Kick Bot DX pixelart overhaul during Indie-pendence day at Warp Zone Louisville

Kick Bot Dev Log July 5th, 2017
-Alex Bezuska

On July 4th a group of game creators in the Louisville Makes Games community decided to do an impromptu “Indie-pendence day”. We hung out at Warp Zone Louisville all day and jammed on our projects for Kentucky Fried Pixels (game jam that will end next weekend on July 9th).
I put Summer Games Done Quick on the projector and hung out with Barry, Loi, Josh, and Allen and worked on a ton of art for Kick Bot DX.

Kick Bot old art (left) new art (right
Kick Bot old art (left) new art (right

I have had a bit of a block on the new character designs Kick Bot so I worked on updates for the existing art including backgrounds, walls, hazards, and the classic Kick Bot character. I found that creating a mockup of a game screenshot in Photoshop really helped me see how everything would look together.

New Kick Bot DX art, now with twice the pixels!
New Kick Bot DX art, now with twice the pixels!

I imported the existing Kick Bot artwork, laid out a mock screenshot, and doubled the pixel size of everything. My goal was to add more detail while still retaining quick readability of all elements in the game. The other concern was keeping the exact sizes of all game elements while upping the detail. I did this by making the new sprites exactly 200% the size of the original giving me twice as many pixels of detail to work with and setting the “Pixels Per Unit” for the changed sprites to 2 instead of 1 as they were before.(this setting is specific to our game)

Pixels Per Unit in the Unity Inspector
Pixels Per Unit in the Unity Inspector


Below are some screenshots of the new artwork:

Kick Bot DX by Two Scoop Games Kick Bot DX by Two Scoop Games Kick Bot DX by Two Scoop Games

I use Adobe Photoshop for all of my pixel art.

Kick Bot DX is being created for the Kentucky Fried Pixels (KFP) game jam which ends July 9th, we will be releasing a pay-what-you-want bundle of games on August 17th!

Sign up here to get an email when the KFP bundle is released

Who is Alex Bezuska?

Alex is a game artist and developer at independent games studio Two Scoop Games. He is passionate about making art and technology work together for a purpose through games and other interactive art. Alex is also a director for the non-profit Louisville Makes Games! where he helps to further an inclusive and encouraging local game creation community in Louisville, Kentucky. He is also an avid lover of ice cream.

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Two Scoop games on Twitter: @TwoScoopGames

Stuff I need to learn this week

Google Packaged Apps w/ PhoneGap (Cordova)
A big goal of mine For Two Scoop Games is to get our games packaged and up on both the Google Play and Apple iOS App stores. Because of the engine we have developed being based on HTML5 Canvas (JavaScript) it is cross-platform without any extra effort, but to avoid the varied nature of mobile browser quality, I would prefer to have our games as ‘apps’ . This is where PhoneGap comes in, I have succeeded in getting a game packaged with PhoneGap, but the canvas performance by default is low. A friend has suggested Google Packages Apps and I need to do my research and get this working!
PhoneGap

WordPress SEO plugin
SEO is something that would really benefit me to learn more about, both in my day job and for my games – is art, art if nobody ever sees it? Is a game, a game if nobody ever has the opportunity to play it?

WordPress social integration
For Two Scoop Games I would like to sync posts or more ideally post similar updates to all of the social networks at once.