This week I really wanted to try and create something extremely different from Doom — something wholesome with a lot of cute animations in a very small area. My goal was to think small for the map design, but fill the area with a lot of sprites and animations.
Here’s my first sort of “brainstorming” for the level. I started out knowing that I wanted a large tree with some sort of bird animation on it, a frog sitting in a pond, some plants and flowers that the player could water with a watering can, and the “enemy” sprite was going to be some sort of cute animal following the player around.
This is what it turned out to be! I think my favorite animation is the bird poking its head out of the tree every once in a while.
I ended up hand drawing almost everything in this level on a piece of paper, and then editing those drawings in Gimp to have transparency. Here are some of the original drawings:
As well as some failed attempts at drawing…
Although it is extremely tedious, I really wish I had the time to hand draw everything, because I feel like the things that I drew digitally stick out like a sore thumb — the sky, the water, the grass as a few examples. I also wish that my drawings did not end up so pixelated in the final result after spending so much time on them!
Overall, it was really neat to see my drawings come to life in a video game and was also really interesting for me to create something cutesy and wholesome out of something that originally was the complete opposite.