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Let’s be honest, our team got infected with the pixelartosis. Yes, we got lost in the beauty of Hotline Miami and Papers, Please, which reminded us how much we missed Another Worlds and Jazz Jackrabbits. Like dozens of other developers we had decided to add our own drop to the wave of nostalgia, which resulted in making of The Way.
The Way - our first game
It might seem that two years of work should effectively satisfy the need for expressing ourselves with pixels, but we simply fell in love with this style. Of course, you can change the object of your love, but it's like trying to remove a tick from your heart. With this emotional deformity, we started creating our next game.
Unluckily, during the design phase, we remembered some of our other childhood romances, such as Gothic, Silent Hill or Soul Reaver. We were torn between worlds of 2d and 3d. Which of them would work better? Which one to choose? We couldn't decide...
...So we let the two worlds collide. You can view the result in full 3D (and even in VR!) by simply checking out the model placed at the very top of this post!
Stylistically Unlucky Seven is our recipe for a combination of eighties and nineties aesthetics. This is the new form of pixelartosis growing in our humble laboratory. We really hope to get all of you infected when it's complete.
Welcome to our weekly logs from our experiments!
Today Pawel (our lead artist) wants to say something about creating a character in this style:
I do all the work in Blender. Modeling usually starts with a cube, which I divide into sections and extrude some of them to create a form for a character. Then I perform multiple iterations of this process until it’s well shaped. The final model does not have to be too complicated, a simpler one goes better with large pixels on a texture. Like in good old games. We decided to use only the diffuse maps, to not interfere with pixelart style. After unwrapping the mesh, I choose a few basic colors (based on my concept art sketch) and I cover each element, such as trousers, jacket, shoes or head, with one. Then, using variations of brightness and hue I paint details such as corners of clothes. I'm always trying to use a limited palette, but sometimes I leave some texture regions "dirty" to get a less structured effect and to save some time.
Moreau texture - versions with and without the jacket I designate a different pixel density for different parts just like you normally would with high-poly models with high-resolution textures. A head requires more detail, unlike trousers. I’m trying to hide seams with objects overlapping each other. If it is impossible, I leave a small offset between texels. They are barely visible. Due to the irregular form of the mesh it is not possible to keep perfect square shape of texels (big pixels) on its surface. Perfect shape like this could be only achieved when objects are formed from cubes and planes. Fortunately, small distortions are not visible to the player. In some places, I use them to get a little bit more detail than normally allowed by a texture. For example, eyebrows forms are arched and slightly narrowed toward the center of the face, although this fragment corresponds to one pixel.
Distorting pixel shape to get more detail and using planes as fuzz I enrich the characters with fuzzy elements such as tufts of fur on body parts, but instead of simply using planes with a transparent texture applied (like regular games do) I extrude individual planes. I narrow them gently at the ends and set at a proper angle relative to the surface to make them easily visible. When the model and its textures are done we can finally preview it in our game engine. However, some additional preparations are needed to make sure that the pixelart textures display correctly... But that's a story for another update!
You can also find this entry on our official Development Blog