Tools of the Trade
Submitted by Jonathan Smith on Mon, 01/25/2016 - 13:36
One of the early questions when creating Eclipse: Hypernova was what game engine should be used to power the game? The original Eclipse: First wave was written from the ground up by Ian Miller using Microsoft's Game API (GAPI) utilising a customised version of a 3rd party tile editor to create the levels and enemy paths. It was decided early on that to make the game look as nice as it could while still being 2D in nature that a non tile based editor would be a better fit. And so, Unity was chosen for it's editor and many other reasons such as simplicity of use, good 2D support and uses standard C# for scripting.My weapon of choice for creating the artwork for the game is a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. It allows me to paint the level background using the pressure sensitive pen so that the whole game resembles (and sometimes surpasses) the original concept art that I created before full production of the game began.
I will talk more about the look and creation of the art a later development blog.