Greetings!

Welcome back to the devlogs of Adventures of Nalem! In the last devlog we talked about how I made all those designs of Nalem and was having a hard time deciding which design I want to use for the game. This decision is important because it decides the feeling and visuals of the game, which is experienced by you, the players. 

From the V0 Nalem, I felt it was lacking something original and relatability. You can't really bond with the character because it has so few characteristics that are noticeable. This led to the headache of me designing new models for Nalem (and Knafeh, because they are the two humans in the Shogi world, ) I had to work fast.

I really liked how the 2D characters have a nice personality to it, it seems to have more life and friendly character that you can look at the details and infer something about the character.

So, I decided to combine both 2D models into one, kinda like the fusion dance in Dragon Ball. Haha! 

I gathered the things I liked about both characters and put it in one 2D model.

I made the character much shorter; it's standing full height at 32 voxels high! Previous model was 40 voxels high. The reason I reduced the height, I wanted it to fit in a top down as well as a billboard character, the maximum dimension of a character is 32x32x48, so I had to make the character within the constraints of this 32x32 square. Once I was happy with the idle pose and the overall design, I went on to animate the walking/running pose of the model. I had no experience in drawing pixel art but luckily, I have my trusty friend, YouTube!

Most of the pixel art videos I watched are from AdamCYounis, who is a great artist and game developer, he teaches step by step on how to achieve the animation you're trying to get. 

I sat down at 8pm at night watching and proceeded to animate my character. I was so absorbed in finishing the walking animation, I didn't realise it was already 2am! Here's my result, pretty good, eh? 

I tested it out with as a billboard sprite on an Isometric map, I liked it a lot. 

Next, I will move on to replacing the colour to make Knafeh's character and the Shogi pieces. At this point, I might as well redo the whole game. I will also need to think about how to improve the tutorial of the game, because Shogi has quite a lot of rules and different piece movements compared to Chess, which is more well known to the masses.

Thanks for reading and if you have suggestions for the game, please leave a comment below!

Jien.