GBJAM7 Day 2

Second day in GBJAM7. Today's objective is:

1. Make sprites for Rick and supervisor
2. Make pixel arts for maps

Sprites

Sprites for young and old Rick

Tool: Aseprite

Based on the sprites of player in Grub's Adventure and images of Rick in Rick and Morty, I made the sprites first the old Rick (white hair) and then change the hair color to black hair, since Rick should be young when he went to grad school! Main features for Rick are his messy hair, connected eyebrow and saliva in the mouth. I am quite happy with the end result. I think these features are well captured in the sprites. Perhaps I can add some more details to the cloth. But the sprites is good enough for now.

Sprites for supervisor

I also made sprites for the supervisor based on npc003 in Grub's Adventure and a picture of my supervisor when he was young and had messy long hair. The sprites don't capture the image of my supervisor. But I will leave it like this for now.

Tile set

Tool: Aseprite, Tiled

I spent a great deal of time today looking for good tile set. After some struggling, I found a great tile set on https://fanart.pokefans.net/tutorials/mapping/tilesets I divided the tile set into a few sections and added the palette for GBStudio in Aseprite. The style of this tile set is very similar to the original Pokemon and other classic GB games, and quite different from Grub's Adventure. Grub's Adventure uses dark green as the main color while traditional GB games uses light green. I prefer Grub's Adventure style, but for this game jam I will stick to the traditional style for the sake of time. According to the rules of GBJAM7, I need to make all assets myself during the jam. I should replace the tiles with my own design.

Map for university

After settling the tile set, I spent a few minutes to quickly draw the map for the university. This is no where as good as Grub's Adventure, but I guess it's good enough for the game jam.

Learning points

Today I learn how to make sprites and tiled maps for the first time, which is very crucial if I want to make more 2D games. Making sprites and maps is not easy task. I should start collecting art assets for future game jams. I found it rather difficult to find good art assets on the Internet. 

I start to appreciate the integration of PICO-8. Even with the ease of use of GBStudio, making a GB game is not an easy job. I need to master many software in order to make one game: GBStudio for the game design, Aseprite and Tiled for sprites and maps, MilkyTracker for music and sfx. In PICO-8, all of these can be done in single piece of software. 

I will be rather busy during the week, not sure I will have time to do much work. If not, I will start working on the game again next weekend. Now that I get familiar with Aseprite and Tiled, hope I can implement the rest with relative ease.