Working on health pickups today – that means more pixel-pushing! Fortunately the health pickup itself was pretty straightforward. I wanted a spinning ‘First Aid’ type icon inside a bubble – the hardest thing to get right here turned out to be getting the spinning icon to look like it was inside the bubble whilst remaining legible and also sticking to minimal palette.
My solution in the end was (in Photoshop) to duplicate the bubble layer and place on top of the icon. Set the new overlaid layer to ‘screen’, reduce opacity considerably, delete everything bar the highlights and then apply the icon layer as a mask. This has the effect of only applying light highlights to the icon itself. It’s a bit of a cheat as I’m creating colours not in my original palette but it works and looks pretty good. I may have to revise this a little if and when I come to apply different palettes to the game.
Whilst designing this I couldn’t help but wonder how many pixel-pushers before me had designed health pickup icons – there should be some kind of repository of them somewhere!
Integration into the game was pretty straightforward as well, time consuming as I needed to set up a new ‘pickup’ superclass to handle collisions with the environment and manage getting collected etc but nothing overly complex. Designing the ‘collection’ animation took a bit longer, mainly tweaking the bubble particles that appear but drawing and animating that concentric ring effect took some time as well. Again – not difficult, just time consuming. I’m pleased with the end result though.
Dev Time: 1 day
Total Dev Time: approx 21.75 days
Got Health – No Jogging Required
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