“Reel World” was a project I worked on under Iron Fox Games / Second Monitor Games. I was responsible for the vast majority of initial character art, item art, and environment art. 2D art was used for most items, but a hybrid of 3D was used for the environments.
Character Sprites
- Character sprites were created using Figma in a vector format, then exported as PNGs.
- I used a program called Dragon Bones, which is similar to Spine, to create animations.
- I built a custom application in Python to automate the process of combining animation frames into sprite sheets.
Item Sprites
- Item sprites were sketched out in Clip Studio Paint and then traced over in Figma to create vector assets.
Environment Tiles
- Initially, the environment tiles were going to be created in the same manner as the other assets, using vector art. However, the sheer number of tiles that needed to be created posed a challenge.
- I leveraged my experience as a 3D artist to create a pipeline in Blender that allowed me to make tiling, 2D-like environment assets that could be easily modified and altered into new tiles, and even animations.
- These models allowed for fast iteration as I received feedback from my art director.
- I used a significant amount of procedural techniques to create animated assets, such as water shorelines and river highlights.
- A custom tool was created to automate the process of splitting the tile images into individual files, which was necessary for our workflow.
User Interface
I did a significant amount of GUI concepting and design
Jonathan Banks 