Adventure Character Design:  Toolchain

It took me quite some time to find the ideal toolchain for my pixel art adventure character designs. Actually I’m still at the very beginning of my Game-Development journey but hey, the way is the goal!

Currently I use Unity3D in combination with the great extension called Adventure Creator, to develop my first little adventure game. As a C# Developer, this integrates smoothly with Visual Studio and especially with the Adventure Creator extension, is a no brainer. So let’s move to the challenge => The Artwork! 😉

As I’m not particularly talented in regards to that (this is definitely an understatement), I at least wanted to have a smooth toolchain in place to reduce boring tasks to a minimum. Which leads us to the „Character Design Toolchain“. This is the current process of mine:

1. Imagination & Drawing the Character on Paper
2. Drawing the Caracter with Aseprite and this is why
   1. Realy great tool for PixelArt artists, reduced to the maximum needed functionality
   2. Some PixelArt specific features like the „Pixel-Perfect“ (Freehand trace algorithm) mode, are making the live of a beginner (yep thats me) very easy
   3. For a price of USD 15 very affordable
3. Animating the Character, also done in Aseprite
4. Import the Animations to Unity3D with Aseprite Animation Importer for Unity
   1. Before that, I spent hours of work by exporting the animations, importing to Unity3D, specify the animation again and and and…
   2. The Tool does it all for you, credits to Talecreafter for this great pice of work

Thats it. There’s still so much room for improvement / automation but as I’m just at the beginning of my journey, this will need to wait until there’s actually some content in place for the game! 😉