In this week, I made some miscellaneous stuff before the beta-presentation tomorrow morning. We also had a artwork presentation for our game in wednesday, during the 2D-course where the class and the 2D-teachers watched every teams' works of arts. The teachers asked if any team needed art-support and extra tutoring.
The teachers liked our work, especially the mole, which they found very cute. They also appreciated the mole animations, though we did not show all of them, just the death- and the walking animation (which the Game Designer made, not me).
During the beginning of the week, I made an another death animation for the mole, when he drowns in the water. This, however, will not be implemented in time before the presentation, but maybe later. I used the same sprites like in the original animation, but I turned them horizontal. Then I draw three additional sprites when the mole gets water inside his mouth. I used free-transforming to get his paws to hold against his mouth, and some extre coloring for his eyes, mouth and tongue. I colored it blue to make it look wet.
This is how he turned out.
Later, I also made a tutorial screen for the game, presenting the controls, the player and the enemy character, and the objects that the player must collect. This was done quite quickly. I began with taking a wooden background pic from Google, changed some of its colors and turned it horizontal. Then I pasted much of our artwork, using two GUI-pics to add some grass. Then I took a pic of a black keyboard from Google and cut out some of its keys, such as the arrow keys, enter, shift and space.
This is the result
Now that I'm completely done with the mole and its animations, I have virtually nothing to do in the graphics department, at least before the beta presentation. Except for polishing some of the animation frames, or maybe add additional frames to speed up their flow.
However, the team gave me the task of finding a suitable background music for the game, which must be licensed free. So I spent two days with finding various tracks, and found one that was quite good. I uploaded it to our Drive, and I hope the team will implement it before the presentation.
The presentation will be just like the alpha-presentation back in February, though it will focus more on the game-presentation rather than the PowerPoint-presentation. The representative for the team will talk about three good and three bad things that the team experienced thoughout the production, After that, he will present the game and talk about various things that has been changed and implemented after the alpha-version. The crowd and the teachers will then ask questions, tell their impressions and come up with useful suggestions on how to improve the game.
I think that this presentation will go much, MUCH, better than the alpha, because we didn't implement any artwork whatsoever because the progammers failed to implement isometric graphics. So we were as good as butchered by every single person except of Team 13. But now, me and the team are stronger and more confident than ever before. Most of the Top-Down artwork has been successfully implemented, and the game now has a scoring system, a death screen and animations. However, it does not have sound or a projectile yet, but I hope that the programmers will have them coded and implemented just before the presentation.
Which us good luck, and tare piano!
Hello there!
ReplyDeleteYou have written a very informative post about what you have done and I think I know how you have thought when you did it. I think you have succeeded in making the mole. It is very cute as it is now and I think that you as a player will get a kind of bond to the mole and don't
want it to get hurt by the gardener.
However I think that you should try and illustrate the drowning mole in some other way than what you have now. At the moment I think it more looks like it is eating something that it does not like and then gets poisoned from it. Maybe an animation where the mole kind of disappears in a puddle of blue water would be more illustrative of what happens to the mole rather than it just turning over on its back.
But if you want to keep the turning over animation maybe change the tongue at least. I think it would look better if you enlarged the moles cheeks to try and illustrate that his mouth is full of water instead of change the colour of his tongue to blue. That looks more like he has been poisoned.
The tutorial screen looks nice and informing and the only thing I can say about it is that it looks good. If you want you could change the keyboard keys so that they match the rest of your art style but other than that I think it looks good.
Your game has developed a LOT since the alpha presentation and I look forward to play the finished result at the end of next week.