Electrical Wires
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My name is Thea Falkenmark and I’m one of three graphic artists in group 13. Our game is the game Trowl. It’s about a magical owl mom, whom flies above a train, searching for her lost owlets. This week I have worked on a lot of artefacts. This because we had to go into crunch mode in order to get all the concept art ready for the design document. The one that I had the most trouble with was the electrical wire. The electrical wire is one of four obstacles in our game, Trowl. The actual finished artefact was not hard to do. However, when I was about to start I found several flaws in the concept. The only guidelines we got from the concept document was: “If the player gets hit by a wire he/she will stunned for a short moment, making the owl mother and the owlets vulnerable to enemy attacks”. Seeing as our game is in 2D perspective and it takes place above an old-school train, somewhere in a forest, there were no natural way for it to appear. My first thought was that it could be a wire on top of the train that broke and fell down. But in order for that to work we would have to draw wires above the entire train and that would not look good in the environment. So then I thought that it could be an electrical pole that appears at random. It could not be placed in the background even though this would be more visually pleasing. This because it would not make sense that it would affect the owl on board the train when the obstacle was behind it. If I would have put it that way, it that way there was the risk that it would blend in to the background and the player would not realize that it was an obstacle before it was too late. So I came to the conclusion that it had to be placed in the foreground. So now it was time to start drawing and my first thought on how it would look was something like this.
But after consulting my teammate she basically said that that would look like something from a nuclear plant. So I moved on to basically having a plain metal pole that was electrical. I started to think about what kind of visual feedback the player would get and figured that a halo of lightning would be the best solution. I redefined the description for the design document like this: “The electrical wire appears at random. It covers half the screen and forces the player to fly over it. If the player gets hit by a wire he/she will stunned for a short moment, making the owl mother and the owlets vulnerable to enemy attacks. The obstacle will blink and move to the left along with the train, passing the avatar and her owlets without adding any more damage whilst they are paralyzed.” I also decided that I wanted it to make two different noises, one whilst idle and one when the owls collides with it. My main problem when drawing this was the lightning bolts. I realized that it was way harder than I thought to draw them. All the lightning I drew ended up looking like Harry Potter’s scar. And we did not want it to look that plain simple. After that I tried using Photoshop lightning brushes. But that made it to realistic, and we were not going for that either. After a while I remember that the Lazy Nezumi plugin for Photoshop has a setting called noise. This allowed me to make lightning bolts that ended up somewhere in between Harry Potter and hyper realistic lightning. This is the end result.
I’m not very happy about the end result and I think I might go with the “nuclear plant” type of pole when I start to animate. But seeing as I had about one hour to this, where the most part was spent planning on how to do it, I figured that it was good enough. And after all it is only concept art.  |
