Wizards are known for their wisdom and mastery in various magics for ages and ages before. They might seem to be old homeless wanderers in humble robes, but be sure not to underestimate the man with a high pointy hat and a long white beard. Wizards strike their enemies with cunning strategy and loads of fireballs casted from their Staves of Infernal Fire.

In this post, I wanted to share with you a process of creating a wizard unit for our Knights and Wizards game project.

For the beginning, let us think of a classic wizard. They have robes, beards, hats and some kind of magical items to cast their spells. Also, they are a symbol of wisdom and power. In all kind of games usually wizards are strong ranged damage dealers but weak in melee combat. Though lately, after appearance of Gandalf in Lord of The Rings trilogy swinging Glamdring and fighting epic battles in close combat wielding staff and one-and-a-half-handed sword on the big screen, fragile character of wizard has got a new dimension of melee mastery.

So today we are going to create a character of a wizard.



I will start by creating a classic silhouette of a wizard on 32×32 pixel canvas. I love to start making characters from the eyes and then continue with face and outlines. The most important detail in my wizard will be a hat so this is the first thing to start detailing. I have chosen the grey colour set for robes so my wizard will look more Gandalf. Also, as I am going to put my wizard into the world where he will fight knights, I will borrow the idea from LotR and give him a sword off the staff to fight the close combat encounters.

Ok, it seems to be the nice one. Now let’s try to make some more detailing and add random shades of base colour to make it deeper.

And now we are ready to make some fun stuff with animation.

In our game, we have decided to use sprite sheets to switch between animation frames.

As first one, I wanted to make a close combat attack animation. I thought of how actual swing of a sword could look like. I tried some swings with a ruler standing by the computer and figured out that it will be enough for me to bend the wizards hand and then rotate it once by 90 degrees. So I do not lose the shape of the hand by drawing diagonal pixel lines. To make a slash more dynamic, I used only one frame to return the sword to the initial position. And added the paths of blade trajectory. To make the blow look more powerful, I am adding a small jump movement to the animation. To finish the jump animation and make it more fun, I added some more details. Here we can see moving hat tip and naked legs.



Second sprite set is for walking. This one is a bit tricky. To simplify my task, I took advantage of the robe so I have to animate only feet and a robe. I will not mess with the movement of legs.

Now it looks a bit like a bad try of moonwalking. But in the end it will look better when the wizard itself will move forward. To save the day I added some hand movement as the character steps forward and again animated the tip of the hat.

There is still missing a ranged attack animation. That one I will show you when I will finish the fireball casting animation and burn down some castles.

Lots of work to do now, till the next time…

-Uniblack, the game smith.