How we made the graphics in Re-Slash
Play here
We had already decided we wanted to make a hack and slash puzzle game with looped inputs, and for it to work, the entire level had to be visible in the camera right from the start, so we knew the characters had to be pretty small. We also knew the design of the game required a lot of reference points to be able to move to the right spots imagining how the loop would go in the future, so that's how the columns came in.
One option was to go for the 3D cenital view effect we used in our previous game Lucent but we didn't want to do the same, so we decided we were going to make it 2D this time.
We took inspiration from Hotline Miami for the graphics, but we didn't have any pixel artist in the team, so we had to come up with some clever solutions.
I had this idea for a while of a palette with a yellow-orange floor and dark red walls, so that was the first thing we implemented. We didn't want the floor to look too uninteresting so we made it blink a little.
Then we made the character white to make it stand out from the background, and we made the enemies red to also make them a focus.
I'm a big fan of the random blinking colors effect, so I decided to use it for the weapons, to simulate a metallic effect.
We also decided the character would turn blue when the loop starts, because we had this idea he was a robot glitching out or something, and we made everything loop-related this color.
SpritesAs I stated before, we didn't have any pixel artist in our team, so we had to improvise everything out of scaled squares and circles.
At this point we also made each body part of the character and enemies' bodies different shades of white and red to simmulate depth.
We also made the camera slightly tilt and bounce according to the position of the character on the screen.
And this was the result:
Not pretty good, the style was really flat this way, and the elements didn't contrast very well with the background.
Post-processing effects like vignette and grain helped a bit but still were not enough.
We also made the floor blink less strongly, as some people really disliked that, but it didn't work either.
After a bit of struggling trying to make the colors contrast more, we decided to check Hotline Miami again and realized it actually had dropdown shadows!
So we tried that and it actually worked! It was the perfect solution to give the visual style more depth and make everything stand out from the background.
After that we added some particle effects and got on to work on the menus, and the artstyle was complete!
