Click for the full screen cap, just ’cause.

I know people may be thinking, “Sprite comic? Where are the sprites?” and/or “Recycled art? Lazy!” So I thought I’d show what I have to do in order to get a new sprite. It won’t disprove allegations of laziness because those are, well, true, but it does allow me to say “well if I’m so lazy, let’s see you do it.”

If you’ve got a sharp eye, you’ll notice that all the art in HoD is recycled from the same set of templates. I have a “master” PSD file for each character which includes everything you see, plus the original sketch. The lines are a layer filled with black with a vector mask applied over it, meaning the lines are fully vector, though the mask means I can paint new colors and such on the lines themselves. Kind of a happy compromise. To make a new sprite from the template, I have to modify the lines, which usually involves adding things to the sketch with ye olde Wacom tablet, getting my vector on, and then painting and erasing the flat color layers to match. Once I’m finished, I merge all the layers except the sketch and the white background, apply a little bloom, copy it off to a new document, undo, move the eyes, and repeat. (The eyes, via a little simple layer and clipping mask trickery, can be repositioned so that she’s looking up, down, left, right, what have you.) Since I’m not saving my changes to the master file, I try and get every expression I can think of rendered down. The end result is that I have a folder full of PNG files for every different version of every character that I’ve ever used, and a few that haven’t been used yet. These are the sprites. They’re a much higher resolution than your average ripped-from-an-NES-game sprites, but game sprites would also be much higher resolution if the entire game industry hadn’t abandoned them entirely in the polygon wars of the late 1990s.