Creating graphics for a Silverlight game
Creating the characters
Having drawn up a rough outline of the characters required and the kind of look they would portray, the next step was to get them on screen. I used Expression Design to draw them out.
All the characters are drawn face on to the player. The aeroplane, due to its width, was selected as the kind of 'end of level baddy'. This visually added an element of scale to the game.
Using Expression Design was not too much of a leap from other illustration tools. Colour selection I found a little trickier than usual, and I admit to finding the combination of vector paths and layers a bit of an odd concept to grasp and control, but overall it worked well.
Once created, all the characters were exported as xaml files so that they could be brought into Expression Blend and manipulated further.
Other games characters relating to the gameplay were created in the same way, such as the iceberg shape used for the melting ice flow symbol, Olop's ice shard fire and the toxic fire and explosions of the polutants.
