Hey guys! I'm here to show you a little glimpse at the Saradomin Female Platebody that we have so far, and maybe a just a tad of inside information that'll be cool to know if you ever want to try designing your own sprites!

First, in the design process, I'll start by taking all of the angles that we need and combine them in a spritesheet, as it makes it so much easier to design and save as a whole, as so:

"Spritesheeted" Sprites - 18 Angles (3 Fighting)

I'll then start the design process around that armor on many layers, and sometimes working zoomed in on a piece of armor can be a little confusing, so a lot of breaks are pretty necessary. We need a lot of revisions on a piece of armor. The male platebodies that we designed earlier in the month took over thirteen revisions before we got something that actually even worked... in-game. You can see our linework below, what you see may change in the future, especially on the other completed pieces we have already.

The Linework

Once the design is cool with Fate & n0m (n0m is a bit picky, but I love it and it keeps my head level when designing, so I'm thankful for him greatly when it comes to the feedback he supplies), I'll start the shading of the sprites. All lines are hand drawn and the symbols are also hand drawn and skewed to match perspective. Sometimes it's hard to tell from a distance whether or not a sprite is shaded, especially depending on the tones. We try to keep the tones as close as possible when it comes to shading. If we shade too dark, it'll look out of place. If the shading is too light, then we'll stick out like a sore thumb. Once shading is done, Fate will take it into his client and color it to Rune, Dragon, Black, Mithril, etc. - essentially whatever color he wants the grey to be. All sprites are grey to start, and can be shaded via the client.

The Shading

Once the shading is complete, we'll slice the image up into independent images that are able to be saved independently as well. We'll name these sprites a number, usually the number that the sprite started as, and we'll just give it a new ID once we import it into rscrevolution. Once we've done that, Fate & n0m will test the sprites liberally before getting back to me with any bugs or feedback. Adding sprites into the game used to take around 30 minutes per piece of armor! Fate got that time down to just under 5 minutes with a new back-end update.

The Slices - All Independent

Once the slices are done, saved, and sent off - we'll work on the inventory sprite. The inventory sprite is completely different than the in-game sprites. Usually, you'll notice a bit more detail, shading, etc. with inventory sprites. These are the sprites that show up on the ground when someone dies as well. We try to keep these as good looking as possible and sometimes tend to put a tiny bit more detail into the inventory sprites.

The Inventory Sprite - That's how I know I'm done with this piece

When I save the .PSD and .PNG of this image, I know I can usually move onto the next piece of armor.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you enjoy what you see! We're working hard on completing this update so stay tuned!