Gheldia

One of the largest projects I’ve had the honor of working on as a freelance artist. I was involved in all artistic aspects of Gheldia. The project spanned over several years, with constant progress and updates including visuals, added engine features, design, and storytelling.

My major responsibilities included concept art for all the major characters in the game, poster/promotional artwork, logo design, character sprites for all controllable characters, NPCs, enemies, and props. I also built all the environment tiles, and designed all the tilesets.

What I Was Hired To Do

Concept Art

All major characters needed concept art to use as a style guide for the pixel art, portrait art, as well as promotional materials.

01 Pixel Art

All playable characters, NPCs, monsters, props, and environments.

02 Illustration

Poster art, promotional materials, logo design.

03 Consultant

Advising on story direction, character motivation, game design, and marketing.

04

A Full Cast of Characters

From concept design, to pixel creation

Character Portraits

The initial roster of characters who were considered major players in the story. Some were playable, and a few were planned playable.

These portraits were planned for dialogue cutscenes, and usage in status screens. Crops would be used for various other UI and HUD elements.

Plans were made to convert them to lower resolution sprites to match the retro look of the game.

Pixel Character Sprites

Every playable character had four-directional movement, four-directional attacks, different equipable weapons and special effects, injure animations, death animations, and various interactive animations. The initial limit was 32×32 pixels, and later expanded to 64×64 to include weapons and special effects.

This is a selection of my favorites from the hundreds of sprites I made. (I just really loved these specific characters!)

Pixel NPC Sprites With Infinite Scalability

Problem: Creating numerous NPCs on a limited budget.

Solution: Creating an infinitely scalable system with a “character editor” with numerous accessories, hair styles, clothes and colors to generate an infinite number of possible NPC combinations. This meant that no two NPCs were the same. Each attribute has 4 directions of movement.

Here is a sample of some combinations I created arbitrarily.

Character Concepts

A sample of concept art for some of the story characters. These were initial draft, so no shading or finishing was done for them. The aged paper treatment was intended for when these got released as promotional material.

Angry Mobs - Enemy Sprites

While I loved creating every artistic aspect of Gheldia. I think I had the most fun with creating the enemies. Every enemy had at least one attack, one special skill, walk, injure, idle, and death animations. Here is a sample of a few of my favorites from the Goblin clan.

Environment Art

Tiles fit on a 32×32 grid. I created special tilable edges and chunk pieces for more unique and organic designs. The design of these tiles to make them organic was the magnum opus of my pixel environment work. Some tilesets were created to be as modular as possible for unique arrangements without blowing budget on too many art assets.

Tilesets were arranged in logical ways for use in the level editor, which would be optimized into more condensed tile maps in game.

Effects, such as shadows, lighting, water etc. were added in real time to increase the dynamics of the environment.

Environments included ruins, towns, fire/ice caverns, cathedrals, dungeons, castles, jungles, forests, swamps, deserts, and more.

Props and Furniture

About 200 pieces of prop items and furniture items were made, including chairs, tables, shop stalls, plants, flowers, benches, vases, curtains, bookshelves, switches, levers, signs, statues, wall paintings, emblems, and many, many more. It would be difficult so show the scope in just a few images.