Kelley here. Nothing in Crea has given me so much grief as the character animations. The challenge has been balancing attractiveness with moddability.

Initially, Jasson and I took a very unusual approach to character animation in order to make it as accessible to modders as possible.

Rather than just drawing the frames whole, we cut the character into lots of tiny, tiny pieces and reassembled him using the program Spriter. Then I would create the animations by moving the tiny parts. Because those parts would be re-used in multiple animations, there would be less repetitive drawing for me, and for modders.

These are all the parts that made up one character.

The problem with this method is that it drove me crazy. It is kind of like doing a claymation movie with an action figure. It was stiff and awkward. Not pretty at all. Little pieces would look jagged and out of place, or they would disappear, and fixing them was such a chore.

See those weird shoulders? Stuff like that. There was always something wrong.

As I’ve worked on Crea, my pixel art skills have slowly improved, and the character animations were starting to look worse and worse by comparison. Our players are going to (hopefully) spend hours improving their characters, and they deserve better.

During a recent “business lunch” with Jasson, I finally said that I had honestly, truly gone as far as I could with this method. So, after much debate, we came up with a new character animation scheme that is a blend between traditional animation and our “action figure” method. It sacrifices a bit of easy moddability in exchange for more attractive graphics and a happier Kelley.

Now only the arms are detached from the body. The torso, legs and head are all in one piece, allowing for a more organic animation method. We’re still using the program Spriter, but relying on it less than before. I will have to draw more frames for the character and for all pieces of equipment, and modders will as well. But in general it’s a much simpler system.

This is the new character. He’s still in testing mode, which is why he’s naked. Look how happy he is, frolicking through the grass in his birthday suit.

Just today heard somewhere that part of being a good artist is knowing when to say “this is crap” and start over. This has been an annoying learning experience, but Crea will be better because of it.

So that’s what I’m up to right now. Once the animations are all polished up I’ll put together a video for the blog.

To thank you all for your support, here’s a free Creasmas desktop wallpaper! May the majestic Sky Llama bring glory and warmth to your hearts.

Download here:

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iPhone version

Merry Creasmas everybody!

Happy Halloween from Siege Games!

If you don’t know, this guy is going to be one of the monsters in Crea! Spooky, right?

 When Jasson asked me to create some plants to grow in the underground biome of Crea, I was kind of stumped. Underground plants? What else is there besides mushrooms, which we already have? So I did some research on what kind of weird, creepy plants. I have a very sophisticated and complicated technique for doing this – namely, doing a Google Image search for “creepy plant.”

Google introduced me to the monotropa uniflora, or “Indian Pipe.” According to Wikipedia, its “leaves are scale-like, without chlorophyll, alternating on a waxy stem.” It has several wonderful qualities:

• It looks kind of ghostly
• It is rare
• It is a parasite
• It can grow in very dark places, because it sucks energy from other plants rather than the sun

“This is perfect,” I thought. “I’ll call it a Ghost Plant! Yeah!” Then I discovered that it’s already called a Ghost Plant, or, even worse, a Corpse Plant. Ooooh!

So now, when your Crea character is exploring the murky depths of the underground biome, or trudging through the barren wasteland of the scorched biome, you may happen upon my little ghostly plant friend.

So far the art in Crea has been a mixture of pixel art for the small things, like the character and items, and anti-aliasing for the large things, such as the background and the trees.

Anti-aliasing looks smooth, and it’s really fast to make. Pixel art, on the other hand, is very crisp so it works well for rendering tiny detailed things.

During the Kickstarter, some people said that the art in Crea looked “flat,” so I’ve been pondering ways to improve it. It occured to me that, since it was necessary to draw most of the game objects on a pixel-by-pixel basis, maybe I should just draw everything that way – except for the background. That will allow for greater foreground-background separation.

So I redrew the trees with the pencil tool.

The new tree is on the right.

Jasson agrees that this is a big improvement, and I like it as well. The objects have more dimension and solidity.

One drawback is that the pixel art is more time-consuming, but it will be worth it if it helps the game look better. The backgrounds will remain anti-aliased, which hopefully will help bring the foreground forward while preserving Crea’s unique look.

This monster is a Glow Bat. It lives underground in stalactite formations. It uses its glowing tail to attract people who like pretty glowy things, then it blasts them with its sonic wave attack.

We are planning to make the tail’s glow be dynamically generated. I look forward to showing you guys the completed glow bat in its full glowy (ba dum ching).

Also, some people were commenting that the background of Crea looks flat, so yesterday I  started trying to add a little more dimension to the background layers. Here’s the old version:

And here’s the new version:

What do you guys think? Better?

Ninja stands alone

Among the marshmallow trees

Corrupted llama.

Hi, this is Kelley. I’m here to introduce you to some of the trees you’ll meet while exploring the world of Crea. The tree pictured above is a “tree.” It was the first one I drew for Crea; just sort of a generic type. Thus the name “tree.”

Designing trees is definitely my favorite task so far. Each tree comes in three forms: seed, sapling, and full-grown tree. Even the fully grown trees will have various heights and sizes, so they’ll look organic and not like clones of each other.

Here is a zebra tree.

Here is a mighty Redwood tree. It’s a little weird looking because it has to be cut up into segments, so that it can add on segments of branches as it grows.  I might revisit this one later, but part of me likes its strange shape.

This is a Ginko tree.

Finally, my favorite: the Marshmellow tree. It was originally supposed to be a cherry blossom tree, but it ended up looking more like it was made from cotton candy. Jasson suggested that the seed form of the tree is a marshmellow, which made me extremely happy. If only this tree really existed.

Leave a comment if you have any additional tree suggestions!