Pantsman Part 1

Pants! What can you say about them that would truly do them justice. They protect you from Nature's harsh realities. They keep you warm on a cold winter's night. I wear them daily, and so (probably) do you. So, let us raise our drinks and cheer on that unsung hero, pants.

Sock it to me

So, yeah: Socks. What can you say about them? Not a lot. But there they are. Awesome.

Foot Fetish

Ok, so, seven shoes with a bunch of alternate colours should be more than enough. I kind of wanted to be able to have multiple shoes per era, but I'm no footwareologist. I guess maybe I'll look into it more for other poses.

Four heads are better than one

Silly me... Even after sorting out what layers I need and where about they should sit, I still mis-read my own notes. Faces where closest to the body, so they needed to be done first. I think 4 (times 4 different skin tones) should be fine for one pose.

Also after thinking about it some more, there are some additional layers I've missed (Facial hair, socks/stockings, tattoos). Possibly more.

Barred Lines

There was already a couple of things I realised I was doing badly (the boot top clips through the pants, hair specifically made for 1 face type alone) so I thought before I continue on I'd better think about what layer is going where.

I think also this means I've gotta start on the layers closest to the body first, so I hope you like shoes because there's probably going to be a few of them in the next few days.

Take 2

All today I've been kind of been back and forth over whether or not this style and workflow is going to be right for what I'm doing. The idea was that by adopting this kind of "paper doll" structure I could quickly do a lot of different stuff and hence introduce a lot more variety into the game. That thinking still rings true, it's not as fast as I was thinking it was going to be, but it's most definitely going to be quicker than doing individual enemies.

The bigger problem came from the look/style itself. Whenever I was looking at the images so far, I would kind of feel it was going to be enough, but whenever I wasn't I became anxious that there wasn't enough to it but couldn't quite put my finger on why.

If I was being super critical, and I knew I had a lot more time on my hands, I'd definitely think that the pose was lacking in style and attack. I don't know what else I could do to rectify that at the moment aside from starting again from scratch, which I'm not going to do. I know that the pose does leave itself open to a lot of accessory/prop usage though (i.e. I could get a guitar in there, or a walkman, or signed picture of Whitney Houston) so at least that works. I think I'll just have to be mindful to make the other body types more interesting. It's ok to have some boring poses at least.  


Secondly, I thought the colours looked flat and I think also too bright and washed out . I've tried to see what I can do to fix that a little by playing around with gradients, as well as darkening outlines and shadow levels. I'm happier with it but I'm sure there's going to be a few other things I can do. I was possibly being a little too thin with the linework. I'm mindful that a lot of the time I can use lines that are too think and use too much black and shadow, so I was trying to stay away from that here. Maybe I stayed too far away. I'm not sure if there's much else I can do about it without altering things quite a lot, so I might just follow the same guidelines for the moment.

I am worried about some knock on effects from this change though. Firstly, I don't know how I'll be able to get the gradients/shadows into the system I was planning on using in GameMaker. It may mean rethinking how that will be put together. To be honest though, I didn't know if it was going to work initially anyway though, so I guess there's nothing truly lost here. Secondly, I'm a little worried this means I'm going to have to assess gradients/shadows for every colour for each object. The idea was going to be that I do an outline, a colour, a shadow and a highlight and then just combine them in game. having a shadow worked fine(-ish) but the gradient might need to be tweaked quite a bit to work over all colour combinations.

No shirt no shoes no service

So this is taking a little longer than I was really anticipating. I'm also not entirely convinced about the colours either at the moment, but I might wait until I have a background to place it over first.