Category: 8-bit / Oldschool art

Supplice spriting timelapse #1

I’m busy with all kinds of projects as usual, however I thought recently that I could record myself working on some game artwork and create a kind of time-lapse video with some commentary what I’m doing and why. :) And while it’s not a proper tutorial, a look into someone’s workflow can still be interesting and helpful. Here’s a first video where I clean up and paint-over the 3d renders of the weapons to create proper gun pickup sprites for the Supplice Doom project. I plan to make more soon, covering making sprites and textures from scratch.

Thanks to James Paddock for the great music I could use in the video!

Door texture walkthrough

Here’s a walkthrough of a door texture I’ve made for Supplice (One of the many), the focus is on the process, the tools/options are covered in another article. :)

The idea


Mechadon’s pencil sketch

It’s best to start with a sketch – it doesn’t matter if it could pass as an Moebius’ drawing or if it’s ugly as heck – it’s purpose is just to get the idea out of your head and spare you the trial and error you might encounter when “just jumping in”. Of course, it’s nice to do some improvisation! Sketch as many details as you deem fit.

The one on the left is not my drawing, it’s one of the texture idea sketches made by Mechadon for Supplice. Well, it’s nowhere close to the old masters’ but it’s pretty clear what’s going on. ;) Mechadon is a pretty cool guy and I don’t have to be too strict, since he’s open to my interpretations. Thanks to this sketch, I know where the details should be placed and their general look, so I can focus on specifics later. Once I’m done with the final texture we’ll compare it with the sketch.

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Conversion to 8-bit palette

If you ever worked on a mod for an old-game, or made your own, old-school styled one, I’m sure you’ve had to convert your artwork to an 8-bit, 256 colors max, palette – either because of the supported file format, or you just had to fit the artwork into already established palette. In Photoshop you do this through the image mode indexed color dialog. Let’s have a closer look at it, with all options explained.

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Colorizing and remapping with gradient maps

As you might know from my other tutorial, I create ny textures for my old school mods in grayscale most of the time. To add some color to them I use gradient maps, they’re also really great for adjusting the colors of your image to prepare it for 8-bit.

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