ART 326: Character Designing and Creating Sprite Sheets

This past year at California State University, San Bernardino, I took an Interactive Multimedia Design class where we, the artists, worked with the gaming class, the programmers.  When I took the class it was the first time the university offered it, and I really enjoyed the experience.  It was very much like a work environment were we worked in teams and discussed plans for our game.

As artists, we divided ourselves and distributed the jobs.  Each of us worked on a few character designs, while I also had the job of creating sprite sheets.  Since our goal for the quarter was to have a really simplistic demo done, I did not have to create all of the characters but only the characters that were necessary for that section.  I usually do "painterly" styled digital work, so this was a new challenge for me.  On top of that I had never used Adobe Illustrator before, and I knew I needed to create vector graphics because we were not entirely sure about the size we needed the characters yet.

To start off, I created a few character designs.  When creating a design for a character it's a good idea to draw them in different styles.  This way you get an idea with what you (or your team) feels goes best with the tone of the game (or any other product).  Also when determining what style to go with, remember that more detailed work usually takes more time to render, and rasterized images are harder to expand.

Here are some sketches I did with colored pencil:

After discussing with my group, we decided to go with one style for the sprites and a more detailed one for the sprites that pop-up to talk.  While I was still sketching ideas of the character design, I taught myself Adobe Illustrator by fiddling around with the tools and lots of YouTube videos (Youtube, one of my best friends).  Here is the sprite sheet I ended up creating.

Even though we never continued adding to the game after the class, I really enjoyed the work environment and very hands on experience getting to communicate with other students from a different field.  I definitely would recommend taking a class like this (or this same class).  Also, don't be afraid to experiment and use a program you've never used before.