Game Development – 3rd Blog Entry

Hello again, and welcome to my third blog entry in the series where I detail the progress that our team is making in the development of our student project game. If you want more information on the project and earlier work done in it, you can find that in the earlier blog posts.

This week, I will talk about an asset that I created for out game during last week’s production sprint.

Unfortunately, I was sick in a cold for the beginning of the week and the one who was responsible for holding the alpha presentation, so I didn’t complete much work on the actual game.

The asset that I created was an animated sprite for the projectiles used in the game. As the game has a somewhat humorous twist, the projectiles that the both player character and the enemies fire are potatoes. Before I had produced this asset, we used a photo of a real potato as a place holder.

I started out by drawing the general shape of the potato in a Photoshop document that was 320 by 320 pixels in size, and did a basic coloring of the potato using various yellow and brown hues.

I then shrunk the image size to 32 by 32 pixels, the size that the sprite was to appear as in the game.

The reason that I started out in a larger size than the sprite was actually supposed to be was that I found it easier to get a general feeling of the shape when the image was in a higher resolution.

After shrinking down the image to its proper size, I then polished it on a pixel-by-pixel level using the ‘pen’ tool, adding proper shading and refining the outline of the sprite.

This version of the sprite is the one that we used in the live demo part of our alpha presentation last Friday.

One piece of feedback that we got during this event was that the projectiles should have some kind of animation, to give the impression that they are tumbling through the air rather than being shot forward perfectly straight.

As such, I went to work on creating an animation for the projectile. With the sprite already in place, creating the animation with small alterations to it was fairly easy.

With the use of the software GlueIT, I baked the separate sprites in this animation into a sprite sheet. I also implemented this into the game engine with some help from our lead coder.

Although technically not part of last week’s production sprint, earlier this week the graphic artists of our team sat down to make a proper visual style guide together. Style guides are meant to help graphic artists in making the graphics of a game being stylistically coherent. This was something we had not done earlier, to our regret. Due to the decisions made in this style guide, I updated and replaced the projectile animation to have a different outline.

Game Development – 2nd Blog Entry

Hello again, every one!

I’m back again this week to tell you about the progress we’ve been making in our school project.

I’m Peo Johansson and I’m studying video game design and graphics at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland. I’m currently a part of a six-member team undertaking a school assignment.

You can read about what the specifics of said project in the first blog entry.

Now then, onto the detailing of last week’s work!

One of the artifacts that I worked on last week was a number of icons that will represent the power ups that will be in the game.

One of the power ups is a firework that the player can use to take out multiple enemies at once. It is a more powerful attack than the default shooting ability, with a so-called “area of effect”.

After being tasked with undertaking the creation of these assets, I started sketching up a few possible visual directions that I could take with the power up icons. I did this with the firework ability, as it was the one that was the most urgent and I wanted to be sure that it would be completed as quickly as possible. You can see some of the designs that I produced below.

The purpose of the icons was to not only represent the power ups on the game levels in their state where they would be able to be picked up by the player, but also in the game HUD to communicate to the player which power ups are available for use. As such, I wanted them to be as clear and distinct as possible, and aimed to create a minimalistic design that aimed more at basic shapes than at realistic details.

After running the produced concepts past the lead artist on our team, I decided on a more concrete direction for the design of the icons.

After creating the design for the firework power up icon, I went on to start work on another ability called “Moonshine”. I made extra care to make sure that the line work of the two icons was of equal thickness, so that the icons would have a shared visual uniformity in their design.

In the process of working on both power up icon designs, I also decided to color code them to further make them easy to tell apart at a glance. After all, it was important for the player to be able to informed decisions as quick as possible while playing the game, even as the in-game camera is auto-scrolling at a moderate speed.

While the icons isn’t implemented into the game engine as of writing this blog post, below you can see a mockup of how the icons would be used in-game (some other in-game elements outdated).

Game Development – 1st Blog Entry

Hello, and welcome!

My name is Peo Björn Johansson, and I’m currently studying Game Design and Graphics at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. 

In this series of blog entries I will write about the progress of the group project that I’m currently participating in. The group consists of a team of six people, half of which are coders and half of which are artists. I am one of the artists.

We are developing a video game in the so called “space shooter” genre. It is based on a concept that another team of students designed previously. All team developed their own concepts, and the teams could pick whatever concept they desired to produce as an actual game except for their own.

The concept that our team picked was “Potato Pirates of the Prohibition” and is about an air plane pilot who is smuggling potatoes for use in brewing alcohol. The game takes place in the United States and during the later years of the prohibition era, in the 1930’s.

We are currently in the third week of development on the game, and in this blog entry I will showcase some of the work that I did during the last week of development.

Since the game takes place during the time period that it does, it made sense to us as a team that the general feel of the game would reflect this. For example, the background music in the game will sound similar to the style of music that was popular during the 1930’s. And we also decided that the game should have an art style inspired by the contemporary drawn cartoons of the era.

During the last week of development, one of the artifacts that I worked on was a number of smoke puff sprites (pictured above), for use in effect animations. For example, they would be used when the avatar air plane or when enemy planes are hit by projectiles. This is to accentuate the impact, to give it a bit more “oumph”, so to speak.

During the process of making these smoke puff sprites, I drew inspiration from cartoon depictions of smoke puffs and clouds in general, and the smoke effects from the game “The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker” (pictured above) in particular. The smoke effect from this game stood out to me in the way it utilized small 2D sprites in a way to create one coherent effect.

My goal while making these smoke puff sprites was that they would share a common, simplistic look, while still being different enough o not look repetitive. They should be able to be interchanged with each other, to be mixed and matched in various animations as a visual effect in the game.

As they’ve yet to be implemented in the actual game engine, I cannot say how well they would work in the finished product. But I can say that judging from the goals I set out for myself, I am satisfied with my work.