Making a bullethell underwater adventure with my homeboy @willowblade

A boss with multiple stages!

Squidboy and Starface thought they were just on an afternoon hike in the deep sea... Little did they know that their pleasant afternoon stroll wouldn't last!

Not all difficulties work adequately, but a deadline is a deadline! :D & Some bugs might still need squashing!

Happy with the result!

Dear player,

The devteam from the cinematic and iconic masterpiece 'SquidBoy and StarFace' would like to sincerely apologize for their mutilation of the graphical integrity of their product.

Unfortunately during shipping of our product one of our programmers forgot to add a vital part to the already legendary boss 'The Bloody HornBeak'. As a result, players of our game were unable to appreciate the final product...

Like you can see in the attached evidence, the boss was supposed to have an extra horn, that would deteriorate during the boss stages and would be able to fully bring out the aesthetics that we had initially envisioned

Envisioned graphical fidelity (Stage 3):

The horn in question across all stages:

The final ingame product (which can be found here):

We feel like this is an unforgivable mistake on our part and assure you, the players, that the programmer in question has been delt with and will taint the noble art of gamedev no more.

Have a pleasant day,

The SquidBoy devs

Doing art is done in stages.. always. Or that's just my method anyway! While creating art I always have a fixed amount of steps I follow and it always fills me with lots of joy when I can look back at each of the steps!

These are the different steps I went through for creating our boss 'The Bloody Hornbeak'! (which stars as the main antagonist in our jam game.)

1. Sketch

Every asset starts with a sketch! Done with a light pencil (in Krita)!

2. Line Art

After being happy with the sketch, I move to lineart. For our boss it was important that he had different stages with each of them showing the Hornbeak in a more deteriorated shape.

...poor Hornbeak!

3. Coloring

Adding some primitive colors to the asset is important. I always try to use colors that work well together (= are complementary)! A cheat sheet I use for this is the David star color wheel . In this case I deliberately choose yellow/orange together with blue! Obey the color wheel!

4. Shading

The next step would be shading, but unfortunately I didn't have time to do the shading for the Hornbeak... :( Maybe I'll update him one day!

These are the four most common steps associated with making art. Are there any artists here that use other methods for making the assets for their game?

The ratings we got:

Seems like people really liked our art!

We had expected more on theme, but well... better luck next time! Gotta hit that home run! (next time for sure!)

Join Frank on his perilous journey to Xuriaqs-ZRQ8CSxixuoQ45-RTT#03BR-II! Ace your job and reap your just reward!

Playable now here!