Upgrades

This week I have been working on developing the background image since it was very flat and boring and did not really blend with the other environmental elements. This was also true for the totem pole and we have gotten feedback stating that we should do something more with it. So I gave the totem pole some highlights and shadows that also gave the coloured blocks some texture. The background I gave some texture by adding old looking stone tiles and grass which highlights the area of the totem pole, the further away from the "scoring zone" the more broken and scattered they are until the jungle takes over towards the edges.
Here is how it looked before...

 and now...

I decided to recycle the plants we already had by changing the colour and bringing down the contrast to make them fit and blend into the background better. I used the grass mostly towards the center and the more jungle-looking plants towards the edges to make it look like a ruin centered in a jungle. During the playtesting session last week we got some comments that the screen felt a bit cluttered and i think that it was partly because the plants stood out so much against the background. By making them blend in more I have been able to use more of them, making the environment more interesting, without making it look as cluttered. I still have to wait until all new obstacles and the level design is complete so that we can test it properly in-game, but it is looking good so far.

Alpha Update

I thought I would just give you a quick update of how the Alpha presentation for our GGC project, went. So yesterday we first held a short presentation, covering the original concept, changes that had been made and what had been going well and not so well. After that we got to show the game to the audience before getting feedback from the three teachers present. As usual it was Oskar (Lead Designer) and I that presented, we got to go up first of all and it went really well, we got some advice and a pass for the Alpha assignment.

Later, during the afternoon, our class and the second years set up our laptops for a playtesting session were we got some additional feedback as well as confirmation that we are working towards our aesthetic goals. Most of the negative feedback we got was about the volcanoes which were not working as they should, the collision is off and it is possible to get killed when near it. The programmers had an idea of it being an area of effect but it is not intuitive and especially since there is no visual feedback the players do not understand, either way the collision should only be at the base of the volcano and only when the characters feet are near it. This was something that we were aware of and need to work on, apart from that the feedback was generally positive and the players seemed to enjoy it. Both during the playtesting session and the presentation we were commended for showing as complete of a game that we did, which felt really good.

Here is a screenshot from the Alpha we showed.

Alpha Week

This week has been busy as usual, we started out Monday morning with going up on stage to practice our GGC presentations. It went rather well, we definitely need to prepare more and keep working on our presentation but it seemed as we had gotten further with our presentation than some of the other teams. The point of this presentation was to show what we had ready at the moment and get some valuable feedback on what we might want to add, remove or change. We got some really good advice and immediately made changes, both inspired by the feedback and by other teams. We did feel that it was challenging to create the presentation considering how unfinished the project still is and I think it will be changed even more before the big one at the GGC.

For the presentation I created a PowerPoint presentation and a PowerPoint template that we will use for all presentations in the future, I also created a PowerPoint presentation for the Alpha presentation we had today.

This week I also created a foot for the totem pole, since it looked a bit like it was floating on the game space. I thought it would be a good idea to have it for the Alpha and following playtesting session to aid the audience and the players to understand our vision since there had been some people pointing it out before. This is how it looks at the moment, there are also some new art assets created by our other artist that has been placed to make the gameplay more interesting and to decorate the background.

Since the original placeholder art and animation for the gatherers did not look right I created a new one. It needs some polishing but it looks very comical which was exactly what I was aiming for. Previously they had really long legs which took up about half of their frames, I thought it would be better to make the bodies smaller in comparison to the masks and scale them up while cutting their legs at their knees. (The original placeholder can be seen in the mockup above). Here is how it turned out.

I have also been looking at the power-ups this week, I created two placeholders as we needed them when showing the Alpha, although they will need to be iterated since they did not turn out as I wanted. I had an idea that I wanted to test but they did not really fit the art style, they looked more like they would belong in the game we designed last semester called "With Love...". They did however look well enough for the Alpha and were implemented, we will have to figure that out when we start completing all placeholders next week. We want all art to be complete prior to the Beta so that the programmers have time to implement it and still have time to work out any issues and finish balancing the game and controls.

Late the night before the Alpha presentation the Lead Programmer asked me to make a quick win text that he could place on a white background. I quickly created four winner texts and a background (that was not white) to use for placeholders, so that we would have something, although in the end he unfortunately did not find the time to implement them. At the moment it is just text but we will change that later, perhaps have a a text saying "wins" or "winner is" and then have the mask or the character appear next to it.

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.