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Despite the fact that we're only dedicating our spare free time to our game, we're finally starting to make some headway towards a final product. I thought I'd share a "small" tech demo that encompasses a test of our sprites and menu system.This demo is designed primarily as a test for our lighting and paper doll system. Along with it is some of our customized menu system.

Only three sprites are presented here. But, they encompass the full range of poses, outfits, hair styles and expressions. In fact, with this demo you should be able to utilize the paper doll system to create sprites that will never actually show up in the final game.

The lighting system, while functional, won't look like much in this version, as the sprites are all just pencils. But it's designed to cast a tint on top of our paper doll sprites, in order for them to match the time of day. That way, we don't have to CG special versions of each sprite for each lighting change.

Anyway, enjoy. And let me know if you find any problems/bugs.

Errant Heart Sprite Demo - MAC

Errant Heart Sprite Demo - PC

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Errant Heart

A Mac is a PC and Win32 is not.



From what I can tell everything seems to work fine -- although scaling/rounding errors aren't really noticeable on sketches.

Looks pretty cool, I really like the menus. The sprite demo seemed mostly that you were adjusting the color's matrix, but it's hard to tell because all the characters are black and white. Really looking forward to seeing what you do next!

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Technical Designer/Programmer
Game Design Portfolio - Project updates on my Twitter - Check out my 2D Platformer: Lunaris
Experienced in: C/C++, Python, Unreal, Unity, and Flash
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"Space can be very lonely. The greatest adventure is having someone share it with you."

Can I just say, I love the Art Deco menu! I have always had a soft spot for that era of design.

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The other 1/2 of Cyanide Tea l My Deviantart Account I My Tumber Account I Break Chance Memento I Ristorante Amore

The whole thing is pretty much a LiveComposite with a bunch of ConditionSwitches for the costume/lighting changes. And, yes, it's just MatrixColor being used to tint the sprites. It doesn't really look like much with black and white sprites on a white background (this "demo" was mostly put together for testing purposes), but I think it makes for a nice, subtle effect with color sprites on an appropriate background.


Glad you liked it. I've never tried designing Art Deco anything prior to this, so that's been a big struggle for me. I'm still kinda dreading having to finish up the main menu background.

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You did a good job on it ^_^

I have a question, though I haven't played through the demo because I'm at work, so it might be a stupid one. Does this effect exclusively effect the sprites, or does it effect the background too?

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The other 1/2 of Cyanide Tea l My Deviantart Account I My Tumber Account I Break Chance Memento I Ristorante Amore

It's only used on the sprites. The backgrounds are all separate images, since it would take more than just a color tint to make a convincing change in the time of day/weather.

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Thanks for answering. That's pretty awesome. Recolouring sprites for different times of day and weather is not something I'm going to start to do soon, so this is an interesting idea for an alternative.

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The other 1/2 of Cyanide Tea l My Deviantart Account I My Tumber Account I Break Chance Memento I Ristorante Amore

Thought I'd take a moment to post a couple of new samples of our sprites.

The process we typically go through is @berration does the pencils. He hands them off to me and I lay down a finalized ink for all the lines. Since my specialty lies in screen toning, I exploit that by laying down two layers of shadows before handing the sprites back to @berration for final CGing. What you see below are examples of how the sprites look before I hand them back for CGing.

For most of the sprites, we actually go to the trouble of drawing/inking/CGing the nudes and then doing the same for the clothing layer, since we're dealing with a paper doll system. Although, for these two gents, since they aren't in the game quite as much as other characters, they only have one outfit and one pose each. And since we have a pretty flexible positioning system, we do in fact need to ink full-length body shots, as they are used from time-to-time.

The fact that you're looking at a grayscale output is just for the benefit of seeing the individual layers. They're actually pure black "shadows" that @berration uses as selection layers later on.

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Errant Heart