Week 3 of Big Game Project – Finishing the bear

This week I worked on the texture of the enemy from last week.
First I tried texturing it closely to the concept art, this is what it looked like:
I was pretty satisfied with the result but when trying it out in the game, we realized it was actually too well camouflaged. The players had a hard time making it out against the green background of the jungle. So I played around with the colors a bit and tried to make it […]

Week 2 of Big Game Project – Enemies

This week I worked on the first enemy for the game. The enemies are mostly going to be animals living in the jungle, but we didn’t want to just take normal animals from our own planet, since this game is set on a different world. So I started  to design a new kind of predator. We wanted something big and heavy so all the settlers had to group up just to bring one down, this made me think of a […]

Big Game Project – The Beginning

For the last four weeks,  I have been working on a game that will be showcased at the Gotland Game Conference on the 20th of May. We are a group of six students, three programmers and three graphical artists making the game over an eight weeks course called Big Game Project.
In this post I will go into the work I did the first week.
The idea for the game was already finished before this course started, so production began right away. […]

Game Production: Feature 6

This week I have been working on the end screen, it is the screen you get when you lose the game, and since this is a “no victory” game, you will see this screen a lot. Therefore I really wanted it to look nice. In the end of this game you will lose your “Life tree” so I wanted that to be represented in the Image, It is shown in the middle as a stump. It has a shaft of […]

Game Production: Feature 5

This week we have been scrambling to get all our artwork done for the beta presentation this friday. So I have been working on a lot of different stuff, mostly animations and effects.
So in this blog I’ll describe a few different animation and how I created them.
First is the enemy with the big axe, I made walk animations and an attack animation for him. These are the results:

He is supposed to hit all trees in his vicinity so […]

Game Production: Feature 4

This week I am working on some different things, but the feature I will be talking about in this blog post is the menu screen. It is a background painting that I have put a lot more hours in than I had initially planned, but I think it’s important that the artwork is good enough to give the player a nice first impression. It also serves as a way to set the theme for the game and introduce the main […]

Game Production: Feature 3

This week I have been working on the HUD (Heads Up Display), polishing what I already had done previous weeks, and creating some new elements.
The first element I worked on was the health-bar for the player character. I wanted the HUD to feel integrated with the theme of the game. The theme being the forest, I decided on branches or roots for the health-bar outline. This was my first iteration:

But after testing this with the temporary background colour […]

Game Production: Feature 2

This week I have been working on our main characters animations. Beginning with the walk cycles and attack specifically. It has been going pretty good, animation is something that I feel I know how to do since I have studied animation before. The hardest part was to make them look good on such a small model. But after some experimentation and trial and error I came up with a technique that I liked and looked good enough for this project.
Production […]

Game Production: Feature 1

This semester we are creating games based on the concepts created last year. Choosing between the concepts of the other groups, we decided on one called Green Warden, a tower-defense game set in a forest.
The first asset I started working on was the players character. This character is a spirit of the forest who is trying to save the ”Life Tree” (the heart of the forest and her home) from human loggers and foresters. She does this both by attacking […]

Concept Assignment Continues

Work on the concept moves forward. Third week we made a paper prototype of the game, a physical representation of how the game is supposed to work. We got a lot of good feedback, and needed to iron out some stuff that were unclear about the game design, such as level design, puzzle difficulties and game scope.
Last week we worked on our pitch for the game, we then had a test pitch in front of two teachers. The test pitch […]

Concept Assignment Continues

Work on the concept moves forward. Third week we made a paper prototype of the game, a physical representation of how the game is supposed to work. We got a lot of good feedback, and needed to iron out some stuff that were unclear about the game design, such as level design, puzzle difficulties and game scope.
Last week we worked on our pitch for the game, we then had a test pitch in front of two teachers. The test pitch […]

Concept Document Assignment

So after a few weeks of workshops and lectures we move into a 5 week project. The goal of his project is to create a concept document for a 2D, no gravity, shooter (space shooter). We were put into groups of six with six different roles to represent a real design team. The roles are: Producer, Lead Designer, Lead Art, Lead Code, Lead Sound and QA (quality assurance). I got the part of Lead Art, which means I have to […]