In our last post, we talked a little about W&W’s origins. Today, I’ll post a little bit on how the graphics were created for Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles!

As we all know, the resolution of the GP2X is 320*240 pixels, and though it may sound like a very limited resolution by today’s standards, it houses no less than 76800 dots of pure workload. The reason is that sprite graphics have dots hand placed carefully to make everything look pretty and well animated.

For the graphics, as always, everything goes by the “rule of eights” with me. I already knew that the “Elements” in the game would be 16×16, so all I needed was to make them colorful and to include the appropriate Chinese character inside. Chinese characters are pretty complicated compared to letters in say, English, and sometimes squeezing the whole ideogram in a limited space can be quite a challenge!

At first, they were going to be more “classic” in style. The characters were more calligraphic and the blocks much flatter. Later, I imagined them as cubes, so I had to play with the lighting to give them volume. I wanted the blocks to fade according to the element they represented, so I drew the bursting animations.