toastergrl-visual-designer

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

Any independent, volunteer video game project will have contributors wear a lot of hats; that is very true for for Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers as well, where I got to do some writing.

My initial contribution was the Spray Can segment of the tutorial, which you can watch here. I wrote twelve different options for the dialogue flow - nine intended colours, a second run-through, the out-of-order unlock error handler, and a softlock-preventing 100% completion secret.

This was intended to be a fun side contribution, but the team believed I'd captured the character's voices well, so I took point on the First Boot introduction sequence - and did consistency editing for the rest of the Tutorial's dialogue as well, which had been drafted by the mappers designing the segments. The goal was to set a strong first impression, and although the Tutorial was widely critiqued its personality was one of the better recieved aspects.

In the weeks preceding launch, I wrote the bulk of the 90's-style voiceover of the 40 second release promo, which was then performed by another member of the team. This was widely virally shared and recieved a very positive response.

And finally, I contributed the "story so far" page to the Ring Racers Online Manual. It was an interesting challenge attempting to channel the slightly stilted, overly-elaborate introductions of yore in a way that still remained compelling to read.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers was a five-year project building on and responding to the successes and failures of SRB2Kart. I'm intensely proud of it as a piece. The strong responses of all ilks underlie that we made something genuinely special and unlike anything currently on the market.

Nowhere is this is more apparent than the Sealed Stars, the moments in the title that dwell upon the sublime of the chained realm... and its unidentifiable invaders. Attached are pieces of pixel art baked into the players' Evaluation at the end of the credits. The first two are part of the same animation, and the team deemed it of quality and value worthy to include as a teaser taking a full 10 seconds of our tightly paced 40-second release promo; the third, "Perfect Evaluation" scene is regularly shared by players as a mark of their accomplishment, which is itself a point of pride.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

I was personally responsible for the base Ring Racers characters "Metal Sonic", "Surge", and "Heavy Magician", in addition to a handful of Followers; attached are some of the more visually interesting spritework and animations in their number.

Note that all these characters are not "supposed" to be green - that is the colour the title's graphics rendering pipeline uses to apply "Spray Cans" for player expression.

In addition, the karts were created by another member of the team, and Heavy Magician's base sprites were a relatively minor adjustment of another teammate's work - so I've put the focus here on her "victory signpost" graphic, which was all mine.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

A combination of pixel art and (digital) sketch art for the currently unreleased SMBX modification “Tetherrift”, featuring a character I use to represent myself online.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

A colelction of avatars I previously used, based on different iterations of the epynomous “toaster” character. Notable for their exploratory, nonliteral use of colour and hue shifting, coupled with self-imposed rigid palette limits.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

A pixel-based piece of an original robot mook design, created to showcase my attention to form, shading, and colour choice in larger pieces.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

I created a spriteset for “Surge the Tenrec”, the speed-type impostor from the IDW Sonic comic series, for inclusion in the fan project “Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers″ (WIP footage, several UI elements changed since recording). This is a more recent example of my spriting ability compared to many of the examples further down this portfolio. (The visual effects, environment, and kart were sprited by another member of the team. My primary contribution is the character in the kart, although per my cross-discipline skills I also coded the core physics and a number of these effects.)

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

Both the pitch and the final product for 21331 LEGO Ideas Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone, focusing on the overall display. that I campaigned for and which got selected for further development and production are very good showcases of my creative design sensibilities.

The final product was a creative collaboration and I learned a lot of practical knowledge from a team of seasoned veterans, but my influence exists across the set and is most strongly felt in the buildable characters.

I’m not going to upload every relevant image from the pitch to this portfolio, but I invite you to check the main renders and rolling updates through this Flickr link to see my approach to product design and revisional work.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

Now that version 2.2 has long been released, this portfolio can be expanded to cover material which was previously top-secret.

I was heavily involved in the “Fang the Sniper” boss battle, and it was one of my primary boss-related accomplishments (alongside improving the mechanics of the Sea Egg and Egg Colosseum battles, which will not be covered here). The original pitch had the character simply jump in through a window. However, the arena became entirely enclosed during the first phase as a result of difficulty adjustments and design practicalities. The above two introductions were developed to increase the strength of the first impression this character gave, which was measured with testing on new development team members.

One of the more interesting aspects of these introductions, beyond the fact that they are rare in this engine, is that it also offers a gameplay balancing effect of its own. Due to the late-game nature of this fight, it is fairly challenging. However, the boss is fully vulnerable for as long as it is fully visible - meaning you can deliver a free hit to even the stakes a little better! This is especially evident in the second gif, as the player character’s lock-on target appears for a few frames.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

An assortment of various crystals significant in the Sonic franchise for the SRB2Kart project.

With the exception of the fourth from the right, which was drawn from scratch and shaded using an anime screenshot as reference, the following applies:

The first row of item-sized icons were created using the original designs as reference, but drawn from scratch. Then, the second row were edited from the 2D titles’ reference material to match the different shading and palette indicies of the top row, for use as lower resolution splitscreen-compatible graphics.

Ultimately, only the second one from the right was used in the finished title, and continued being used for its sequel. But they were all good practice.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

Here are some assorted visual effects and sprites I’ve been involved with for SRB2.

In addition, I was heavily involved in the making and editing of the 20th anniversary trailer for the game. You can find it embedded below.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

I’ve made many pieces of concept art, exploring ideas before putting mouse/styus pen to pixel. Here are some of the non-SRB2 concepts I incubated over the years*.

*keep in mind I no longer have the original source art for these, and therefore am unable to replace the photographs with higher-quality scans.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

One of my first projects when joining the SRB2 development team was working on future-proofing the 256-colour palette. I painstakingly rearranged the rows, and compressed similar colour ranges whilst making sure the effect on the COLORMAP (a translation table required for shadowed areas in DooM-engine games) was not destructive. This enabled the use of more esoteric colours the game had not previously been able to employ, giving its upcoming version a characteristically distinct look and feel.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

During my time in the SRB2 community, I’ve undertaken several in-depth sprite work projects. The two that best represent my output are Miles “Tails” Prower* and Dr Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik. Both of these were collaberative projects, but the sprites shown here are the ones in which my involvement was significant.

Neither of these were completely from scratch (see the Asset History section for the original material), but you can see that I have significantly expanded upon the original sprite selection - with consistent quality (even in the face of fluid animation!) for the former, and further increased accuracy and quality in the latter.

*for those familiar with the Tails character, you may have noticed they are missing their characteristic twin tails in most of the sprites; these were handled concurrently by a different artist on the team, and are loaded as a separate object in-game.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

I’ve been closely involved in prototyping and designing menus for SRB2, on both mechanical and visual fronts.

The Add-ons Menu was based off more simplistic file dialogs to avoid requiring cursor input. Despite this, I still felt it was necessary to add miniature icons for quick, at-a-glance filetype awareness, and had lots of fun exploring how to represent them without clashing with the visual presentation of the rest of the game.

The Save-select Menu was previously very difficult to quickly find the file you were on previously if you had many files. Increasing the size of the elements and rotating the menu’s input to operate on save “cards”, rather than generic boxes, made the experience more visual than textual and increased consistency with other classic Sonic games.

[toastergrl-visual-designer]

I haven’t been very involved in texture creation for the project itself, but in a non-official capacity I’ve developed near-complete texture sets for several SRB2 add-on levels which enhance the base resources of the game.

Flipside Frenzy was a combination casino, pinball, and gravity-warping challenge. Sadly, its level design was never completed, but its textures and associated assets were some of my proudest work for the time. The cannon is a draw-over of a pre-render, and the card suits were traced from stock assets, but aside from that the bulk of the assets depicted are mine.

Cutout Warehouse is a level I collaborated on with another member of the community. It was designed within extremely restrictive mapping limits, limiting the number of floor/ceiling height combinations that can exist within the level. The challenge was developing an aesthetic which could be used to construct thin walls bunched up closely together to serve as platforms. The result is a factory (given pre-existing, kind of ugly textures to contrast) fortified with nothing but cardboard shipping boxes and masking tape.