Fourth week – Dangerous kids (Day of the Piñata)
|
I am now four weeks into a ten week project of creating the game Day of the Piñata. My team and I over took the concept document for this game from another team and our task is now simple; make the game as fantastic as it was first intended. For this game you play as a piñata come to life, as it is possessed by a vengeful spirit who passed through to our world on the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos. Coming into this new papier-maché body the spirit demands to avenge all piñatas ever smashed through the ages, by smashing up the festival in return. The color of the festival Dia de los Muertos and its themes will permeate the whole of this game and is the base of inspiration for my fellow artists and me. Up to this point I have been working on one of the enemies, among other things, keeping this theme in mind. The enemies in this game are kids, hungry for the sugary innards of a piñata. There are also birds and a parade of grown-ups to watch out for, but it was decided we needed the kids first and foremost. I started out by deciding the basic proportions and body stature of the children. These enemies, needed to read easily and I made a few sketches before settling on the one below. To quickly show that this is a child I made the head a lot larger in proportion to the body, almost one third of it, than what reality allows. I needed to make a few concepts based on this that would work well together as well as with the background. I knew these would be changed to try a lot of different concepts later. This is because these concepts will be used to make kids in groups to hunt the piñata. Based on this I made all clothes in two parts: top and bottom. This way I can pick and choose which to combine and get different results without extra work. I also made the base of the clothes in grayscale so I could easily switch the color of the clothes and get different results. I went traditional in terms of style for the festive atmoshere, where children are likely dressed up for the occasion, and made a couple of face paints to go with the theme. If there is time I will concept more of these later, but for now it will do simply to be able to switch color in the design. The player will pay more attention to the colors than the actual patterns when playing. In my photoshop file I keep the concepts on the background Erik Starander is currently making for this game, so it will be easier to make out what colors to use in the final version of the kids. These will work as modifiable concepts for later and since I keep everything in different layers it will be easy to make any change and experiment with color later on in the project.  |
