Week 5

This week we have focused on making tiles, reusable assets. We figured out that instead of making huge chunks of art, we could draw individual reusable objects. These ”tiles” feels a bit more static but gives us new advantages:

• It’s easier to build smart level design when you don’t need to make an entirely new painting every time you come up with something. The level designers can put a level together like Legos.

 

• You can put a lot more detail and precision to to these objects than you could otherwise. For example, instead of wasting time quickly producing 5 meters worth of sand, i could focus on a limited portion, and give it exceptional resolution, values, color and lighting. This was the result:

 

 

 

These sand dunes loops perfectly and can be put together to make an infinite map. Meanwhile, Kevin, another graphics artist in my group have been cutting out pieces of rocks, ship wreck parts and corals from previously made background art, cleaned them up and made them ready to be used as sprites. In conclusion, we have saved enormous amounts of time using tiles.

• Tiles are also easy to recolor, for even more variety.

I have also begun animating the mermaid enemy. As i haven’t had the time to animate before in this course, i felt it was necessary to make some more research, so i watched YouTube videos about the twelve principles of animation:

This proved to be a good reminder from previous lessons. I also watched how other people had dealt with animating mermaids, for inspiration, as well as looking at this mermaid animation sheet for guidance:

Here is a first picture of how the animation. Hopefully i it will have a few more frames next week:

The challenge here is to make the snake like, rippling effect of the lower part of her body while utilizing the 12 principles of animation.

The mermaids look will be based on an early piece of concept artwork i made at the start of this project:

This what we ultimately want the mermaid animation to look like: dangerous, scary and strong. Dark eyes, scales around the edges of her skin, hair flowing dramatically in the water and a very threatening trident. The anchor might not make it, but maybe the chains.

I will have to learn animation quickly, there is a lot to do until next week when the beta needs to be finished.  We have to put quantity over quality at this stage as there will be more time for polish after the beta deadline.

Week 4

 

This week i have been working further on the background, which is now three times as long. I have also reworked the colors that felt a bit too ”dirty” and did not drive the focus towards the player avatar enough, which the new colors does a lot better. The new line art helps with that as well, i have med it much thinner since my previous blog post. I added a diffuse filter to the background in Photoshop in order to make it feel more like it’s underwater and added a gaussian blur filter to it as well to make the foreground pop out even more.

There is also some concern about the pirate skeleton in the background image.  I did not think too much about its size in relation to the player avatar. I thought it might look somewhat more impactful and symbolic being the oversized. After getting feedback from other students, it seems that it might bother people that it’s not in actual size. I’m going to have to make a decision with the team whether or not the pirate is worth revisiting.

ipated. Much of these final effects have been premature as the there is some more clean-up to be done to the picture, but in order to get the background decent for the alpha, i quickly finished up this temporary version of the background. The line art still needs to be cleaned up and the background layer of the picture needs some more work in terms of colors.

I have also made the coin collectible that had to be in place for the alpha test. It had to be done quickly so that the programmers could implement it in the game, so i went straight to work without much reference research. For a golden coin with a skull on it to give it pirates touch. I put the coin on the background to make sure it looked nice, shiny and appealing in contrast to the rest of the map and the result was better than i had expected. It was supposed to be a place-holder coin, but it turned out to be popular in the group so we might actually keep it, though it might get revisited for better colors and if there’s time, an animation of it spinning

To be a bit self-critical, we, and me especially, need to be even better at distributing time and get things done on deadline. Looking forward, I will finish up the background and, make sure that a long needed style guide is in place.

 

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Week 3

 

This week i have worked on the background of group 19s assigned game ”Mermaid River”.
One thing i kept in mind from the very start was to make sure the colors didn’t take up too much attention and that the line art wasn’t too sharp since i want the focus to be aimed at the character, the enemies and other things related to the actual gameplay.  I really had to be careful with that particular part because it’s not always easy to restrain yourself as an artist and actually keep away from the ”fun stuff”.

When choosing colors i began by gathering reference material. The game is set underwater in an exotic location so i goggled coral reefs and started sampling colors from there and turned those into a color palette. I then drew the lineart and filled it with things i would expect to find diving in Caribbean water, taking lots of inspiration from my gathered reference material. Coral reefs, sunken ships, sea weed etc. I made sure the line art was thick at the foreground, thinner further away. I made sure that the foreground of sand stood out from the rest of the picture, as that is the layer where the game itself is taking place.

I then colored the picture, carefully choosing nuances that would separate the foreground, middle ground and background. I Made sure to make the light come from above since we’re underwater. Certain details like the coral reefs got some extra saturation too express the colorful nature of them. I also colored the line art, to make it feel more as a part of the whole. It made the whole picture more harmonious for the eye to look at.

I still had some concern that the background would take up too much attention, so i added a gradient of blue over the whole picture, except the foreground where the game is taking place. I also used the blur tool in Photoshop to blur out the sharp line art to make sure that the eye will be directed at what’s actually important.

This was the end result of the week:

The picture still has to be cleaned up and I’m not entirely sure if the gradient overlay makes the picture a bit lifeless. I might also make the line art even thinner in order redirect the focus to what’s important. All that aside, the real challenge going forward will be making this background three times as big while keeping up with the schedule.