This evening I created the first designs for the bear hunter tower. The bear hunter is Daniel's tower wish, the winner of the current challenge.
I thought I shed some light on the tower design progress today. Daniel provided a lot of information to this tower in facebook already. So I already had a very concrete character in mind.
Drawing the tower artwork
The first thing I usually do is to draw the rough outline of the character with the graphics tablet. It usually evolves from very scetchy to a more and more concrete piece of work. For the final inking I use a very thick brush, so that the strokes are still visible on the high-dpi mobile displays. You see the final result for the stroke layer on the left.
The next step is to color the tower. For that, I create a new layer below the stroke layer and fill the colored areas areas with a heavy brush. On some towers before I used some airbrush techniques but currently I prefer the flat coloring. The coloring is probably the most relaxing part of the design.
Now comes the shadow layer. For this I use a solid black brush and adjust the shadow layer transparency to control the amount of shadow I want to add. Lovely! The bear hunter now looks a lot more grim than before!
As a final step I enhance the tower with some more details, so that the artwork looks a bit more connected to the world it will be built on later. Usually I use the built in grass pattern brush (you might have spotted it already on some other towers). This time I painted my own few blades of grass around the hunter.
Bringing the artwork into the game
Now the fun part begins. Creating the game card and testing the tower in the map. For the game card, I have some pretty nice logic already. Based on my programming of the tower class and the tower ability instances that are plugged into the tower, the card layouts itself automatically. Yes, programmers are very lazy.
And finally, this is how the bear trapper looks on the map. I think he looks very determined: Get my damn traps coded, so that I can kick some creep's asses! Hell, right now the only thing I can to is to idle!
The interesting part will now be to actually implement the trap system. That's something entirely new for the game engine! But I'm looking forward to the trap concept.
The first thing I usually do is to draw the rough outline of the character with the graphics tablet. It usually evolves from very scetchy to a more and more concrete piece of work. For the final inking I use a very thick brush, so that the strokes are still visible on the high-dpi mobile displays. You see the final result for the stroke layer on the left.
The next step is to color the tower. For that, I create a new layer below the stroke layer and fill the colored areas areas with a heavy brush. On some towers before I used some airbrush techniques but currently I prefer the flat coloring. The coloring is probably the most relaxing part of the design.
Now comes the shadow layer. For this I use a solid black brush and adjust the shadow layer transparency to control the amount of shadow I want to add. Lovely! The bear hunter now looks a lot more grim than before!
As a final step I enhance the tower with some more details, so that the artwork looks a bit more connected to the world it will be built on later. Usually I use the built in grass pattern brush (you might have spotted it already on some other towers). This time I painted my own few blades of grass around the hunter.
Now the fun part begins. Creating the game card and testing the tower in the map. For the game card, I have some pretty nice logic already. Based on my programming of the tower class and the tower ability instances that are plugged into the tower, the card layouts itself automatically. Yes, programmers are very lazy.
And finally, this is how the bear trapper looks on the map. I think he looks very determined: Get my damn traps coded, so that I can kick some creep's asses! Hell, right now the only thing I can to is to idle!
The interesting part will now be to actually implement the trap system. That's something entirely new for the game engine! But I'm looking forward to the trap concept.