This week I started working on art and basic animations for Nomad Axe. I have been working and thinking about that stuff for a really long time but thinking and doing are different beasts. The art style I want for the finished game and the art for the prototype ideally are going to be different. The idea is for me to create an art style that is easier to iterate on and change as the foundation of the game begins to take shape. The problem with a super sweet and detailed pixel style is the amount of time it takes to adjust each pixel and fill in all the shadows and highlights. This way instead of spending multiple hours on one or two frames I can hopefully produce an entire animation set. Or at the very least a temporary animation set.

Here is an example of what I would want the game to ultimately look like:

An art treatment I worked up to explore the possibilities of a temporary art style:

I felt like even my Sword Sworcery-ish treatment was a little too time intensive. Which makes sense because I remember reading blogs or interviews in which Craig Adams had mentioned how time intensive his art style was. Of course this treatment doesn't exactly adhere to the same rules Craig Adams uses when making his pixel art (mainly classical rules about proportions...). It may not be evident by looking at first but it's super easy to get carried away trying to figure out the best placement for each pixel.

In any case I think I have arrived at an art style that allows for basic keyframes and fast iterations. We will also be working on a script for the game that will resize the art assets to be larger and look awesome on retina displays.

Here is what I ended up at