Construction of spaceship

Basic unit image specifications

• Final format: transparent PNG, 72 x 72 pixels
  • 8 bits per RGB channel. may be listed as "PNG-24" or "8-bit RGBA".
  • "Indexed color" or "color map" is different. These will work, but are not recommended.
• Light comes from a specific direction (for shadings and highlights)
• Turbines fire at 60 opacity, any color (with blurred and soft borders)
• Unit/Ship must look in the lower right direction.
• Units/Ships are centered horizontally.
• Outlines should be used, made with a darker, but similar colour to what they're surrounding, this makes the unit/ship feel bigger then the amount of pixels you'd use for the same with a black outline. (Black outlines not welcome)
• Use consistent names for your files, beginning with the unit/ship name, so that they are kept together when browsing the files.

Unit animation specifications

• You can have as many frames for animations as you like. It depends on what you want to get accross
• Images and animations must be done for:
• normal image (1 frame)
• attack for each type (at least one frame - 2 is good - 4 better)
• directional attacks (recomended for ships)
• defense
• death frame

Unit Leveling

Each unit level should differ in size, lv2 unit should be 2 or 3 pixels higher, max altitude of a unit should be around 47 pixels.

• A good way of showing higer lv is changing position.
• One unit can have multiple tree of evolution

Additional Notes and examples

• Test early with different backgrounds. Go to your game terrain files, pick, say, 3 terrains, preferably with different colours, and have a look what they look like against the background, because that way if you have used alpha channels, it may look better in game than as the average standard sprite.
• Test your unit early in the game. Replacing an existing unit graphic with yours is the fastest way (be sure to make a copy of the originals so you don't lose them.)

See also:

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• Space Art
• Spaceship tutorial