Something different

I did not know I would ever get to say this, but I am actually running low on work. The last few weeks the amount of work I had to do have been getting less and less. I am afraid I will have to dig up something old to write about next week.

Anyway, this week I did something a little bit different, I made the sketch of the background for the options menu. I do not usually do very good with full pictures, especially not mechanical stuff. however, I am quite happy with this one.

When you navigate the main menu, the background is a tailors workshop. The “options” button is positioned above the sowing machine, so it was obvious we had to have a sowing machine in the options menu background. I wanted a top down view of the sowing machine, as if the player was the tailor standing there, looking down at his work space.

Here I actually got to put the perspective I learned in an earlier course to use (you were right Steven!), while drawing the sowing machine. I composed the picture to make the piece of cloth laying under the machine act as a surface for the options to lay on, while the sowing machine towers towards the camera, somewhat framing the options. PS: the shadow under machine wont be there in the final picture, I just could not resist adding it.

I did some research on old sowing machines, and it appears that all old-timey sowing machines were owned by a company called the Singer Company, which I find a bit funny for some reason. Anyway, I studied the sowing machines quite closely to get the machinery at least almost right. The way these things are constructed was far more complicated than I had expected, they are more than just a few wheels and sticks. In the end I had to simplify a few bits and pieces, not to distract from the options, after all, it is still just background.

The end result was all good in my opinion. I did not manage to make the machine tower towards the camera as much as I would have liked, though maybe that is for the better. On the other hand, the small wheels buttons and what not came out better than I had dared to hope, and I did not believe that I would be able to get the shapes so visible through the highlighting. All in all, another successfully completed task.

All GUI and no animation makes William a dull boy (but nah, it’s cool)

This week has been quite different from the previous ones. Up until today, I have worked almost entirely on designing characters and animating them. However, our programmers are now busy working on putting the animations we already have to use, and we are not that likely to add many more, if any at all. This has resulted in this week becoming devoid of animation, and instead, I have been tasked with designing parts of the GUI.

The one item that I probably found most enjoyable to make this week, was probably the decaying suit. The goal in our game is to defeat all the bugs that are feasting on your suit before  it is destroyed, while not getting yourself beat up by the bugs at the same time. We decided to have the player and suit share health pool, and so, we must make sure that the player can easily understand that.

For this, I came up with the idea to attach a picture of the suit to the health bar, showing the player how the suit decays as the health drops.

For this task I first needed a picture of a suit that I could add decay to. I produced a few sketches that I then presented to Sky, he picked a suit and gave me the green and I continued to the next stage.

I drew a more symmetric version of the suit in PS, then I went ahead to add the destruction effect. I copied the suit and started adding notches to it, I then copied that one and continued making even more drastic tears and damages with each copy, until their was barley anything left. By that time, I had 7 different versions of the suit. I felt that 7 was not a very good number of stages for the suit to be in, instead I decided to aim for 10. I added some extra pictures between the ones that had a larger difference between them.

As you might have noticed, drawing suits is not my strong side, However, I a happy with the end result. The aim was never to have a picture of a good looking suit, but rather a simple indicator of a suit. Maybe It would have been more fitting to the style if I had put less detail into the tearing, but I think it is alright.