This is the first release of the High Tides Asset Pack. I was inspired by Hiroshi Nagai’s paintings and Masayoshi Takanaka. As a Brazilian dude, I just love beaches and surfing, so making this asset pack was my calling. You know I had to do it to em.

For the characters, Trip was inspired by Andy Samberg’s character in Palm Springs, Sunny’s name was inspired by Stevie Wonder’s “Sunny”, Adrien was inspired by a friend of mine, and Ruby’s name was inspired by the song from Foster the People (the YouTube version of the song is beautiful by the way).

Replicating the character’s head across different spritesheet positions would’ve taken a lot of time, so I thought to myself, “why spend 10 minutes doing it when I can spend 10 hours automating it?”, which is exactly what I did. 

First I dabbled with some Aseprite scripting, but that didn’t work, so instead I ended up making a custom automation script using PyAutoGUI that handles the repetitive task of placing body and head parts where they need to go in Aseprite.

It works like this - I draw all the body and head parts in a Mesh file on Aseprite, and the automation copies and pastes them in the right positions in the Spritesheet file, using the keyboard and moving the mouse to specific coordinates on my screen, all specified by me in the automation.

Overall, I just need to worry about making the art for the characters and keep their clothes continuity across different angles, and the automation does the tedious copy-paste stuff for me. 

Of course, after the automation is done a couple of revisions are made. Sunny’s long hair, for example, had to be manually redrawn in some angles where she’s walking or surfing, or else the hair would hide most of her body.

For the tilesets, I tried different styles to see what would work. Went for a more realistic approach at first, but realized it wouldn’t fit well with the common top-down Pixel-Art aesthetic. The transitions between tiles also weren’t matching very well.

Designing the foam from the waves hitting the sand was the hardest part. Had to find balance between realism and cartoon style.

Made a couple of drafts for making the tile transitions as well. Figured out a basic outline that could be used as template for all the transitions, whilst still making it look natural.

I was making these while on vacation from college. I'm  eager to keep working on it, adding more features, but I'll have to slow my pace a bit to focus on classes for now. 

Still, I'll keep promoting it and checking people's reactions to it, to see if they are requesting any changes or additions to the asset pack.

Thanks for reading!