Hello all, I have recently discovered the World of Vector Art!
Yay!
Well, for the longest time I have been scrapping all of my projects because of a lack of art. I mean there is plenty of art out there to use to make many different types of games, but I a) don't want to use mass-used assets, and b) want to be super happy with my project.
Then I remembered playing a game back in my High School days called Adventure Quest (the original, not AQW or DF, etc), and remembered the simplicity yet sexiness of it. It's super duper simple to make that sort of art world, it has its challenges like everything else but it's art work I used to do on paper for fun. And it's one directional with animations done via (in my case) Spriter Pro that I got from a humble bundle game dev pack way back when.
Sooo.. I came up with this handsome first try!
Update (My first addition - Adobe Illustrator):
Concept Armor (My Step-Sister designed this, I'm going to make it):
Edit: Sorry used Google Drive and embedded the image. Apparently that didn't work. Uploaded to Dropbox. And added a video of the animations at the end.
I created it in a day (in pieces, this is an assembled animation for idle) and the day after I managed to create a sample animation for Idle, Walk, SwordSwing1H, Jump, Fall. I used Spriter Pro to animate the pieces, I'm happy with Fall, Idle, but Walk needs a bit of work, and Jump/SwordSwing1H.
So about the Vector Art part. I am really good with Line Curve tools, depending on the program apparently (DAMN YOU FLASH! YOU AND YOUR EXCESS POINTY LINES!), so at first I created the art in Paint.Net since I am most familiar with, then I used a tool online to convert it to Vector Art (Bzzt, this website only allows 2 images for free after you register, skip, next one, okay this one allows you to use unlimited images but 1 per X seconds okay whatever). Yay! I got a .SVG! Flash can't open it... damn.. okay.. well what can? Oh inkscape can! *Downloads* ..... *Imports* Yay my artwork is in! What...? Why does it look like it was written with a pen? (Lines not the same width, it looked more thing on curves and that like a.. well... old ink pen). Okay so I opened up my Flash project and imported in the file I did in Paint.Net, after that I used a tool that was supposed to convert the lines into vector but it crashed, so I painfully just re-drew (traced) it in Flash which worked. Yay!
Now that I had the pieces done, I exported/imported .png pieces over to Spriter Pro (even though I used vector, I have to use PNG because of Spriter Pro/Construct 2, besides it's not actually Vector that I wanted it's just the simple yet elegant art style) and then animated it in the Spriter Pro. Checked all 3 checks like the tutorials like it told me too but couldn't get the image into Construct 2, but bad forgot to hit the Apply button haha!
All good! I figured it out, got my very first character (above) into Construct 2 HD Landscape project. Works great! The edges kind of act anti aliasy but that's probably just the Resolution/File Size or something, I'll eventually figure it out.
It's awesome! I got a head, upper left/right arm, lower arms, hands, upper legs, lower legs (no feet, they're attached for now I'm not an artist hehe), torso and pelvis. Using Spriter Pro I can swap out parts to make different faces, heads (helmets) hair, body pieces (armor) add weapons etc at runtime so it's great!
I'm going to make a 1080P Side Scroller MORPG (forget the Massively part, really I'm just making a community based game). This is going to be a massive undertaking now but I am glad that I discovered Vector Art because I finally found an art style I can do to make my first dream game!
Thanks for reading, just wanted to show off that I got my first human character made and to remind programmer of vector art!
Edit: I added a video!
https://youtu.be/9-3VNhu9NqA