(mrowr)
Hello, this is Alex (artisticazurite) and I'm doing all of the art for this project! I really don't have any background or practice when it comes to pixel art, ESPECIALLY not animation, so this is definitely a learning experience for me. I've also been switching between many different art programs to try to find what I'm most comfortable with for this project (Clip Studio Paint, Paint Tool SAI, Photoshop for animations, and Pyxel Edit).
This is Peanuts!
He's one of Jadon's two cats, both of who will be appearing in this game. Last year we considered joining myfirstgamejam, but found we didn't have the time. However, we still brainstormed ideas for what kind of game we'd like to make, and decided it would be nice to make a cute game about his cats exploring space. When it was announced that the optional theme for this year's game jam was cats/dogs, we figured it would be the perfect time to actually make this game!
If you want to know anything about the real Peanuts, he is friendly, fat, occasionally a troublemaker, and likes to sleep a lot. Definitely not fit for space exploration in real life.
ANYWAY, now to the actual art itself. I actually made the first sprite for Peanuts a year ago when we first came up with the idea for this game, but I never used or animated it. Now, I decided to use this sprite for the project. Again, I have absolutely no experience in animation. For that reason, and because the overall art for the game is more cute than realistic, I felt that a two frame hopping animation would work best.
This was my original concept art that I drew after we thought about this game last year. We haven't added in Zippy (Jadon's other cat) yet, but she'll be added in soon!
Here is the concept art I did for the environment of the planet that Peanuts has crash-landed on. We've changed the colors a bit in the game now but the overall concept is the same! Recently I've been trying to practice more with colors in my art, so I'm still having a little trouble judging what colors work best together. The background (which can be seen in other screenshots we've posted) was actually kind of difficult for me to make look nice. I ended up adding several more color gradients over the green sky, which I think made it look a lot better.
(What is he doing up there?)
I've made so many tile sets now by hand, including ones for floating rocks and islands in the sky. In some of the screenshots, you can see that I added a couple of variations in grass and flowers for the tiles to make it a little more interesting.
I designed the space ship to look like a cat, as you can see. Some of the pieces of it are missing, which Peanuts will need to find in order to get home. I'm proud of how it came out, I think it looks pretty cute :')
And lastly, this is the most recent thing I've worked on! The fire animation and Peanuts' tail movement are actually separated in the game, but I put it together in this gif to show how it's supposed to look. Again, I've never animated before, so I tried my best to keep it basic while still hopefully looking fluid. The fire especially was challenging, but I think I was able to make a nice loop for it.
That's everything that I've finished so far! I'll be updating more each day with the progress I've made as well as other concept art. The next things I'll be working on will be Zippy, as well as npcs! Outside of this devlog, I'll be around on the Discord chat (Azurite #2347) and have been posting the progress as well on my twitter as well!
Thank you for checking out our game!