TWO DAYS until Gem Setter releases!

Today, I offer an explanation of my process drawing Meg:

I'm not much of an artist, so when I approach things like drawing Meg here, I usually end up doing a bunch of geometry and math. Most of my art involves precise measurement and theory rather than skillful linework or painting.

For every tile in the game, I started out by measuring a 300x300 square to act as the base. In the image below, that is represented by the gray outline around the shape. Meg's base is an octagon with small corners, so I outlined that shape within the 300x300 boundary. To create shading, I took the brightness of the color in the center and recolored each segment of the octagon with a new brightness according to this sort of formula:

new_brightness = base_brightness + 5 * (x_offset + y_offset)

This is good start, but it is very clearly flat. Many tiles in Gem Setter, including the player tile, have depth created by raising everything at wall height by 75 pixels (which is 1/4 of the 300 pixel side length of the square from earlier.) To create this orthogonal perspective for Meg, I raised the center square by this amount and reconnected the outer point on the base to create the final shape. The gray outline in the diagram below represents the position of the base square offset to wall height, which was how I repositioned Meg's top.

Notice how this geometric process causes the sections of the shape in the back to become occluded. If I was doing this solely by artistic intuition, I might have not known to not draw that part of Meg's body in the final shape. However, the math doesn't lie: the perspective at which the character is drawn necessarily means that the back face shouldn't be visible. Through this process, I was able to geometrically show how the gem should appear if projected in the way the game's view is.

And after drawing a simple face using a few basic shapes, I had a character. That's it! That's all the ingredients you need to make your own Meg.

I then repeated these techniques on a rounded rectangle base to create Tess. Here's a similar graphic showing what the base looked like.

Throughout the development of this game, I've been pondering whether or not these mathematical processes qualify as art. Am I really making a creative expression when I draw shapes this way? Or am I just producing diagrams? I suppose I will let you decide the answer to that question :)