One of the most enjoyable parts of the game development process so far has been creating characters. Using my imagination to discover how they look, what abilities they have, where they’re from, and how they talk is immensely satisfying. Largely due to the efforts of the illustrator and animator I’m contracting, the first character of the game was just fully completed. I’m extremely happy with the outcome and thought I’d share with you the process of how he came to life.

I’ve been working on level design with an illustrator for the last couple weeks and things are really moving along nicely. What once took about 3 days of work is now condensed down into almost a day. We have 5 or so levels knocked out at this stage and I thought I’d share the process on how they come to life.

One of the reasons I chose Corona SDK as my development platform was because they support many devices across many platforms. But mo’ devices means mo’ problems, and one of those problems is creating artwork that scales across all devices.

I’m in the process of contracting an illustrator and so far I’ve looked at more profiles on deviantART and Behance than I can remember. I thought this would be an easy process, but I’ve never worked with an illustrator before and I never realized how many variables would come into play when searching for the right person. I know I won’t find everything I’m looking for, but here are some of the variables I’m taking into consideration while looking for the right person.

An easy way to add distinction and flavor to your game is to make seemingly standard concepts into unique game art. For example, two visual elements that pretty much all turn based tactical games contain are a means of displaying how far character can move and what enemies are within attack range. It would be easy to just make some squares green and others red, but you’d be missing an opportunity to add a little polish to your game. To visually understand what I’m talking about, here are screenshots of games that implement standard concepts in unique ways.

A couple commonly used projection techniques for turn based video games are orthographic and isometric projection. I’m in the process of figuring out which technique I’ll be using for my tactics game and I’ve been looking into the pros and cons of each method and how they’ve been used in previous games. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far.

Visually displaying a character’s health has been around for over 30 years and continues to be a mainstay of video games. From Zelda to Starcraft, these small graphics play a large role in how games are played and how information is communicated. The turn based game I’m working on will include health bars, so I’ve been looking into how other successful games have given their characters life. Here is a quick roundup of some of the more popular techniques I’ve come across.