Scrap Pirates: The last week of production before GGC

Gotland Game Conference 2015 marked the deadline of our production time in this course and we have now reached that point. As the last week of a production can be rather chaotic and present sudden, urgent needs in a project, I have been working part of my time with sound effects for the game as we noticed that we needed more of it. In terms of graphics, I finished working on the space parallaxing background as well as started the production of achievement icons for the result screen.

Old version

Final Version

It is one background with two foreground objects in order to be able to make a more advanced parallax than one simple image. This is not visible in the current version of the game, but we made most assets for the game with modularity and the future in mind.

The old image had too many independent parts and felt a bit sparse and unconnected as a scene. I got the feedback to tone the independent parts down and put more of the colorful clouds in and bind them together to make it feel larger and more cohesive. To me, It definitely feels like an improvement and it is all thanks to letting other, talented people give feedback. So I’ll give a note to self and to anyone doing creative work: Don’t cower from showing your work and taking feedback! It really helps!

But at the same time, one has to still remember to stay true to oneself and make stuff that feel good on a personal level too. Especially in game design, a lot of people have different opinions on what kind of features the game should have. If you try to please all these voices at once, the game might change too much and you can lose the passion you had somewhere on the way. Balance is key.

To sum the whole experience of this eight week period, it has been intense but smooth. Having a proper pre-production period and a Scrum plan was definitely beneficial for the group, and every member worked hard. Having an office where we sat and worked face to face was for sure to our advantage as well. It beats distance work in terms of efficiency by far!

Now it is PostMortem time and I’ll write about my experience with creating environmental art and creating the world for a 2D game. Once it is finished, I might upload it here as well.

I hope my post have been helpful or at least interesting for anyone who reads this. It is quite hard to know how to document the progress of a project the best way at times. There is just so much going on at once!

Until next time! 🙂

Scrap Pirates – Week 5

Greetings!

I hope the red day of May 1st is a good one. Myself, I’m sitting in school, painting rust!

This week I have made the top extension backgrounds and keep my fingers crossed that I now am finished with the background tiles. I have now started making decals to place on the walls to create some more variation and life i the background. I managed to figure out how to animate my fan/turbine asset and am now studying dirt, rust and other types of deterioration that might be suitable in our game environment.

To study photos of rust in comparison to how it’s been painted in games such as Deponia, they can look really different. There is a depth of understanding that must be gained before one can create it on their own. That is what I’m currently doing right now, exploring my way to creating a type of rust effect that looks good together with our environment. Keep in mind that the rust that is shown on the picture is not finished yet. The rest is finished, though; and a player avatar for scale.

As it is right now, it can easily be recolored to a green hue and be used as some kind of algae growth. I’m playing around with the shapes and the transition/blend of different tones in the rust texture. The value and saturation will also be tweaked to melt into the environment better. I’ll probably gain an in-house title of Dirt Master by the time that I am done with these decals.

Until next week!

Linear Color and Speedpaintings

We played around a little with different blending options on our brushes in Photoshop today. After that, we sat and did 4 speedpaintings on environments. 15 minutes each. My brain is all tired and gooey from all the concentration.

Environment shading – Day Two

I worked  another 5 hours on this today. It’s my first time so it takes quite a while to get it right. The biggest challenge was to figure out what should be darker or lighter than other objects in the vicinity. It’s not easy like “light or shade”, but different shaded parts can actually have the same value as lit up parts depending on how close they are in the picture. It’s complicated, but fun. Here’s a sample of what it looks like right now.

I made the river darker, switched values on some major parts, some detailed shading, added some glow from the moon and a bit of highlighting among other things.

Next Challenge: Lighting an Environment!

Christmas is over and feels already very distant due to the fast pace life’s back in. I have been working all day on how to render an environment. Between 10 am to 5 pm I practiced this on our assigned environment sketch. Then I have also been looking at a lot of art, interviews and tutorials with artists from modern Disney films among others.

I’ll post a sample of my environment to be able to track my progress, but this is in no way whatsoever finished. It’s still very much a work in progress.

We’ve been asked to bring art and pictures with us for reference for tomorrow. I’ll mainly go to Jonas De Ro for inspiration. I think he’s pure genious when it comes  to environment and lighting.