Shovel Knight: Kingdom of Calamity
This project is a character design and analysis task based on Yacht Club Game's Shovel Knight.
Part of this project was research into Yacht Club Games and their work ethos:
A lot of analysis went into breaking down and analysing the Shovel Knight art style:
A deconstructuion of one of the Shovel Kinght characters
I also did a "sprite swap" were I converted a Shovel Knight character into a different art style and broke down how that changed the way they were perceived:
I also did a sprite demake of the Star Wars character Boba Fett, further allowing me to analyse and practice with the Shovel Knight art style:
First attempt at demaking Boba Fett in the Shovel Kinght style
Second attempt at demaking Boba Fett, which turned out much better
The Boba Fett sprite in a lineup with other Shovel Knight characters
There was also the task of looking into environmental issues and making a unique Shovel Knight character off an issue.
The mindmap which helped me to decide upon my environmental theme
The environmental theme I ended up choosing was famine and drought.
A moonboard of media related to famine and drought, which helped in deciding the colours for my character.
A moodboard composed of images related to real-life famine and drought. This helped hone in on the shape and some of the visual features of my character
With this information in hand, I then created character sketches and some rough storyboards or animation (ordered from oldest to newest):
I then refined upon the sketches further. The design I chose drew heavily from the connotations of ravens being related to death.
This led me to the key art stage, in which I used Adobe Illustrator, a relatively new tool for me.
First Iteration:
Second Iteration:
Idle Pose:
Idle Pose:
Attack Pose:
Third Iteration:
Idle Pose:
Idle Pose:
Attack Pose:
After this I moved onto creating sprites based off of the key art (ordered from oldest to newest):
Initial Version:
Initial Version:
Initial Version Sprite Lineup:
Body Swap:
Body Swap Sprite Lineup:
I then created idle and attack animations based off of these sprites (ordered from oldest to newest):
Idle Animation:
Idle Animation:
Initial Version:
Body Swap:
Attack Animation:
Initial Version:
Initial Version:
Body Swap:
After this I developed a stage based off of my Shovel Knight character. I first placed them in pre-existing Shovel Knight locations to see which colours they blended well with:
After this I sketched some designs for my level. Taking inspiration from my moodboards (in order from oldest to newest):
Sketches:
This first design took inspiration from parcheded crop fields and a dried up river
This second design exaggerated the previous version, drawing inspiration from Japanese rice fields
I then took this design and started making a level around it (ordered from oldest to newest):
This first design is based on my initial sketch, compared to the rest which are all based on my second sketch
This version started to play with transparency in the background
This version started to play with a tileset for the ground. But, this first iteration was visually noisy and had to be toned down.
I made an attempt to create some depth by adding shadows to the background mountains
With this the project was done. I feel that my pixel art, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator skills have greatly improved with this project, and I look forward to progressing them in the future.
Final Sprite Sheet:
Final Sprite Sheet:
