Asset Creation: Step-by-Step

Over the last few years, I've unofficially settled into a workflow of making the characters and scenery that goes into the game. Everybody has mostly the same types of outlines and shading, and I generally know what my Photoshop file is going to look like. But maybe you've wondered what the drawing process actually looks like.

Wonder no longer.

Everybody starts with a sketch. I wish I had gorgeous detailed sketches to give to you, but honestly, things rarely get more polished than this:

Homeboy's sacral chakra is hella blocked. 

Fun fact: sometimes I look back at my sketches and can't even figure out what I was going for.

?????

But once I think I've got it from here, we lay down the outlines. Probably redrawing the hands fifteen million times because hands are hard. And anyone who holds a swappable weapon may need to have the holding-hand and weapon be in separate layer groups.

Then we lay down the base colors (minus the separate hand group here), so that we know generally what color scheme we're in. Deepists have blueish skin, both from generations of being underground and also to conveniently distinguish them from goodie-two-shoes human types. ;)

The shading is another layer with a mask made from the base layer, so that I can go wheee with the brushstrokes and keep things contained. The shading layer is also set to Hard Light, if you know Photoshop and are into that kind of information. I've found it to be the best blend mode for keeping the colors looking the way I want.

There may be more layers for extra details that I don't want baked into any other layer. Tattoos, spots, stripes, woodgrain, highlights, etc. Anything that I want to be able to turn on/off or edit separately gets its own layer. I learned this lesson the hard way during a job where the art director would ask me to change the color of the highlights on a picture, and I'd give them a blank look, because I'd painted the whole thing into one gorgeous layer. Because I was used to painting with physical paint. So I had to redo the entire thing. Don't be like young Annie. Use layers.

Then we do the same thing with the weapon. In fact, the weapon here is just for show. In the game, the weapon is it's own PNG, and Nate tells it to sandwich itself in between the PNGs for this brute and this brute's hand, then to scoot and rotate until it the placement is right.

Ideally, we end up with somebody who looks like this in-game:

And he's all pumped to go get his ass kicked by some heroes.