Ashley Faulkner
Idle Pirates is a 2d pixel art, idle management game where the player is a pirate. The goal of the game is to become the wealthiest fleet of ships on the sea. This is done by gathering resources through trade, claiming new lands, and recruiting ship members.
This was a group project for class to create a video game. We decided on a pirate themed game with idle elements and mini games the player can win to earn resources.
Resource Sprites
Resource assets were made for this game. These items are used for trading with different cities as the player travels around on a boat.
Minigame Sprites
There were also sprites created for the mini games that periodically appear while sailing on the water. For example, one is a ship sailing game where the player must dodge obstacles and sail a certain distance before the timer runs out. A majority of these sprites shown are in that game.
Ship detailing
I also helped in detailing the pirate ships of the game. The ships began with a basic outline that was created by another member of the group. Each contain a ship and sail. I would take those base designs to detail and shade them like the examples below.
(detailed and shaded)
(base ship)
(more ship examples)
UI
Buttons
The player can press buttons to engage in combat, a mechanic in the game used to fight other ships. There is also a tutorial button in the form of a question mark.
"flee" button
"attack" button
"swap ship" button
"tutorial" button
Title screen button
This button is used for the game title screen. The first prototype was a circle button made to match the ones in the combat mechanic. However, it was decided against in favor of something more square in design. The grey outline was the 2nd iteration. However, the design was found to be plain. The 3rd iteration is similar to the final design, but is lacking the black outline.
Final title screen button design
Health bars
Shop interface and dialogue boxes
Much of the shop interface was made to fit the pirate theme. The menu for purchasing items, crew members and new pirate ships are made on this slip of parchment paper. The dialogue box is also supposed to resemble parchment. There was also experimentation with different colors and styles of the back and down arrows to also match the pirate theme.
shop menu screen
dialogue box
back and down arrows
Backgrounds
My main job was creating backgrounds for the game. A number of them went unused, but it was great practice in making pixel art. Below is a selection of the backgrounds that were created for the game. Most of them are views of different cities and shops the players can buy/ sell things in.
The process for creating the backgrounds was sketching multiple thumbnails in Photoshop. Once one was selected, that thumbnail would be taken into another program and made into pixel art.
Thumbnail sketch of Shop 1
Final design: Shop 1
Other backgrounds
(Unused) Outside: City #2
(Unused) Plains: City #3
Combat background
(Unused) Shop #3
(Unused) Win screen
(Unused) Snow: City #4
(Unused) Raid screen
(Unused) Outside: Shop #2
