Creating the Player Sprite Sheet

Last week I created the ores, this week I have developed the Sprite Sheet for the Player. This also entailed researching how I was going to implement the Player sprites. The best way that I can see (might change upon development) is to use the Animator tool within Unity. This allows me to simply add each sprite to the animator using 'key frames'. I imagine that when I get around to implementing this it should be a lot easier seeing as I will have used 'Key frames' for Unit 601: 3D Modelling and Animation. I imagine that it won't be much different in Unity.

The basic iteration for creating a Sprite Sheet (fig. 1) is to have a motion for each direction. The nice thing about Piskel is that I can preview how my animation is going to look using the animator tool. The way this work is by adding each image onto a 'frame' on the left-hand side, this will then play through at whatever speed I choose on the right-hand side.

The left half of this Sprite Sheet are the movement animations. The right-side of this sheet is for when the player is mining. Being able to preview the animation for the mining within Piskel saved me a lot of time and convenience and allowed me to fine-tweak it.

Creating the Ores

To start the development process for my game I first need some graphics. All graphics will be created in Piskel, which is a great tool for developing pixel art. I plan to use “tilemaps” in Unity, which automatically handles each tile, and also allows me to draw out my level using a “palette” of different tiles. This will be documented when I create my level, further on in the documentation.

To visualise it, I drew up a table with the rarity at which each ore would appear, as well as the name and value. These may be changed later on down the line due to balancing, but I think this is a good starting point.

Material	Rarity	Value
Dirt	Common	£1
Stone	Common	£5
Tin	Common	£20
Copper	Common	£25
Iron	Uncommon	£40
Emerald	Rare	£300
Ruby	Rare	£500
Diamond	Very Rare	£1,000

The character will start on the surface, and the easiest order to develop my assets will be in the order that the player will come into contact them. I will be focusing on all underground assets first, then I will attempt to develop the ones on the surface such as buildings, trees and minecarts etc.

All of my ideas and their development can be viewed in this document (opens in a new window).