By Bait or By Bullet

 Hello!

By Bait or By Bullet is a fishing rogue-lite adventure developed by Small Pond Studios. I worked with a 20 person team to develop this game. My role was animator and pixel artist. I developed 2D VFX, animated guns, and the first boss fight of the game. 

You can check the game out through this link: 

https://apostoljane.itch.io/by-bait-or-by-bullet

Pixel Boss Art and Animations

I worked closely with the design team to create the bosses of this game. The bosses in the game are tentacles designed in different mediums. The medium I created was the pixel art boss. Since animating a tentacle is quite unorthodox and difficult, the animations I designed were reused and referenced when creating the other tentacle animations. 

Idle, Drill Attack, and Scrapped Pierce Attack

We decided that the bosses would move through a portal. The portals would also shoot out projectiles. I designed and animated the portal which is reused for the other bosses as well. 

Portal Animation 

I split the portal into two. The second one was created for the programmers to put in front of the boss to make it look like the tentacle is coming out of the portal. 

Boss + Portal

 

Pixel Boss Arena Background and Foreground

Projectiles

The piranha projectile was based off of pacman. It would shoot out of a projectile and once it reaches the same x or y level as the player character, the piranha would turn and chase after you. 

The second projectile is a lobster which was based on space invaders. After the boss would reach a certain health threshold, an array of them would spawn and move from the top of the screen downwards. 

Miscellaneous Art

Pufferfish Gun

Deadbones gun

Buffs or junk you can fish

2D Vfx I created for dying bosses

Wanted Poster for Bosses Intro Banner

First Design of Backpack Merchant

Motion Test for Tentacle

Animation for Initializing Fishing Minigame

I also included a README for every finished asset I created. In this readme I would give steps on how to import the art into the game engine and what settings would be best. 

This is an example README I would add:

Hello!

This the pixel boss drill animations. To properly fit them into a 1920x1080 scene all you should need to do is upscale it by 3x (as they were created by using a resolution 3x smaller). 

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Make sure to use the proper import settings when uploading pixel art sprite sheets into Unity. 

1. Change Sprite mode from single to multiple

2. Change Filter mode from Bilinear to Point (no filter)

3. Change Compression from Normal Quality to None

4. Click Apply

5. Click on Sprite Editor

6. Click on Slice

7. Change type from automatic to grid from cell size

8. Then change the Pixel Size to the corresponding resolution.

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The resolutions for TentacleDrill-TransitionIN.png, TentacleDrill-Transitionout.png, and TentacleDrill-Attack.png is 540 x 400

The order of the animations is transition in, Tentacle Drill, and transition out. 

Richard Huang

✧♡(◕‿◕✿)

Good Luck.