An Insight to Game Development as a Game Artist: The making of Harpy Raiders

Hello Irregulars! For those who don't know, I have worked on Harpy Raiders and it's available to wishlist on Steam Now! It's an action-RPG platformer game where you play as a slime to fight against the harpy race. I have to thank my dearest friend, Linus Soon (Linx145, the project lead) for giving me the chance to come on board as the 2D Art Generalist for this project! Harpy Raiders was my FYP project in polytechnic, and I was assigned the leader for the project, helping to manage deadlines and delegating tasks out to my other peers.

As a 2D generalist in an indie game development team, I was tasked to work alongside my teammates to brainstorm and generate ideas for the Concept art for both the environment and the characters! I think this was one of the most memorable experience because bouncing off ideas for the setting of the story, creating our own inside jokes within the team and having that shape the direction of the game's visuals was really an amazing experience. here are some of the areas that I have worked on! As you can see, when it comes to concept art, We were given the liberty to draw in our own comfortable art styles, and the types of sketches had different ranges in terms of rendering and visual clarity. Whenever I was working on the environments, I had to make sure the perspective of the camera mirrors how it would look like in-game so our works would translate into mock-ups. This goes for both character art and environment art!

Here are some of the concepts that I have worked on! More will be up on my Artstation soon! You can also see some of my other concept arts here on my instagram :) You can also take a look at the compilation of me and my peers here!

The first sketch of the forest floors of Isle Natura

Forest floors of Isle Natura!

Initial sketch of Kytra, a Boss character

Developed Kytra concepts! With expression sheets

Was tasked to make different slime types and species so I made an Ocean themed slime party! These characters would be mainly used for NPCs In-game

I was also tasked with creating mock-ups of 2 areas- Sword of Terra and Harpy Village. These mock-ups were made to simulate how the level would look like with all the assets and get the general "vibe" of the area- to see if our vision from our concept arts would translate over into the in-game art style. This was such a fun challenge, as I have never touched pixel art before working on this project. It was akin to learning a new medium, where there are different art principles and applications I had to work with. I learnt about the importance of tiling, learning new terms like "Jaggies" (an unintentional break that break the smoothness of a line or curve, making works look sharp and strange), learning about different pixel art styles and just many different approaches to approach my craft. Many of the textures and techniques used for the bark of the trees, to the ruins went through many changes before settling on the final design.

Mock-up of the Sword of Terra!

Here is the Harpy Village, located in Isles Natura. The rationale behind the vertical layout is to simulate the tall trees and to see if these assets would work out in-game

Those who are familiar with 3D modeling would understand the importance of an atlas map- here in pixel art, we are required to rearrange the assets in a certain way where it fits into the spaces of the tiles so that the game engine could detect the hitbox size of each asset.

Here is the Atlas map for Sword of Terra! These are all the assets used in the mock-up lain out here.

Atlas map for the Harpy Village

Apart from working on the concepts and the assets, I have also worked on the redesign of the UI design in-game! Here are some of the assets that were reworked. Linus initially made the assets and I have used his previous designs as a wireframe, I made sure to draw a mock-up of the assets in photoshop before getting his approval for the work to be pixelised in Aesprite. This was a fun challenge to blend in elements of clarity and communication while having a design that aligns with the theme of the game. I decided to go with a art deco style for the art direction, thus the colour palette and the geometric design.

Old UI for the textbox (wireframe)

Finalised sketch in Photoshop

Pixelised Asset used in-game

Inventory sketch in Photoshop (the key to adjust the scale is to take a screenshot of the current game and draw over it)

Final design Pixelised!

Overall this project was really fulfilling once we get to see our assets used in the demo (that you can see here!) Through this FYP I have learnt to hone my management skills and leadership, learning to compromise and communicate with my teammates. It is interesting to see indie game production pipeline and experience and I am really grateful for the guidance given by Kepler Interactive and our lecturers throughout the past 6 months.

My Slimesona! Also! The Harpy Raiders team is going to be here in the flesh for Gamescon Asia 2023 from 21st Oct- 22nd Oct! Do check out our booth! See you there :)