Still on my pixel art trip, I created this out of fridge magnets the other day. Coincidentally, one of the guys at work forwarded this page by SNK Playmore illustrating their methods for pixel art creation, (which they refer to as “Dot Art”.) While I’ve always been a fan of Capcom’s games, I do appreciate that SNK’s character art and animation are superior, with a personal preference for the realistic style of Shinkiro below.

There are instructions as to the various stages of the art creation but unfortunately the text is image-based so I can’t babel it. While there are 5 characters at the time of writing, it looks like it’s going to grow over time so certainly something to check back on.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Porath for swiftly providing a translation for the stages of production:

1. Get the design of the character, usually from the art director, or sometimes Rough Design. One character usually takes about 3 days.
2. Make a 3d model of the character. This usually takes 2 weeks per character. You also make the ranges of motion, which takes around 2 months/character.
3. Render out the 3d character. To bake out all the animation for one character usually takes around 2 weeks.
4. Touch up the render, according to art director’s wishes. This usually takes 1 week per character.
5. Add in additional stuff like wrinkles, muscle creases, and the like, while maintaining the form. This takes each character around 6 and a half months (!). This is where all the character’s consistency in form is checked.
6. Adding in gradients. This takes 2 and a half months per character.

Each character usually has around 500 frames of animation, but some are up to 4x that.

A kid and a giant bird dog… sheer genius.

Here’s the product of a rainy Sunday afternoon – a twist on the original purchase here. I took bad when we first moved from pixels to the anti-aliased imagery of photoshop because of the loss of control, so it’s nice to see pixel art becoming a decorative retro-style all of its own.

Well done to Tony and the rest of the Dragon Age Cinematics team in Edmonton on the latest trailer for Dragon Age  – they’re really able to get a lot on screen at once!

Warning: This isn’t for kids...

On another note, if you’d like to see this or any other YouTube video in a really cool way, punch the URL in here.

On a recent road trip down to NYC for the long weekend, MJ and I were customarily delayed a little extra at the border control due to my non-Canadian status. The conversation with the patrol officer went a little like this:

Officer: What is your status in Canada?
Me: I’m on a work permit.
Officer: And what kind of work do you do?
Me: I make videogames.
Officer: Made any famous videogames I might have heard of?
Me: Well… perhaps. My last big one was called Mass Effect? [...] It’s kind of an eighties sci-fi story in a similar vein to Star Tre…
Officer: Is it rated E for Everyone?
Me: No, M for Mature. It’s quite grown up.
Officer: [Indignantly] Well I’ll make sure my kids never get to play it.
Me: Well you make sure you do Officer, so you can carry out your job as a parent with every bit the efficiency of your day job.

OK, so the last line only played out in my head as I nod politely lest I wish to follow up with “Step on the gas!” and and ensuing police chase all the way to the Big Apple, but it’s one of the few times I’ve witnessed first-hand the ignorance of opinion that all videogames are for children. When are these parents going to finally get it that they are in fact QUITE RIGHT to ensure their kids don’t play senior-rated games? That’s the whole reason the ratings are there in the first place.

A week on Wednesday two of Edmonton’s finest, Dusty and Corey, will be flying into town to give an updated version of their GDC talk on our production process, part of which uses one of the cutscenes we did here in Montreal last year to help illustrate the various stages of iteration in our levels’ development.

Above is the poster I drew up for the event using the IGDA template, (click for the hi-res), exclusively featuring the first actual screenshot of the game released to the public. If you’re in Montreal on the 20th why not drop by and make a night of it – details in the poster.