Shoot ’em up Project 14-02-13

Last week was a busy week, as usual. One of our group members left us, leaving me and Anita as the only graphical artists. He was also our groups’ Lead Designer, so we had to decide on who would take over that role. It is a bit sad to have lost a group member, especially since we all get along very well and enjoy working together. But we have gotten back on track rather quickly – there is no time to be idle. I’ve taken over his graphical tasks, thus getting more jobs to do. Apart from designing and animating the Big Monster (which I’ll post more updates on later), and the smaller monsters and critters, I’m now also tasked with the environmental designs, such as walls and floor textures.

I began working on the walls straight away when I got the task. I chose to change the very few sketch versions that had already been made, only keeping the basic colour scheme. There hadn’t been very much done at all with the walls, so I practically started from scratch. One of the first things I did was to look up brick walls and dirt walls, and quickly research their looks, textures, colours and such to get an idea of what I was doing. We want the game to feel like you’re stuck and lost in a nightmare-esque 19^th–20^th century based basement or cellar. We had already decided on having old brick and dirt walls, with a dark dirt floor. I was given a small image from Per, one of our groups’ programmers, on what shapes they wanted the walls to have, with corners and such. When I had finished a couple of brick walls and a few dirt walls I sat down together with Anita and created a simple mock-up for the game, as we felt that the colour scheme had to be corrected and decided upon. We tweaked and changed the colours in the mock-up, whilst constantly checking colour references of old, spooky cellars and games that handled the same kind of environment or feeling as the one we want to achieve. When we had decided upon a colour palette I went back to all of the walls and edited their colours as to match the new colour scheme.

The images below are not sprite sheets, but rather tile-tests done by me in order to make sure that the textures tile as they should. There are some things that I need to fix with the brick-walls, but overall I’m happy with the result. They’re seen from a top-down perspective, as our game will be a top-down game.

When I finished the walls I made a wall-crack overlay animation, inspired by the ones seen in Minecraft when you destroy blocks. The wall-cracks are to be used when the player is digging through walls, in order to show the player that the wall is breaking when they hit it.

We had our Pre-Alpha meeting today, and it feels great. Time for Alpha next week!

Have a great week and weekend!

MPh out.