Week 6 – Chilling out in the pause menu

Hello! This week, the last week of our game project, I have been tasked with iterating the paus screen for our game. The reason we needed a new one was because weren’t pleased with the old one. I chose this task because I was the one who made the original one, so I  guess I had some experience, I also have been the one making most of the GUI and HUD in our game.

So let’s start off.
In the beginning we had planned on a total remake of this menu, so I sat down and made a lot of thumbnails for it. When we chose on of them I estimated the time to make this take about 12 hours, it was going to be the player avatar plane that had landed and footsteps leading into a bar, that would be pretty neat. But since 12 hours is a lot of time, and we had a design document that needed some (a lot) of re-writing we chose to make it much easier.

So the plan was to take the last pause menu, add a typewriter that another graphics monkey made, remove some of the old objects and add some new ones.

Now, starting of, adding the typewriter, not a problem. Adding some buttons? Not a problem! Removing old objects? Not a problem! Painting a new object? Very tedious! The new object I added was a better booze bottle, so I took inspiration from old time alcoholic whiskey beverages, I then added a bottle I liked to my photoshop file and used it as a template. So painting over it was not the tedious part, the tedious part was making the glass look like actual glass. These are some methods I tried to make it look more glass like: Making it see-through, painting white lines on the corners like it reflected some light, making it less see-through where there is only one visible layer of glass (where the bottle opening is). This any of this work? Probably! Am I happy with the result? No, not really. I can’t put my finger on it but I am just not pleased with the result, maybe I am missing some outlines.

Anyhow, I couldn’t loiter and stay continue working on this asset for as long as I wished for or until I was happy with it, because I had to get started with the design document. So I left it as it was, that will do, it is at least better than then its predecessor.

This was the only asset I have done this week, otherwise I have been writing the design document. So it has been a chill week. Looking back on the entire project I feel like I’ve come a long way and this has been a wonderfull experience. Now I can’t wait for the theme park to start, but before that I’m gonna take a paus and reflect on some work.

Thank you, that is all! – Sakarias ‘Rostfritt’ Ståhl

About Sakarias Ståhl

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