Post #3 – Crosshair

This week marked an important week for my team and I. We had an important deadline which was alpha. Alpha meant that the game had to be playable and include basic functionality. Luckily to make a functioning game there was not so much stress on the graphics students as there was for the programmers and game designers as basic functionality did not depend on working animations. Nonetheless we still had work I aimed to complete.

I decided that for the alpha I would focus on implementing a GUI. While my graphics partner Elin took most of the workload I thought it would be a good idea to replace the mouse with a decent cross hair. As always I set about doing research and looking up different cross hairs from various games such as Call of Duty. One game that had given me a plethora of ideas was Overwatch with their unique and various types of cross hairs they had to offer. In the end I turned to one of my favorites, Counter Strike Global Offensive for my main source of inspiration.

I decided to skip the concept drawing portion of usual work and dived right into making it in Photoshop. Using the line tool I was able to draw a simplistic cross hair style that is found commonly in most games. I also choose to include a dot in the middle of the cross hair lines as a reference to the player that it was the center point. This would allow for easier aim. However when testing it I realized nobody would be able to discern it from the colorful background we had in our game. The lines just weren’t thick enough. I pondered of a way to solve this issue and resolved it by adding in an outer ring and painting it a bright red.

Crosshair.png
Finished with the cross hair I had Baloo our programmer exchange the in game mouse for the cross hair and the result was fantastic, just one problem. The cross hair was far too thin and many players play testing our game complained of the hard visual it had. I solved this issue by taking the cross hair and making it thicker on all aspects. The red I used also seemed to assist the cross hair into fading into the background, but we wanted it to stick out so I decided I would make a yellow one as well as a replacement should the thicker cross hair not be adequate enough.thickercrosshairYELLOW.png

About Felipe Kandek

2016 Graphics