Meet the Captain

Since I’m no artist, we’re starting from AI generated images, and from there try to modify them to fit the game. Today, I started on a first draft for a character: The Captain.

First I generated some portraits of “seasoned navy captains, with a scar, smoking a cigar, cartoony”. I’ll have to up my prompt engineering in the coming time.

This is what the Captain could look like according to AI

I threw the portrait I liked most into aseprite, a sprite editor & pixel art tool. It came up as a good tool to do the graphics in for our kind of game, and I got myself a license through Steam.

My first goal was to take the AI generated still, and make a speech animation. I grabbed the Captain’s mustache and lowerlip, added a frame where these part and painted in some basic teeth. For a draft, in a tool I never used before, it’s good enough for now.

More mustache than man

Next, I wanted to simulate some sort of scanlines, for the videocall sequences where we’d use these portraits. I’ve probably overcomplicated things, used too many layers and animated it clumsily, but the end result I was pretty happy with. Reminds me of those old, green, monochrome monitors.

The Captain uses some old naval technology for video conferencing.

Finally, I tried my hand at an overlay for the portrait + scanlines, to have somewhat of a border around it, and tried some more animations, such as the blinking light and the scrolling letters. That’s far too clumsy to do neatly in aseprite as far as I can tell for now.

Here’s the Captain on the phone with you, giving orders.

Doing these in aseprite is a lot of fun, although I should probably take some time to study the tool and read the documentation. For now, I’ve been going by experience from other graphical editors I’ve worked with throughout the years. We’ll get there!