Designing the probe sprites and AT-AT walkers in Photoshop

I think it’s interesting sometimes to see how people work.

Last night I spent an hour or so redesigning the probe from Hoth Strike to fit in to my HTML5 version of the game – Rebel Rescue. I’m using a full screen gradient that contains a fair amount of orange / yellow so I wanted to enhance the colours on the probe to better fit the backdrop. This involved adding a blue stroke to the sprite.

Designing the viper probe in Photoshop

As you can see I colour fill the sprite to reflect the amount of damage it has sustained in the game. This is done with the Photoshop blending options – Color Overlay (Red 255,0,0)  > Screen. I adjust the slider to achieve the desired levels. The lowest sprite is pretty much 100% opacity.

I’ve clearly used a lot of license in creating these sprites !

I always find it useful to have the sprite at its 100% scale whilst I zoom in with a single pixel brush to add the detail. I added an in-game shot so that you can see how it should look in the final game.

The AT-AT walker that you see buried in the snow started out as a 16 frame animation. I tried and tried to get a satisfactory level of animation but ultimately ditched it.

As you can perhaps see from the image above I  went to the trouble of articulating most of the “body” parts as separate layers in Photoshop. But when it came to actually performing some kind of stop-motion on them I just found it too hard.

That’s why the game changed from being an attack on the walkers to being about simply rescuing fallen pilots. I set the game some time after the events in the film and buried the walkers in the snow. Much easier :-)

The walker incidentally is hand pixelled. My source for the job was a toy AT-AT from my youth. Nostalgia at its best.