits):



This is your mechanic and her step-father. It may be becoming obvious by now that (A) your team isn't the most well-funded expedition and (B) you're kind of dredging the bottom of the barrel. All the other, older inventors/mechanics have either been hired by earlier teams or refuse to risk their life.

Still, she's capable enough. Although she can't lift any of the heavy equipment, but that's what her father is there for!

The pictures are irritating me. Faces are very hard to do, because I'm scaling them. When you scale something else, if you lose a tiny line or the color gradient goes wonky, it's okay. But we know faces well enough that an error there shows painfully.

I'll probably have to draw these all several more times before I'm satisfied. I'm over-shading these faces. It's my natural instinct to shade, and this would be under-shading in illustration. But I don't think it's a good idea to shade much in this game, because I need high-contrast images, and if a sprite runs the gamut from light to dark, there's not much that can contrast with it.

Anyhow, the color schemes here are pretty obvious. The mechanic is a golden child, talented, innocent, relatively sweet, and thoroughly tactless. Her step-father is a salt-of-the-earth type guy. I don't like his shirt, so I'll have to figure something out there. His color scheme is intended to be boring, but I punched up his background because he was kind of disappearing into it. :P

Not the most inspired graphical designs. The father is intended to be solid and uninteresting, and the mechanic is just supposed to stand out among the rest of the characters - all of whom are either overdressed or dirty slobs. She's neither.

I don't know what to call this game. The perfect name is "The Machine", but that's not Google-friendly. I'll have to think about it.

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