March 2009 « Ninja Beaver.net

Nintendo DS UI

Well it’s been a lot of work, but everything’s starting to come together now. There’s some new art uploaded into the User Interface and environment galleries, which the image on the right is part of. This was for a Nintendo DS game, based underwater. I would say what it was, but sadly for some reason I didn’t actually find out what the final release was called!

Artwork for the DS can be a bit of a challenge, although it supports a form of transparency it doesn’t support anti aliasing that transparency so you have to make sure you leave clean pixels along the edge. It’s entirely possible to create some pretty nice artwork inside those restrictions though – just look at Zelda.

The Ninja Beaver store is completely updated now, and we have pretty much as many products on their as the basic shop will allow. If it ever warrants it we’ll upgrade to a premium shop, but right now we don’t see much of a point to that.

While the hubster was slogging away shifting furniture I was pruning my crap and going through some of my old sketchbooks. I have a terrible habit of not filling them up completely, so consequently I now have a whole shelf of sketchbooks earmarked as ‘must be filled’. Some of this stuff had completely slipped my mind – for example the original Ninja Beaver sketches. I was quite surprised to find that I actually went through a series of drawings of a Ninja Pigeon, what was I thinking?? It was kinda cool to find the (very) rough sketch that the beaver had grown from and stayed with the site for so long as, hard to believe it was 3 years ago.

Things change though, and we’re pretty happy with the way the current Ninja Beaver is looking. I left a few products on the store with the old design on though, as that character is still a strong look and may well get used again in the future. What that future is, who knows. It’ll be fun finding out though!

Before I go, meet some new members of the Ninja Beaver clan. The Phantom Bantam is a character I’ve been playing with on an off for over ten years, the rabbit is Toki, a new samurai rabbit. Everybody loves a samurai, right? Even if they aren’t as cool as ninjas.