Week 8 – Pause Screen
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So we are closing up on the Beta presentation and during this week I have been working on the pause screen for our game Magic Writer. In our group we have divided our graphical tasks in three stages to get a more solid and uniform art style. One person do a sketch, another one puts colour and shading on it and the third one finishes it up and gives it clean lines. We have been trying this method out for a few weeks now and it does help the art look more coherent but it is also difficult to balance. I am in charge for the colouring part which makes me very depending on the other graphics in my group. If they one week haven’t finished a task, I can’t do my tasks either. So for the pause screen I was supposed to only do the colouring part, but instead ended up doing all three stages since I couldn’t continue with any of my other tasks. When starting to sketch up the idea for how the pause screen could look and work I had already talked and seen our artist and producers take on it and since she is the one doing the sketching part in most cases, I tried using ideas and some art that she had come up with before. The important part when designing the pause screen was that it had to cover most of the beach, and foremost the thinking bubbles and the three items that the player can choose to type in, this to avoid the player from cheating. This was solved but the pause screen rolling up from the bottom of the screen covering most of the beach. I used the same buttons as in the start screen and made some quick sketches of how they could be placed. I tried to keep a lot of the wooden planks and poles that we have in our start menu but still tried to make it quite simple since the game itself is quite colourful I wanted to make the pause screen clear and easy to understand. While doing this task I was discussing and brainstorming with our game designer who came up with the idea of having flowers by the buttons. We have earlier been given feedback that our buttons in our menus are too vague, that it is difficult to understand what button you are on and by adding flowers growing around the signs, that blooms out when on that button would, hopefully, add more clarity to that. Here are two sketches and the final result:
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