2D Game Dev Journey — Day 16: New Player Sprite & Health Collectible
Welcome to 2D Game Dev Journey — Day 16: New Player Sprite & Health Collectable. Today I will touch on my process for coming up with our new player sprite as well as how I implemented a new health collectible.
Starting Point & Setup
Today we will be starting right where we left off in 2D Game Dev Journey — Day 15: Creating New Power-ups and Animations.
New Player Sprite
Concepting
The first thing I did when coming up with a new player sprite was simply banging out a few concept sketches. In my mind, I knew the style I wanted to hit on was more of a cartoony look. Once I got some references from Pinterest for ideas, I went to work. Here are a few of the results:
While I think each of these designs came out pretty cool, I felt like the one at the bottom of the three was the best fit to represent our player. With me now settled on the general concept and line-art I want to expand on, I then proceeded to add in the values:
I was pretty happy with the values I set above, so I then made eight different designs with color based on these values. Here are some of my favorite results:
Final in Game
For now, I’ve decided to use the gold-ish and blue sprite. I also created an image for the thrusters between this step and the last to animate for the boost effect. This is how our new player sprite looks in-game:
Looks great! Now we just need to change that mismatched and uncared for user interface (we’ll do this tomorrow).
Health Collectable
If you read the Day 15 article, I set up my health collectible in the same way in terms of animations and placements. The only change I really had to make was to add a property called “HEALTH” to my list of PowerupType enums, and then implement the code I want to happen when collected — which in this case is to increase the player’s health by one, and to put out the fires on the engines.
Conclusion
Thanks for checking in and reading today’s article. Tomorrow I will be updating the user interface to match the style I am going for, as well as match the assets we already have, as well as adding in an ammo implementation. As always, comments and critiques are welcome. If I have made any mistakes, please let me know so I can correct them for future readers. If you would like a more in-depth tutorial about anything I went over today, let me know and I will take the time to write something up.
