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Undead West: Devlog #10 - “The Art of Undead West”

Undead West · published 13 Nov 2024, 15:14 UTC

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Hey,

We’re getting closer to the release of Undead West, and very soon everyone will be able to embark on their journey to the Wild West—filled with cowboys, whiskey, and dangerous enemies waiting for our hero.

For now, you can still download a free demo of the game and put your skills to the test.

This week, we’d like to share some behind-the-scenes magic happening during the development of Undead West.

💀 The Art Process of Undead West

The art of Undead West is created with Aseprite, a program that is specifically designed for drawing and animating in small canvas pixel format. The main character is 17x26 pixels in size and the environment is drawn in 16x16 tiles to maintain proper scaling.
The decision to create the art for the game in a 2-bit black and white color palette was intended to provide a ‘retro’ impression similar to games like Downwell, Minit, and even all the way back to the original first of the genre, Rogue, as well as both time-efficient and challenging in it’s limitations.

💀 Sprites

Undead West sprites are often first sketched out in physical form as a concept in my artbook, which helps get the ideas out and down on paper. Next in Aseprite on a black background, the sprite - whether it’s a boss, enemy, or environmental object - is roughly blocked out in white to get the general shape or pose, usually with the sprite of the player character next to it to make sure that the scale of the sprite will work coherently with the rest of the art assets in-game.

Then come shadows, details (which are usually only a couple of pixels themselves, intended to imitate the idea of something like nails in a crate, or a nose on a 5x5 pixel face), and when the sprite is all cleaned up it usually gets copied and pasted a few times to play around with variations: alter this, change the color of that, erase one pixel here / add one pixel there and finally I choose my favourite version to take into animating or import into Unity, usually as one big spritesheet consisting of ten-twenty or so sprites to get sliced into individuals in the game engine.

After the first few concept sprites of the player character, NPCs, some enemies, and environment tiles, I added a bright red to the color palette as a way to make a handful of objects (like fire) stand out, especially using it for enemies and enemy projectiles.
The player outfits are also an exception to the black and white rule, giving the outfits bright vibrant colors helps the player easily see where they are on the screen versus all of the enemies and also makes you feel unique.

💀 Animation

Animation is often the most time-consuming process of working on enemies and bosses to put in the game. When a sprite is done, it gets it’s own canvas and animation tags which cover a handful of frames for things like spawning, moving, attacking, and death. The short animations are about 8 frames long that loop continuously, you’ll see this in animations such as idling, while unique animations like special boss attacks can be 20 to 60 frames in length.

For some animations, it’s easy enough to rotate parts of a sprite - then clean it up so it doesn’t look messy - to achieve the effect you want. In retro-style games like this, an idle animation can be as simple as moving the body and head one pixel up, then one pixel back down. For more complex animations, I use a varying degree of lines and blocking out methods to get the general position, weight, and timing before adding the final sprite back in and making it match the blockout on every frame - which is why for animating, I split the sprite into each separate limb and put each limb on a different layer.

Example: Animating a run cycle for a side facing sprite (like a horse). Using the base sprite we draw a line (or blockout in a thicker pixel brush size) over each limb, in a different color for each line. This way, if the lines intersect at any point, crossing over or behind each other during a frame, you can tell which line belongs to which limb.
The lines also help you to maintain the length and size of each limb, and using a feature called ‘Onion skin’, you can see a faint version of the previous frame to the one you are currently on so you know where your sprite’s limb was which will help you figure out where it should move to next. Then you can bring the individually split apart limbs and parts of the original sprite back in, rotating them or redrawing them to make them match the lines.

💀 Level Design & Variation

Undead West’s levels are comprised of sequential linear ‘rooms’, often rectangular spaces where enemies will spawn in and initiate combat. These rooms are painted onto tilemaps with Unity’s tile palette using 16x16 tiles. With all the tiles being 16x16 pixel size, they fit onto the tilemap’s grid together seamlessly, which is why I design the tiles in Aseprite drawn each in their 16x16 square with Aseprite’s grid overlay as a guide, with walls and corners all touching so that I know that they line up together and later when the spritesheet of environment tile sprites is imported into Unity they get split up into their own small individual squares, ready for painting in.

The contents of the room are randomly chosen from a set of pre-determined layouts, for each room the game manager script picks 1 out of 3-5 layouts using a variation of hand-placed game objects of decorative wall items, destructible barrels and crates, and sometimes passive traps like proximity activated floor spikes.

💀 Double Feature

If you’re drawn to the gritty, pixelated world of Undead West, you’ll find Janosik 2 equally captivating with its own retro-inspired art style. Especially since our friend Marcin from Onix Games just shared his story of creating the art for Janosik 2. Check it out, and don’t forget to add it to your wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1640400/Janosik_2/