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[TheCornerBro]

I was surfing the Modding section of the forums for sprites I could use to make a ship or two; however, almost every sprite I have seen had a different style to it. None of them can replicate the way the original game sprites look. I was wondering, how does David make the sprites seem so cool?

[j01]

He is a skilled professional. It's his job.

If you're curious about the actual process, maybe he'll chime in and enlighten us. I would be interested in reading about that, myself, even though I'm more into the coding side of things.

[Doom101]

i too would love to know this, i love games with their fancy 3d sphaics but hell this 2d game kicks the arse out of most of them.

[Zapier]

Sprites have always been cool. I find a lot of people think something that is 3D is automatically going to be better 'graphics' than something that is 2D and that 2D is a thing of the past... yet, just like with 3D, as resolutions get better and higher definition gaming, sprites receive just as much benefit in detail as anything else... thus, 'keeping up with the times' in my opinion. Of course, nostalgia does come into play with 2D gaming more... as it especially does for me, but Starfarer is a perfect example of it not just being nostalgia, but proper design!

[ArthropodOfDoom]

My recently-bought gaming laptop cannot really handle modern games at its 1600x900 res, so games like this are perfect.
More storyline than most games, anyway (especially ME3, ).

[SkidWonderKid]

I would have to agree, the 2D sprite artist(s) invovled in this project knows his/her/their stuff. My guess is that said person is a Vet of the industry who either learned their trade back in the days when the sprite was king or their passion was sprites and its what drew them into the industry as an artist.

Although that does not rule out the use of basic 3D to provide the silhouette and AO for the top down sprite images we see as an end result.

A good artist is not a slave to one form of media though, they are simply capable of visualizing something and using the tools they have at their disposal to realize and bring said vision to life. The thing which sets a good artist apart from a great one is speed and efficiency (especially in the commercial art department).

Only my two cents. What ever he/she/they are doing its beautiful

[kwekly]

That the ships are so hard to recreate reflects the fact that they have all been meticulously designed and thought through carefully, on top of the raw technical skill of the artist, "dgbaumgart". Have a look through the blogs (hey a few I'd never seen before too!):

Onslaught


Modern Ship Designs


Pew Pew

Assembling The Fleet

[SkidWonderKid]

Ohh beauty never noticed that before, going to have some fun cruising through those posts and images.

[Dark.Revenant]

Most likely with a digital pad, he creates an outline sketch with some rough fill coloring, then does the usual digital painting method to get the shape, highlights, shadows, and other large features done.  After that, he does pixel art on the whole ship.

Basically, he first paints the ships and then pens in the small details.  It's easy to tell by the art style and from a few of the work-in-progress pics I've seen.  Exactly replicating it would be exceptionally difficult.  The best you can do is copy the process, but even then the ships will look significantly different because of an irreconcilable difference in drawing styles.

[Flare]

I've always wondered how he feels about us cropping his stuff left and right and making new frankenships with his work. Does anyone know if he said anything about it?

[David]

Hey! Finally noticing some of these threads - I've been terribly busy.

My background:
I started doing freelance video game art in late 2007. Worked on a ton of random tiny projects. Joined up with some guys making a game part-time in 2009 or so which ended up becoming Dungeons of Dredmor by Gaslamp Games (which I'm one of three owning partners in; fun fact: 2/3 Gaslamp partners are portraits in Starfarer). I'm now working at Gaslamp fulltime as art director (with two art minions!); it's neat. I have less time than I used to to work on Starfarer, but I love the game and it's extremely rewarding to me to draw spaceships because I've been doing it constantly since I could hold a pencil. I grew up playing all those awesome games of the 90's, Master of Orion 1 and 2, Ascendancy, Darklands, etc.

Starfarer is the game I was born to draw. Seriously.

Technique:
I use Photoshop for everything. Everything.  ...along with a Wacom drawing tablet. I don't even draw on paper any more.
I start a ship by painting a sketch to figure out the mass, the feel, the mood, and the silhouette. From there I refine the painting, moving things around, getting the colours right, and putting in details such that they'll look good for the next step where I scale the painting down to the final in-game sprite size. Then I start pushing pixels. Often times I'll take a couple elements from other ships to paste on for a continuity of aesthetics -- all the turret mounts, usually engines, often command modules for mid-tech ships. This final stage in the process is a combination of pixel art and digital painting. (Funny thing, I've actually gotten a ton of practice at doing extremely small-scale digital painting due to drawing so many game icons, eg. spell icons for World of Warcraft [which I did not work on!] type stuff.) So along with a couple sizes of pixel brush, I'll shade with some softer brushes, dodge and burn and touch, use selective sharpening, and even just do a hard paintbrush here and there at low opacity for hull corrosion. (Adobe gave us this technology, there's no reason to limit myself to tiny palettes and a one-pixel brush.)

I could do another blog post on all this, I think. It'd be a really nice trick to do a time-lapse video of drawing a ship but I've never gotten the capture software to work very well...

Frankensteining my sprite work into new ship designs:
I love it. Go nuts! (Though technically all the art belongs to Alex; he's totally on board with it too.)