Arashi’s design has been undergoing many minute changes both in this project, Shadowdawn Genesis, and the future project Shadowdawn. I was waiting until I was absolutely sure my design was finalized, at least for her 19-year old self, before seriously beginning work on her very involved animation sheet. If you can’t tell, now is the time.
Here you see a vastly shrunk down scan of where I begin drawing each frame before coloring them. Since the final sprites are very small even in a 1280×720 resolution (the standard 720p resolution most hi-def games use nowadays), wasting too much time on very small details is both slow and actually detrimental: those details vanish and only serve to muddy the final result. From here I simply use a flat color for each part, and do a single shadow layer to give definition (something with high contrast). When all these elements are shrunk down to the final size for the game, the bilinear blending takes care of the rest. Bear in mind if I want really tiny details I have to edit them pixel by pixel, but the most important thing at the moment is to finish the core animations since there are so many to do, at least for Arashi and Ket. Most enemies and even NPCs have limited actions which helps keep things manageable, though one boss in particular is going to be as complex as Arashi.
As for the game programming, I have just been taking notes and debugging what I have so far. There’s a few more things I need to add to the engine to make it fully robust but the game is finished enough to play as is. Now it’s just a matter of how polished I want everything to control and look.
