Blog 5

 This week I have been reworking the main character in our game. As I previously mentioned, our other artist recently left, and she was the one who made the main concept and sprite for the character. However, now when we are approaching the end of the project we see that we need to rework some of the assets.
The original concept document said that the main character was supposed to be an elderly woman. We decided to stick with this concept.
However, […]

Blog 5: NPC

 
This week’s feature is a NPC
NPCs, short for Non Playable Character, is a staple of any game. They’re there to enhance the player’s experience of the game and therefore there exists one NPC in our game as well.
In our game Echo, which is a 2D top down view of a mother moth trying to look for its children, we have two distinct enemies – the wasp and the frog. The wasp is easily identifiable as an enemy as it chases […]

Creating a cutscene

A cutscene was something that my team wanted to have in order to explain how the main character, Gillis, escapes from being burnt on the stake. The project manager of our team wrote down a script with the storyboard of each frame, and I went on with drawing rough sketches of the perspective, composition and lighting of each frame in Photoshop. Since there were quite the amount of  frames I had to draw, I knew from the start that I […]

The Creative Process

Hello and welcome to the 5th and last blog post from this course, Game Design 2.
This time I’m going to give you a deeper look at my creative process. More specifically, I’m going to talk a bit more in detail about how I created this weeks asset: The King.
The King was designed to play a passive role in the game. However, in the original concept he plays the role as the last boss. But we had another idea. The encounter will […]

A blog: Part 5 – The Final One

This week has been one of polishing, and UI creation for us that do the graphics in team Dragon. With the project getting extremely close to its deadline, we have enacted a feature freeze within the project. We will not be adding anything new but rather focus on balancing and polishing what we have, this means that we have time to work on the art that has been lacking the most: the main menu and UI.
One of the most pressing […]

Reanimating a dead fish

With my sword fish swimming animation taken care of, I had to produce a second animation which would serve as its death animation.  I had the luxury of using the already created concept art by Evelina Paulsson from which to animate.  This time I had to create my own drawing and animate that.

With this basic line art done I could sample the original color of the swimming sword fish and then fill in this version.  With some clean up and […]

GUI making: Heads-up Display

This week we had an assignment on designing GUI in our graphics course. The assignment could be conveniently integrated with our game design project. I shared the assignment with our teams other graphic artist Alexander Linde. My work focused on the heads-up display. Generally I knew that my time was already stretched thin this week since there was still other work left for the game. This was for example animating the demon which would also require some time afterwards to […]

Stephen- Level transition animation

Today I have made an animation of Stephen swimming into the background for the level transition. This task was my main priority this week.
Here you can see the whole animation.

The first step was to figure out how Stephen is looking from behind, and that part was actually tricky, especially with the fishtail. I had to imagine how my swimming animation of Stephen from the side, would look like behind him. I started with drawing two key frames, first one when the fin […]

Armed to the teeth

The artifact I want to write about this week is not one single artifact, but a bundle of them that are included in the same category.



 
Last week I focused my attention on creating and finishing the weapons for the main character Stephen in our game. It’s essential that he has weapons so that the player will be able to shoot the fishes that are attacking Stephen. My team and I wanted the focus of our game to […]

3DS Max Tutorial – Setting up Reference Planes

So my programmer friend asked me if I could make another tutorial on how I would model something more complex than a box, combining different types of geometry, and sent me a picture of a lamp. So here is part 1 in lamp modeling: setting up reference planes.

Here is the lamp in question:

Animating

As last week came to its end I finished up the scenes that we were going to have as a narrative in the beginning of the game. In my previous post there is a more thorough description of what is going on in the scenes and how I created them. Here is the end result:

(When adding these scenes into the game we will also add a narrative text and possibly some atmospheric music.)
The focus for me this week has been to create animations […]

3DS Max Tutorial

A programmer friend was trying to make a 3D box and asked me to do a tutorial, so I made a short introduction to 3DS Max for beginners. Hopefully even programmer friendly! 🙂