Digital painting practice.

Was practising some digital painting today, trying to establish a sharp look.

Sure would be a lot easier to be proud of myself if not for...

*sigh*....

I'm sure that after that game's release, artist suicides went through the roof.

Another animation test

Thank god that H animations will only be short loops, because I get the feeling I'd spend too much time on details like the hair. Even doing this test, I had to stop myself from making everything "bounce" when it returns to the initial position -__-

Animation test

Did a quick sketch and rig to test animation for CGs. Looks silly, but it's just something I threw together in 40 minutes or so.

When I do actual CGs, I'd spend more time on the picture and rigging, obviously. In the above picture, only her hair and breasts are on different layers (which is why her face distorts), whereas in an actual CG, her head and features would be separate, along with any clothing. Hair would also be done individually.

I'll also spend more time on the breasts. With the nipples on different layers, you can make it appear as though the angle is changing. Same with facial features.

To be honest, I'm actually looking forward to making a couple animations for the game, I find rigging to be pretty fun. For CGs, at least, I think any animation will be better than nothing. Personally, static CGs don't really do it for me anymore. With an animated CG you can have sound effects, and vibration, and stages, and...well, it's much more interesting.

Inspiring? Well..

I took a break from working on the game earlier today to play some Castlevania. I hadn't played any of the metroidvanias for a while, so I figured I'd play through the first area of one of them for some inspiration. Of all of them, I've played  Ecclesia the least, so I went with that.

What did I learn? Well..

First off, the tilesets in this game are absolutely beautiful. Even in enclosed areas, they tend to use larger parallax backgrounds, and they all look awesome. They basically have at least 2-3 different backgrounds for both horizontal and vertical type rooms, with vertical layouts having tower-esque backgrounds, making the environments feel very natural.

Other than that? 

At least in the first area, the level design is... practically non-existent. More so than I remembered. The rooms all felt the same, with very few of them being anything more than a hallway with enemies randomly scattered everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to distinguish one room from the others if not for different combinations of enemies.

I mean, maybe it was just to ease players into combat, and there's more complicated layouts later? Because otherwise it's just..a bad first area. In most games, the first level is what most people remember the most. But usually that memory isn't "big flat surface".

I'll have to play the rest of it, and see how it changes throughout the rest of the game.