After a couple weeks of searching for and reviewing portfolios we’ve finally found an artist that has the talent and style that we were looking for. He, Leonard, has worked on a couple open sourced projects in the past but nothing commercial but we’re hoping to make this project a huge success and a great start to his promising career in game art. I’m sure you will agree that the mockup image he provided is masterfully composed.
The art is a tricky thing because, honestly, we’ve never done dynamic lighting/shading in code for flat 2d images. We have a general idea of how it’s done in code but we’re antipating long hours of tweaking to get the saturation, brightness, and shading just right. The first few assets that Leonard will create will need two versions - one fully shaded and lighted and another with full brightness and saturation with no shading. The first version is what we will try to match through dynamic lighting in code with the latter version. Eventually we’ll get it just right and be able to create a fully lit version and have it look amazing in the engine. I’m expecting a lot of blog posts about that system in the near future.
We’ll keep you posted on future developments which will now include pretty pictures!
Posted by @LunarPeter