Research Art

I have been currently researching all the different art styles of what I could do to my game and how it could look as well as how to make it.

From my research I have found that most tower defence games seem to use a whimsical art tone for their game. I have my mind set on making my art in a pixel art style to make it more retro and stand out from the competitors of other games such as Balloons Tower Defence.

I have even sent out a survey to find out what types of art styles people prefer, from a small group of  nine people these are the results. From the image below you can see that whimsical art style is in the most popular by ten percent as whimsical got four votes as appose to pixel art of its 3 votes.

I have found out how to also make the pixel art as to what I want, I can simply do this by using Photoshop to create my sprites and every 2d image for my game. The steps I would need to do this would be to make a file of 40 by 40 pixels wide and make it a 8 bit with 72 resolution so that it is the right size and make sure I set the background to transparent so when I export and save it as a PNG file it will have a see through background. You would then want to make two layers, the first for the colour pallet were you would chose some colours to work from and keep them their for reference if needed to go back to.

Your other layer could be behind that one with a concept sketch put on it of what it the thing you want to make is as a reference as to how it could look. You would then need to start using the brush tool set at one pixel of size to start drawing your area out, preferably you would want to start with the outline before you colour anything in. You could make new layers for different parts of the thing your making so you can move them around separately later to make an animation with them in Photoshop and then make it as a sprite. However since I am using pixel art I can not make them in separate layers in Photoshop to make an animation because as I have tried myself to see if it works I have found out if you get a horizontal line made of pixels and twist them at an angle of 45 degrees then you will not have a clear line but instead a blurry one as there are other pixels trying to make it look like its a straight line if you were looking at it from far away. This is bad as the additional pixels just clutter up the screen and makes it hard to make sense of the image so I shall just duplicate the image and edit it pixel by pixel as to how I want to make it to look. I have gone ahead and practised making a couple of sprites to see if I can make this work in about roughly an hour combined I have made two sprites which are animated, one being a dragon another other a flame and have also made a pix-elated flower with a couple of different colour looks..

Flame sprite.

2d Flowers

Dragon Sprite

Since it was a small group of people that voted the vote could have gone either way with pixel art potentially being superior to whimsical art style if more people had decided to vote on the pole. Because of my more capable skills at pixel art than whimsical I will do pixel art because of this as well as the fact it would stand out from competitors making pixel art more favourable to do.