Possible Space Shooter Mockup...

[Howard Day]

Hello, all! My name is Howard Day, and I've recently gotten back into pixel art after quite a long absence. I had long since moved pass pushing individual pixels and onto high-resolution 3D - and just got the urge to go back and do some low-poly low-res work...I had forgotten how relaxing it is. Anyhow, The idea for the game is a fixed-angle (not quite orthographic isometric... close, but still with a minimum of perspective) 3d space shooter on a 2d playing field. The art style was definitely inspired by DoDonPachi and other classic vertical shooters. So the first task was to create some representative space ship as might be seen in the game...say a player ship.
*EDIT* This model has 576 Triangles... I forgot to mention that the first time round.*EDIT*

And then the two texture maps...both 16 color 64x64...the first is the diffuse, the second is the glow...

and two alternate color sets.
   
All the 3D stuff was done in 3DSMAX 9 and the textures in GraphicsGale...now there's a cool program.
So that was the initial work I did on this. I thought it looked pretty good (please, rip me apart on this).. and I thought it might be good to try and do some of the effects.
These are all done in 3DSMax alone.
- Medium sized explosion...missile/mine hits, exploding sub components, etc.
http://www.hedfiles.net/~hday/pixel/EXBigunfinished.gif - Big explosion (unfinished) - ship destruction, Epic weapon hits...
- Small shield hit - gun projectile, debris hits...
- Big shield hit - Missiles, mines, Bigger guns...

Well, that's all I've got for now! I'd love to hear any C+C you guys have - as well as any additional sources, ideas, techniques, etc... you might think valuable.
Thanks, and enjoy.

[Beoran]

If you are a computer programmer, I'd reccomend to you to take a look at egg, or at explogen. These programs can generate nice exlosions for you
without too much efforts.

http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/egg/index.html
http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=211466

[Lazycow]

Hi, the nozzles of the craft should point directly to the back and not 45 degree up and down. (otherwise it could not move forward) If you persist with that 45 degree angle for some reason, you might want to have the same amount of nozzles for the upside, as for the downside. The lights on the back of the grey and red crafts are flashing. Did you do that by intention? On the green one, that is just fine.

Apart from that, I think this is really excellent! How did you create these explosions?

[Dusty]

Hi, the nozzles of the craft should point directly to the back and not 45 degree up and down. (otherwise it could not move forward) If you persist with that 45 degree angle for some reason, you might want to have the same amount of nozzles for the upside, as for the downside. The lights on the back of the grey and red crafts are flashing. Did you do that by intention? On the green one, that is just fine.

Apart from that, I think this is really excellent! How did you create these explosions?

Eh, I think this is a good time to choose design over realism. I don't, however, like the way the bottom one is out further than the top ones. It looks awkward.

[Howard Day]

Beoran: I'm not a computer programmer, unfortunately. I am a video game artist in the industry, though, and I like the control that the 3DSMAX setup I have gives me. Thanks for those links!

Lazycow: Nozzles: That's more of a stylistic thing than anything else - I was inspired by the space shuttle on that one. As for the flickering lights...I think that's a palette issue, hopefully fixed in these new images. The explosions were created using particle effects and custom materials in 3DSMAX. This is a pretty cool system, as it lets you put in a random number seed and get a new explosion for every number. If there's any demand for it, I could post the MAX file here.
New randomly generated explosion (palette not optimized - very close to direct output from MAX)

Dusty:Thanks. You're right on about the bottom nozzle - it's been moved back to match the upper one. The original thinking behind that was to have it farther out to make it more visible from the angle you'd be seeing it in the game, but that's a much lesser concern now that I've seen it finished.

So, two new ship images, with the lower engine pushed back forward. I'll post some of the weapons and engine upgrades tonight, with any luck...


Thanks again for the comments!

[Howard Day]

And some new goodies. A engine Upgrade, Missile pack, and First attempt at a gun...




Any C+C is of course very welcome!

[vierbit]

Wow. I really like these.
Reminds me to do a little 3d stuff again.

Not that the current engine block looks unfitting, but personally i liked the nozzles more.
The explosions a great, look almost realistic. Maybe they take a little to long to fade out, esp. the biggest one.

Otherwise

[ptoing]

I quite like these, tho I am not a huge fan of the textures, that's more or a personal taste thing tho.

What I think is a real issue tho, is that the explosions are MUCH too slow and have too many frames. Even if you speed it up they will be too long on screen.
A really good example for nice fast explosions here is DoDonPachi. The ones in there look cool but are gone really fast, as to not impact on the gameplay badly.

[Helm]

Here it is 60 frames per second in pro motion. Our browsers might not be able to handle it but a decent game engine would have no problem with it and it would look alright.




edit: yeah apparently firefox at least runs the 60 frame persec just like the versions Howard Day posted.

[Howard Day]

vierbit: Thanks! I'm glad you like the engine nozzles! You seem to be one of the few that did. That's the default first stage engine, so you'll be seeing a lot of it in the game. As for the explosions, yeah, I think 40 frames is too much. I think 20 for the smaller and 40 for the big bad ones is more reasonable.

ptoing: Thanks. could you give some suggestion or further comment about what you dislike about the textures? Is it anything I could fix? I totally agree with you on the length of the explosions. I will be drastically cutting the length. I think 15-20 frames should be about the maximum for anything that will be on the screen often.

Helm:  thanks for the attempt. I knew I saw at one point an option in GraphicsGale to change the speed of the exported GIF, but I've yet to find it again.

*Edit*
And some additional work for the evening...

And a background or two...



Anyhow. I've actually started talking to dkh and he's expressed a lot of interest in working on some programming for this...I'm pretty darn excited.