Blog week 4 – Branches
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This week has been interesting… We’ve worked to make up for lost time and has as an result put in lots of things into the game on a short amount of time. My biggest problem starting this text was to choose wich one of the artefacts I should document, and while it’s not a big animation or anything this time, it has more to do with the process of its creation rather than how long it took to draw or animate. And it all starts… with a branch. The branch is one of the hazards of our game, one that is quite simple in the way that it works: If you don’t get out of the way when it’s coming towards you, you’ll get smacked. Now, yes, that sounds incredibly simple to make and maybe I made it harder than it had to be but either way there were some redesigns of it during the game-making process. So… I didn’t start the work on it, there was another graphic artist on our that took on the work of making all of the hazards. He made a branch that worked, but I thought it looked a little flat. Unfortunately he was busy with making and animating our predatory bird-enemies, so I asked if it was ok that I picked up the artefact instead, wich he was ok with.
It was a task that looked deceptively simple, but alot of problems started popping up. As our game is purely from a profile-perspective, logically the branch should grow out of the trees towards the camera. Drawing it like that while still making sure that the branch is very visible, since it moves pretty fast across the screen, and that it looks like something that the player would want to avoid, was not easy. On the picture below you can see some of the stages that the branch went through. The first one simply didn’t stand out enough for the player to see clearly and also know to avoid. By putting purple leaves on it, it became harder to miss, but also stood out like a sore thumb against the rest of the tree and still didn’t look dangerous enough.
Design 3 through 5 was an evolution of what I thought would be the final design, as it stood out more and also looked very threatening with its spikes. As we playtested we noticed though that it still wasn’t enough. Some of the fault lied with the speed of the trees, wich will probably be tweaked, but as I started working on another design I thought: If the branch is too hard to see on the tree, what if… We just make an entirely new tree to go with it?
My thoughtprocess while working on this was now mostly one out of gameplay-perspective as it does stand out quite a bit from the other trees. But not only did I make a tree that gave you the signal of danger, but I also made the branch jut out much more than in the other designs. And by giving the rest of a tree a more silouetted look I wanted to make sure that the players eyes were drawn to the highlighted and pointy thing that are sticking out of it. Unfortunately we haven’t playtested it yet, but I hope that it will finally be time to put this branch to rest.  |
