With over 300 sprites to be made, getting this process fast and accurate is a Big Deal. I have begun work on a bespoke sprite editor that will help keep the art in the correct perspective for the game and to speed up production of front and back facing sprites and their animation.

At this stage the editor has only the most basic features and I will show how I've used it to make a sprite for a unit that doesn't require a walking animation - it's a hominid (human) champion that hovers while sitting cross-legged.

The game engine will sort out the hovering height and animation itself, so our job is to draw two sprites (front and back) of a person sitting on the ground. Using the editor to make a skeleton or frame of the champion takes around 5 minutes:

While this looks like a 3D or voxel sprite editor it is actually working slightly differently. Rather than having an underlying 3D model that is projected on to two views, this is actually two pixel-art 2D canvases that map directly to one-another. The benefit of this is that every pixel is exactly positioned: there's no rounding, anti-aliasing, or side-on views of voxels' boxes.

At the moment, this gives a reference image to build the sprite on top of:

This has been opened in GIMP for editing. I could send this to an artist, but this time I'm giving the whole thing a shot myself. So in the next step I flesh out the skeleton with block colours:

This is a human, but also a lich. I've given them a skeleton arm to help show this off. Next I'll add a layer with the border pixels:

Then a layer of shading to give it some depth:

and finally any effects get layered on top. In this case I want to show some smoke from the pipe. At each step I've also been working on the reverse sprite, so the two of them use the same colours, and get similar shading:

That's it for the stationary sprite. For this one the walking animation just involves a change to the smoke layer - having it stream out behind him as he flies along.

For the next set of features to the editor I will be adding rigid body movement of the points to make animation easier. This will probably be tested on flying champions that need to flap wings, which is still simpler than a full walking animation.