Introduction

Okay so next I wanted to make a shooter game, since I have a clicker clone, how about a space invaders one to help spread my wings abit more? However I did run into the dilemma of “what do I actually make the clone about?” Which is quite obvious, I still don’t know. I was still looking a good bit at Japanese stuff in my spare time after the samurai so their dragons caught my attention, then I heard of how Rayquaza (a Pokémon dragon like those dragons) goes into space and hits back meteors. So dragon in space stops meteors, there isn’t much else to say about it and to be honest this one was more code than art which I kind of regret as it makes it get boring pretty fast, making it the weakest of the 4 so far sadly.

Although I am happy I did it as this taught me the basics of object interaction, leading to the much better top down shooter picking up the lack I think.

Dragon

Alright so we want a dragon to shoot meteors, so we need a dragon, so lets make a dragon, and by dragon I mean Japanese styled, not Europe as they are pretty different (Europe are more big and scary when Japanese are more serpent like and pretty). So to start I got a base dragon, I didn’t want a green dragon like Rayquaza and settled on red purely because I didn’t want green and it was the main color that popped up in a eat to use way.

That being like this:

I zoomed in on it since I just wanted the head, a oversight now I think about it as in the game this makes him just a floating head but oh well

Line Art

So first I started put by outlining the head of the dragon in blue so it stands out later on when I come to color this, getting this:

I did end up missing a few spots such as on the nose but I fix those in the coloring part thankfully

Color

Then I added colors and cleaned up the lines to get this, yes it is simple but I thought it was good, at least for this it is. It is probably the most detailed asset besides the background which is kind of sad but like I said before, it was for the code not the art so this was expected

Meteor

Okay so now we need the meteor which the dragon will need to stop, which was easier than the dragon since a meteor is literally just a rock that is flying through space, so I had to give it that extra flare, which you will see later on

Line Art

This is literally just from scratch after a few attempts and me finally being happy with it, in blue so it is easier to tell from the colors later on of course. Oh and you can also see the trail which yes I know most meteors have but the reason they do is it makes them look cooler, rock with glowy fire is better than just rock while making sense.

Color

I made it a nice purple trail because orange is too basic and well it looks cooler, that’s pretty much it, I am very happy with the shading on it and if I take anything artwise from this project it will hopefully be to continue to do shading like this. However I also learned that you should move your shading layer on a overlay layer so it only interacts with that layer as I found when I was blurring it to shade them together it would catch the white off the canvas and add that, ruining it, so this is a work around I sadly realized after.

Oh and the dragon needs to be able to shoot something at these to destroy them and most dragons breath fire, so I edited it abit, made it the classic orange fire which works for the dragon since red does fire for most and orange fire also feels more normal when the meteor’s purple feels more, well otherworldly, which is a good thing.

Background

Alright we have the dragon and the meteors, but now we need the space part, for this I literally just made it up as I go as its space so nobody can tell me “that isn’t how space works” because its space, if you follow the general rule of its base is black with stars if you want then that is space pretty much.

I didn’t do line art as it is literally all shading so I’ll explain how I got this:

So firstly I used a purply black as a base because again, purple is seen as more magical and otherworldly, I then added some white dots over this and blurred it over a good few times to get that distant feeling I wanted as they aren’t all at the same distance.

Then because I thought it still needed something else I added a colorful trail, I didn’t think of a reason other than if supernovae have this colorful gas so can space from stuff, like maybe some meteors came past expelling this gas, making this mysterious trail. Anyways I put them on in a semi see through brush to further that gas feel and blurred them over a few times too so they aren’t static as gasses don’t work like that.

Conclusion

So I wanted to focus on the actual code more for this game, therefore as you can tell the art definitely took a hit from that, I feel I focused on making things that worked instead of what I wanted which is kind of sad. However this does mean that if I want to make a game like this in the future I have the code and can focus more on the art instead