Elements Final Preview (Patreon)

Hey guys, I have a BIG elements preview today-- planned to be the final preview before the actual release sometime in mid-December.

First off-- my buddy fmoo put together a special aseprite script that speeds up the export process. This is huge, it'll save me an insane amount of time vs aligning thousands of sprites in Photoshop. 

Today's sheets were exported using that script. You can download the latest preview .zip here: 

• Elements preview assets (.zip)

These sheets are in the same format as the previous preview. The difference is that I've added a few more, so you can have some more room to experiment with them. 

There's now a sheet for every layer/type that the set will contain. Previous previews didn't have the extra layers: this set includes example sheets for the "front extra" (a beard), "back extra" (a cape), and "back hair" (long hair).

This set also has a few color variations, mostly for the hair assets-- so you can see how it looks with the combination of front and back hair (generally you want to use the same color for both layers). Previous releases only had a single color for each piece.

Notably, I've added some weapon overlay sheets. That zip file includes overlay sheets for a sword, a shield, and a bow-and-arrow.

So... you can see that progress is going swimmingly!

Also, I don't know if I've mentioned this one yet or not, but... the set will include ears so you can make cat-boys and bunny-girls:

Just in case you were wondering about that... ;)

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The big thing that I wanted to show off though... check THIS out:

Yeeeeaaaaaahhhh! It's a sprite generator. 

My friend Locke is making this and we're going to bundle it with the asset pack as a free bonus. It's designed to work specifically with these sprite sheets.

It's gonna be a small tool, pretty much exactly what you see here -- just enough so that the most basic users don't need to open up photoshop to make characters from the asset sheets. It automatically layers the pieces in the right order for each direction. Of course, this generator won't be able to solve the complications that I detailed in the previous post. For some specific animations and combinations, a bit of manual editing might be inevitable.

I don't think that it's completely ready yet, but it's close! It has me super excited and really pumped to release this stuff. This little generator is really gonna take the Elements collection to the next level.

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So, overall -- progress on the assets themselves is going as expected, with some good extras too. :-)

I've got maybe half of the planned release pieces finished and animated. Of the rest, the designs are all ready to go. I'll be animating them over the next couple of weeks as we get nearer the final release.

It's been a real crazy last couple of weeks for me-- with my game release and all the post-launch updates that I scrambled to put together, then I slapped together the Monster's Belly set to throw it up on the store page. I've also started work on character sprites for Quartet, and then Thanksgiving holidays, and then Christmas gift shopping this weekend -- and through all of it: a huge amount of work on these elements assets.

And now... the big Minecraft update drops tomorrow... how will I find the time... 🥵🥵

But I'm not complaining LOL. It's exciting to get so much done. Looking forward to this big release.

Right now I'm shooting to finish this thing for Dec 18/19 (the weekend before Christmas weekend). That's two weeks to finish up all of the assets for the initial "core set" and then one week to get everything exported, organized, write up a little guide, and put together the premade characters.

I'm not promising that it'll be done then-- but that's my goal for now. And it looks like we're on track.

The promise that I did make was that this set would be released before the year is over. We're cutting it close... but we're gonna make it!

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I'll be back in a few days with something from the request thread. Just one for this week, because I'm gonna be focused on jamming elements as we're getting close to that finish line. 

See you soon. Thanks!