Thought bubbles
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These are four thought bubbles for our game Magic writers. They will be shown in the bottom of the screen while in game. The items which our wizard is able to throw are shown in the thought bubbles along with the name of the item. The items available are categorized by four different properties; Dead, Alive, Hot and Cold. The different sorts of items deal extra damage to certain enemies. For example a hot item takes extra damage to an ice monster and so on. Even though you could see on the item that you are summoning which category it belongs to, we felt that we wanted to make it even more clear to the player in order for them to be able to make a fast strategic decision. First we were thinking about having the same thought bubble for every item and a small icon representing which category it belongs to but we felt it was still a little distracting to be forced to look down at the bottom of the screen. Therefore we decided to have the bubbles have different backgrounds since it felt more intuitive and easier to spot with less focus. When making the bubbles my main focus was to make it clear which category it represented. I experimented with different ideas, like just having a texture with different colors, but in the end i decided to give them clear differences in color but also patterns that are easy to distinguish from each other and relate to the category, for example leaves for alive and sharp patterns for cold. In relation to the items I used quite desaturated colors for the backgrounds to make the items that go into the bubble pop out from the background. In an attempt to make them work with our graphical theme I kept the patterns simple and cartoony, trying not the render them to realistically. To make the patterns I used a standard chalk brush in photoshop and some layer styles to create different textures. I used reference images for some of the images, like burning coal and icy lakes. When we implemented these into the game I got some feedback on the designs. Even though I used desaturated colors for the backgrounds, there was still the problem with destinguishing the item from the background. This will be fixed by making the backgrounds lighter, appearing lower in opacity. I am also not totally satisfied with all of the bubbles. The biggest issue is that I feel that the cold background (top left corner) does not fully represent ice as i had planned.  |
