Logos

Today I have been working on a logotype for our team called "Lingonskogen" (Swedish for "the lingonberry forest"). We wanted to include lingonberries in the logo so the first thing I did was to research some reference photos and then make some quick sketches in Photoshop.

After drawing these and discussing with the team I got a clear picture of what we wanted to create and transferred the sketches to my sworn enemy called Illustrator. Since I am very new to using Illustrator it took me some time to get the result I wanted, in the future this will probably be less of a problem as I get more and more familiar with the software. I think one of my biggest issues is that it looks a lot like Photoshop, but it does not behave like it and that some, practically identical, options are named differently. I also think it is a matter of practice to understand how the anchor points and lines work which has been a major source of irritation. As usual when working I had my laptop connected to a projector so that the team could see what I was doing and give instant feedback, especially our Lead Designer Oskar Lidh Frykmark helped me out with the design.

The end result however, once I managed to win against Illustrator, turned out really well, I created two separate sheets, one for light backgrounds and one for dark backgrounds. We want to have several versions of the logo so that we can choose depending on what we want to place it on, for instance a t-shirt or a poster.

Totemic Banner

We are getting well on our way on the Totemic projec, we are working hard but there is still very much to do. Last week I started working on our banner for our booth at the Gotland Game Conference that was due yesterday, even though easter got in the way I managed to schedule my time to finish it in time for the deadline without stressing too much.

Initially I had a lot of problems with the font for the logotype, I had never attempted to make my own font before but we felt we wanted to make something a bit more special than just choosing  a standard font. One of the major issues was that I had never used Adobe Illustrator before, which meant I had to learn a new program aswell, because of this it took much longer than it probably should have to create the font.

We had previously found a font that we felt fit our concept so I decided that I would use it as a base when creating the logo. I searched Google for illustrator tutorials that I experimented with, although some helped me learn the basics of the program I did not really find anything that was really useful to what I was doing.

There was an initial thought of making the logo look like wood or stone, the logo for Disney's Tarzan was one source of inspiration for this. Therefore I wanted to make it rather thick and experimented in illustrator making the font bolder.

It did not go as well as I wanted but I got something to work with that I moved into photoshop and sketched on top of it. When I finally had something I liked I moved it back into illustrator and finished the line art for it. The finished font was then placed onto the image in Photoshop and coloured, this is probably not the best way to do this but it worked.

Here is how it looked when it was moved into Photoshop and how it turned out.

After some sketching I decided to use a triangular composition with the logo on the bottom, the characters in the middle and the totem pole in the center as that is what the game is all about. The background was an issue though, there were lots of ideas among the team, but we wanted there to be action somehow. This is the sketch that we decided we wanted to keep working on and how it looked when I added the elements.

At this point I was very unsure of what to do with the font and the background, luckily we had a graphics coaching session the day after, during wich I got some really helpful advice and ideas. Some of it I had already thought of but did not know how to do it and some where things I had not thought of. This is the first iteration after that session.

After that there was a lot of work redrawing all line art since it was originally drawn in a lot smaller scale for other purposes and to colour everything. This took some time as I wanted to use flatshading with clean sharp lines. Making the logo stand out was also a challenge that appeared when colouring but I think that it turned out well in the end.
Here is how it turned out in the end and what will be seen on our booth at the GGC.

Practice

I looked through my old collection of pictures last week and was inspired by this half-finished painting and decided to complete it. It is a practice painting of a photo of Cara in Legend of the Seeker.

Totemic

Last week the class got to divide itself into new groups for a new course to start making games for the Gotland Game Conference (GGC). Half of my old team is the same with the addition of one artist, one designer/artist and one coder. The theme of the GGC is unconventional controls and after completing "Terminal" we wanted to focus on keeping it simple and polishing it to perfection.

We started a few weeks before starting the course with brainstorming what controls to use and finally decided that we wanted to have the player control two characters simultaneously, one with a joystick and one with a trackball. One of our aesthetic goals is "chaos", we want there to be a lot for the players to keep track of and we want them to engage in friendly competition, shouting and pushing each other while having fun. That was one reason that we decided to create the game for four players, having eight characters on the screen at the same time will help us reach that goal.

When the course started we were still brainstorming on where the game would be set and who the characters would be, the original idea was of little geniuses controlling their homemade robots but in the end we chose to go with a shamanistic/tribal theme set in a tropical environment. The characters would be one shaman and one spiritual creature that they had summoned to protect them from the other shamans' creatures and to stop the other shamans.The shamans were during the concept phase turned into forest spirits wearing tribal inspired masks and costumes and the summoned creatures were to be whirlwind-like, wearing the same mask and colour as their shaman.

The team soon decided for the game to be a "King of the hill" kind of game, placing a totem pole in the centre that each player would need to control for a total amount of 30 seconds to win. To make the game more interesting, as another of our aesthetic goals is "anyone's game", we decided to take inspiration from the negative feedback loop of "Mario cart" to make it more difficult for the player holding the totem and easier for the other players to take it over. We felt that this would make the players use both characters more and keep moving around instead of just going straight for the middle, this is going to need a lot of balancing though.

Along with the other artist, I started working on finding inspirational images, creating Moodboards and making Concept Art as well as starting to list all artefacts that would need to be created in a Scrum Backlog. Together with the Lead Designer, Oskar, I put together a PowerPoint presentation and went up in front of the class and a, larger than usual, jury of teachers and teacher's assistants to pitch our idea. We did not get any really negative feedback and most of the things that were brought up were things that we had already thought about. The biggest discussion was wether it would be too difficult for the player to control the two characters at once, in case it doesn't work we have several backup plans, for instance making it co-op instead. We got some valuable feedback and managed to get a green light for the production of our game called "Totemic".

I will finish what turned out to be an essay of the first week at the "Theme Park"-course with some Concept Art I created.

Finished

As mentioned in my last post I finished all the frames for the intro of "Terminal" Friday, and yesterday our Lead Programmer implemented them in our game. They slide in and out frame by frame, ending on a comic book page with them all gathered before perfectly timed with the music switch to the main menu, of wich he was very proud.

Here is how the finished page turned out.

As I have showed previously I first drew all frames in greyscale, apart from the "Fly City" one which was already finished. What I did next was applying colour layers in Photoshop on top of which I experimented with brushes and layers in colour dodge and linear dodge modes to get the vibrant glowing look I was going for. These were used for finishing touches, to draw the eye to the focal points.

I kept the colours rather flat and worked with very few colours, still inspired by Ms Marvel but now taking it in my own direction. I used the same purple for the background on all images, gradually increasing the amount of turquoise representing the night falling and her going further into the building where there is no sunlight. These are the two colours that make up the colour scheme of "Terminal" and I added some touches of an orange yellow, which complements them both nicely, and a redder version of the purple to get some variations to the colours.

I am thinking about wether it might be a good idea to add the logo to the page, but overall I think it turned out well. The ones I feel most happy with are the first one, of "Fly City", and the last one of the interrogation room from a security camera. I think I did really well on the lighting and colouring of the first one and I am really glad that I managed as well as I did on the last one as the prespective gave me quite a challenge, the light, colour and texture also give it a mysterious feeling that I was going for.

We have finished all graphics for "Terminal" now so it is just up to the coders to implement and polish the last few things that are left and we will be ready to show it on the final playtesting session on Friday, our game is very complete and I think we will do well.

Friday's Work

I finished colouring my last frames for the intro of "Terminal" today, since I had all values done and a colour scheme to follow it went rather quickly. I managed to finish the one I started yesterday and the last three ones, now all that is left is figuring out how it should be presented.

Death

Last week I finally finished the death animation for the main character in "Terminal", this turned out to be quite a challenge. I found it very difficult imagining how one would fall when dying and I did some sketches of how she might look when lying on the floor. I thought about googleing "dead girl" but I was afraid of what I would see so I just had to use my imagination.

I had one "death pose" that I liked although I could not figure out a good way for her to get there, I thought that she should first fall to her knees and then backwards. It just did not look right so I had to rethink everything; this is the very first test I made, just to see if the movement pattern would work, it was, as said, not very successful.

I tried imagining how one would react and discussed it with some of my team members, we came to a conclusion that it would probably be more realistic if she would lean forwards as one does when in danger, instinctively protecting the abdomen. She would still fall on her knees, maybe stay there for just a second and then falling forwards to the side.

The part of her falling to her knees was improved from the previous test and reused, so I had a starting point and a new death pose for the end, again it was a real challenge of how to get her there, much due to the top down perspective.
The first iteration of the new animation had few frames, so that I could see if this would work and it looked like this.

This felt like a good start so I kept working on it, adding more frames for the in-betweens to get a fluid motion. I did have some issues with the perspective and I had to rework all the frames a few times so that she would get proportionally smaller so that it would look like she is falling to the floor, away from the camera. When I felt satisfied with the animation I added her clothing on top, constantly fixing small things to keep it flowing.

Next thing I did was to add her braid, this was also a big challenge that I had to reiterate several times before it looked okay. I tried figuring out how it would move, when hair is gathered in a braid it gets a tad stiff and heavy although it should still move. At one point I did try braiding my hair and running around to see how much it moved, I believe during the creation of the run animation, and it did not move that much although for my animations I had to exaggerate the movement for it to look good.

After too many hours of work I finished the animation with colour and here is the result

If I was to do something differently I could probably add some more frames, it is made up of 13 frames, and perhaps redo the braid again but I am happy with how it turned out.