Gushing About: Gunstar Heroes

     For those unfamiliar, Gunstar Heroes is a game full of explosions and  stunning 16-Bit visual effects. For those who are familiar with it, you probably know the excitement I'm talking about when I recall playing it for the first time. I played this at a friend's house in 9th grade on the Wii's virtual console and my jaw dropped as I realized such an awesome game has been out of my life despite being around when I first discovered Sonic.

Getting The Decoy Spell To Work

     One of the more complex spells in the game is the Decoy spell. It summons a hologram-like turret that shoots spells in the direction it's facing. Getting this thing to work properly was a lot more challenging than tossing out a fireball.

Level 1 Spells in Action

     Now that all the spells are finally coded I can show you what they look like in game. Keep in mind that the game is still in development and I'll be touching up the spell sprites and animations a lot as the summer goes by. For now, I'm happy with how they look. My next step is adding little effects like flame particles shooting out when the Pyre spell blows up and little lightning bolts for the surge spell. I'll also need spell icons for each to make the action button and spell summary page look nice.

Check out the video on YouTube!

New Pixel Art Plan

      I've been brainstorming ways to more easily turn my pencil and paper art skills to become my mouse and pixel art skills. I've decided that the best way to go about it is to simply draw assets I want on paper, scan them in with my printer, play with the size, then start lining up pixels. Drawing all the environmental stuff and complex characters from scratch using only MS Paint pixels ranges from hard to impossible, but drawing what I imagine on paper comes naturally.

      I'm going to give this idea a try. Filling up a sheet of copy paper with doodles of things I need (drawn approximately to scale) with details included. I can scan the sheet and start making all my pixel art then touching the sprites up in Gimp.