Top game producer

A new week begins.

For Ye Meng and Tong Ke, the two artists, this week's task is quite important.

In the previous few weeks, Wang Jian had them start by drawing objects like bookshelves and pianos to familiarize themselves with the pixel art style.

Now that they have drawn most of the objects and their mastery of pixel art has improved significantly, it's time to start drawing people.

The characters in the game are currently using the rough templates provided in RPG Maker.

It's not easy to create distinctive characters in a small space using simple and unadorned pixel art.

Ye Meng decided to start with Dr. Rosalene, glancing at the art requirements: "Long black hair, yellowish skin, wearing a white coat, with a sense of intellectual beauty? Hmm..."

She picked up her graphics tablet and began sketching the rough outline of the character.

The general outline of the character was quickly drawn. Ye Meng then divided the character's hair in the middle with two vertical lines, the hair behind her head hanging straight down. The white coat was cinched at the waist, lightly outlining the tie, and the hemline was slightly slanted like a long skirt, immediately giving it a feminine feel.

This step is fundamental to expressing the character's form and posture.

Next, Ye Meng zoomed in on the outline until she could see each pixel clearly. She continued to modify the outline, trimming the discrete pixels and removing jagged edges.

The pressure-sensitive pen twirled in her hand, her small face showing a pensive expression. Soon, her eyes lit up as she added some details to Dr. Rosalene, such as the round-toe leather shoes and the collar of the white coat.

With the completion of the outline, a blank-colored front view of the female doctor character appeared.

Next is coloring.

"This is quite easy to color," Ye Meng thought, as she adjusted the color of the character's hair to black and the skin to yellowish.

The white coat is naturally white, so there's no need to adjust the color.

After coloring comes shading, which is the most crucial part.

Ye Meng painted the lower edge of the female doctor's face and the areas where the long hair and face, and arms and body touched, with a line of dark shadow. She applied a few gray shadows on the chest and the hem of the white coat, and slightly brightened the inner parts of the hair edges.

When she finished applying these shadows, the three-dimensionality and layering of the character instantly appeared.

Pixel-style games don't usually have many layers of light and dark. Generally, bright areas, dark areas, and shadows are enough, or even just bright areas and dark areas without shadows. The more layers of light and dark, the more realistic and three-dimensional it becomes, but pixel art doesn't pursue realism.

Ye Meng observed her work and began to adjust the final details.

First, she adjusted the outline—using all black outlines would make the character too conspicuous, and in the game, it would appear out of sync with the environment. Therefore, except for the character's hands and the round-toe leather shoes that needed to highlight their characteristics, Ye Meng redrew the outline with a light color.

Then, she outlined the character's eyes to make them look more spirited.

At this point, the front view of the female doctor character was finally completed.

With the talent skill [Pixel Art], Ye Meng drew pixel-style images exceptionally smoothly, and the effect looked good.

She admired it for a while and took a screenshot to send to Wang Jian: "Senior, how is my drawing?"

Wang Jian looked at it and praised, "Not bad, keep up the good work!"

Receiving Wang Jian's praise for the character she drew, Ye Meng was immediately overjoyed, like a sea lion who just single-pulled a rare character, replying with a grinning smiley face.

With a happy mood, she continued to draw the character.

The number of images that need to be drawn for a character varies greatly depending on their importance.

For a character like Dr. Rosalene, in addition to the front view, there must also be front walking images, and the front walking images are further divided into front stepping left foot and front stepping right foot. Similarly, there are also back views, side views... These are just the most basic images of the character.

For example, in a scene where Dr. Rosalene turns to look at Dr. Watts, in order to make the animation look smoother, it is also necessary to add a 45-degree side angle image between the front view and the back view.

In Wang Jian's mind, in the game "To the Moon", the character's up and down movements are achieved through image translation. For example, if Dr. Rosalene wants to step on a chair to get the candy cane from the top of the closet, her body straight, she "swishes" onto the chair, which may make the player feel a little out of place.

Although this detail is relatively harmless to the overall game and will not affect the quality of the game, Wang Jian still wants to make the game as perfect as possible, so he decided to add more images for the character.

For example, if the action of stepping on a chair is to look smooth, at least two transition images need to be added.

Or another example is moving things. If there are no corresponding images arranged, you have to use "Force to Move Things", and the items will move by themselves without contacting the person.

If you want to achieve the scene of moving things, you have to add the character holding the front view of the thing, the back view, the front walking picture... and so on, which is extremely troublesome.

In major RPG games, a main character may have fifty or sixty related images just for different running and walking postures, and if there are fighting actions, there will be even more.

This is also why RPG game characters generally only have one set of clothes on the map, because one more set of clothes means double the workload.

However, not every image has to be drawn from scratch. Some can be slightly modified from the original image to become another action.

"To the Moon", as a story-driven RPG with a short process, requires very few character images.

Even so, Wang Jian estimates that he needs at least three hundred.

Enough for Ye Meng and Tong Ke to draw for a while.

Wang Jian even wondered if he should recruit another artist.

But after thinking about it, he decided against it.

Pixel-style games only had a brief period of glory when the game industry first developed. At that time, due to technical limitations, game devices had small memory and displayed single colors, so they could only present simple pixel art styles, and players didn't mind.

With the rapid innovation of technology, game screens have also changed from full-screen pixels to high-definition texture. Players prefer high-definition screens, and pixel-screen games have quickly declined. As far as Wang Jian knows, there seems to be a game company in Qingzhou that is still insisting on making nostalgic pixel games, but the number of downloads is generally average.

There are few companies making pixel games, and naturally there are even fewer artists who are good at pixel art. Wang Jian also bought several elementary experience books on pixel art drawing from the system's points store and sent them to Ye Meng and Tong Ke, so that they can quickly get started with drawing.

If he recruits another artist, it will take a long time just to learn and adapt to pixel art drawing. By the time they can draw pixel art images that can be used in the game, the game will probably be finished.

Wang Jian estimated the required development time based on the speed at which Ye Meng drew the first character image.

Bai Xueyao's composition and Luo Shuai's programming are also in progress simultaneously.

When the game is finished, after the final debugging to see if there are any bugs, the game development will be completed.

Hmm... about a month or so.