Stick To It
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This week has been rather slow. I’ve been quite sick this week. In fact it has been one of the worse illnesses I’ve had in quite a while. As a result, it drastically effected my work hours for this week. was planning to finish the openable object for the game this week, which is a large thick branch. However due to this illness, I’ve only managed to draw different rough concept sketches. The rough sketches themselves is not enough material to write a blog about it. Therefore I will talk about a different art asset I have made between last week and this week. Last week I made a berry that would be used as a key of some sort in the game. When the moth would touch the berry, it would fall and open the openable object. The openable object is the large thick branch I mentioned earlier that I’m currently working on. It will act as a locked door so the moth would have to find the berry to unlock it. After I made the berry I immediately started working on the breakable object. The breakable object is a obstacle in which the moth would have to use a dash to break through it. When making the breakable object, I planned on making it to be a thin and fragile stick. To us, small sticks are very flimsy and honestly be difficult not to break them. If I were to pick up a small stick, I would instinctively break it without giving it a second thought. Because of this, I feel as though having a flimsy stick would indicate to the player that they can break it. Another thing to note is that moths are a quite small. This would make the moth have more trouble breaking a flimsy stick, rather than a person who could break it effortlessly. This corresponds well the the dash mechanic in the game, since the moth requires more energy to break a stick compared to a person. I first created a rough concept sketch of the breakable stick. Unlike other art assets I made in the past, I only had to make one rough sketch. It was already decided that we, team kraken, would have a fragile stick as our breakable object. Not to mention I got immediate feedback from the sketch since we were working in the same workspace. I tried to make the stick look as unstable and flimsy as possible. I really tried to portray to the player that it was an object that was meant to be broken. To do this, I made the edges of the stick be a bit jagged. This would result in it looking more unstable, since smooth lines is perceived to be more stable rather than jagged ones. I also added a large crack like feature in the middle of the stick, to give it a even bigger feeling to the player that it’s a stick that’s about to break. This would result in the player being encouraged to give the final blow.  In terms of coloring, I had a lot of trouble. I tried to give a bit of green coloring on the edges so it would look like it was rotting. This would make it seem that it’s old and seem more flimsy because of it. That was the plan at least. However, whenever I tried giving it green coloring it stood out way too much. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, since making the stick more noticeable is a good way to indicate to the player that it’s interruptible. However in this case I felt as though whenever I tried coloring it green, it barely looked like a stick anymore. The only way I found that could possibly fix this was to add a lot of shading to it to somewhat blur out some of the coloring of the stick. This in result would make the stick too dark and not indicate to the player whatsoever that it’s intractable.
 After multiple tries to make it work, I wasn’t able to make it work with the green coloring. In the end, I just made the stick have the classic brown color that trees and stick normally have. Although I wasn’t able to implement the green coloring in a good way, I still feels as though the stick came out pretty well. Due to certain indicators, such as the large crack in the middle of the stick, it’s enough for the player to know that it’s a obstacle that needs to be broken.   |
