Wander the twisting reaches of this whimsical fairytale world overflowing with bouncing combat, outlandish characters, and more loot than you can carry!

Gnomad

is a hand-drawn 2D metroidvania platformer being developed by Team Tomte. We are a team of 3 undergraduate students working to craft an expansive world by combining our artistic and technical abilities.

My Role

On Gnomad is the project lead, but most of my day to day work consists of Technical Art, Editor System Design, and illustration. My main tasks on the project were

• Establish a pipeline for 2D sprite assets
• Create abstract templates for interactive prop prefabs
• Design and implement an environment editor system in C# with a visual interface
• Illustrate and animate hundreds of props and characters
• Manage project timeline with schedules and project management tools like Trello

Technical Art

The environment editor system for Gnomad needs to be robust and flexible. Managing thousands of sprites between nine different Z layers is complicated. This system handles placement procedure, rendering layers, post processing effects, lighting layers, sprite seeding, and prop painting. Gnomad is being developed by a very small team (3 strong). I am the lone visual artist as well as the project leader. Between developing player attacks, asset pipelines, time management, and publicity, there is not much time for drawing new assets.

I knew this from the start, so I chose an art style that would be fast to implement. Flat colors and uniform lines look okay on their own, but can be enhanced greatly by the lighting/effect systems, and by the jittering of modifying values such as hue, saturation, rotation, etc. The purpose of the environment editor is therefore twofold: handle prop management for environment creation, and add procedural variation to the props as they are placed.