“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings"

Welcome, welcome!

To semi-quote Foo Fighters from their hit song "Best of You", I've got a (another) confession to make. I underestimated the power of pixel art software. My task for the day was to use the intel I gathered from yesterday's research about level design and apply it in a 2D prototype layout. In other words, I was to make a test version of a level for our game.

My intention was to use Photoshop to draw it since that is where my experience lies when it comes to 2D. However, my co-designer introduced me to a 2D software called Piskel that focuses on making images in pixel art.

Our game measures everything in 1 x 1 sized cubes; the characters, the jumping height and so on. If a platform is supposed to be three cubes long, I can simply scale a default cube in Maya to give it that size on the corresponding axis. This is where the beauty of Piskel comes in.

Since it is grid-based and designed to let the user rapidly add or remove effective brush strokes to the canvas, the iteration is rapid. If I create a level layout in Piskel which the correct measurements (the correct distance between platforms, size of said platforms etc), I can simply export the file as a PNG and then apply it to a plane in Maya and thus use it as a blueprint for the 3D block-out. It is as easy as it sounds!

That's what I had to share for today! Adios!

To completely quote Foo Fighters from their hit song "Best of You", I've got another confession to make.

I am about to run out of far-fetched Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit references in my blog titles.