Game Design 2: Bubble Sprite
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Two weeks ago, I worked on creating a bubble sprite to be able to create a particle trail in Unity. Which makes it so that our protagonist Stephen leaves a trail of bubbles after him as he moves around inside of the screen, to give more of a life feel to the tank. Like with most things on working with this project, I had no previous experience in making a bubble sprite, or even drawing a bubble. Which led me to seek inspiration online, and I shortly realized that there were so many ways I could draw and tons of techniques that I could use to make a bubble sprite. I began by drawing a simple round circle, in a light shade of blue/green, in addition to adding two simple white dots in the top right corner. Although it did not end up looking quite right, so I began to “stretch” out and expand one of the bubbles while still following the edges of the bubble, to make it seem like light was reflecting on the bubble surface. Which seemed to fix the problem, and made a big difference, in addition to resembling a more realistic bubble. Even though I wanted to have more of a cartoon like feel, it still worked since I made sure throughout making this game that the design assets kept a hint of realism, to not make the game look too cartoonish and too directed towards children aesthetically wise when the target audience includes both children and teenagers. To finalize this bubble sprite, I wanted to go in and make it more natural and detailed, by shading around the edges lightly in white. The further away I got from the edges and the closer I got to the middle of the bubble, the shading would get lighter and would start to fade away.
Ultimately, I thought it was going to be easier than I originally thought and even though my explanation sounds quite simple, I struggled a bit with the shading. Often, I ended up putting too much pressure on the pen and the shading became more intense in places where it was supposed to be the opposite. In that sense, it was more of an annoyance than a struggle, but it worked out and the bubble sprite ended up exactly how I imagined, in addition to working perfectly in the game, both as a particle trail and indicator around the power ups.
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