Simplicity was my goal for the style, this way I didn't have to grind for hours to make parts of the needed sprites. So I came up with the idea of a "silhouette" style of art. This allowed me, as required, make the sprites quickly, with little effort.
When one thinks of "silhouette" the first thing that comes to mind is a single color blotch, so i played with this idea. Since there had to be two main factions or sides, I thought it would be dire for the -colors- to easily distinguish the players. So I choose, Green, and its compliment, purple. Originally, all of the artwork for the game only used 9 colors, But i added a few reds, plus white, for the special effects of the game. Right now, the entire game uses only 14 colors.
When I began working on the tileset, I wanted to make tiles unique to each player's side, and a neutral zone. I did this, and the night that I finished, in my insomniac delusional state, I closed all the work without saving it... yes, it prompted and warned me... but I just wanted to sleep, so I kept clicking no. The next day when I realized what I've done I nearly cried, LOL... But it turned out for the better, because remaking it a second time allowed me to make something of better caliber.
Here we have an Example of the three tilesets, Aliens, Robots, Neutral.
I already had in mind I wanted to make the units, like the towers, Upgrade, or unlockable. Here is an example of how your Units can "Evolve"
Towers where something to think about before rushing in to make them. I dearly wanted to avoid projectiles...so I wanted to, in the long run, make a "firing" animation,a and a "hit" animation. To accommodate this, I just drew all of the towers aiming upward.
The GUI was the simplest thing to make, but the most tedious I would say. using the colors i picked out for neutral, i began making a GUI to fit the Space alien/Robot theme.
Ultimately I'm really excited about this. This would be the first game I release for byond, and Verm is a great friend, and co-worker to have on your side. So yea, I'm happy. We are expecting to release Early next month, currently we are wrapping up production, fixing random bugs, and balancing the game play. Public testing will begin soon. I always like to hear ideas and suggestions from the reader, so please feel free to comment with a word or two.