5SD064-The making of fog shape
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Hi, now we come to the 4th blog in the blog journey and that means we are not far from completing the very first game in our Game Design study! This week we didn’t have any lecture from Game Design 2 but play-testing on Monday which gathered many valuable feedback to improve our game before the BETA. Today I want to talk about a small artifact from our game “Umibozu” —- fog shape. “Fog shape” might sounds bit wired, it is actually “fog shape for all the assets in the fog”. Game Umibozu is sat on a foggy ocean scene, the player plays as a boat in the middle of sea and tries to avoid attacks from the enemies. The enemies and power-up boxes are both covered by “fog shapes” as a little trick in game, the player can’t really tell what it is underneath until he or she get closer to the fog shapes and recognizes them by a slight difference of the shape. To start the fog shape, there are two things I need to think about, the shape and the color. I wanted to make the fog shape as natural as possible so it does not stand out too much from the big flowing fog in game. But at the same time, the objects needed to be covered (shrimp, squid, shark, boxes) that has different shapes were going to share the same fog shape, otherwise it would recognizable for the player to tell what is under the fog. At that time I couldn’t think any other shape than round shape to fulfill with these needs. And for color I went for black as the color scheme of our game is pretty much black and grey, also as black color has good intensity to cover other colors.
These are the first version of the fog shape I made for the artifacts, and I sent to the programmer to implant. However, he thought it would be better if the color was more similar to the background. So I took the screen shot from our game and used color pick tool to have the color of the background. Then I redrew the fog shape based on the color picked from background as the following pictures shown.
I also changed the shape to ellipse as it looked dull as round shape before. But these two failed to cover the objects due to the transparency of my brush was too high. So I adjusted it and made new one again.
Finally we implanted this fog shape to the game and used it for playing test day. Even I tried to be close to the background color, it turned out it’s much darker than the background in the actual game playing. We also got feedback from teacher Mika that she also thought the fog shape looked unnatural compared with the big flowing fog.
In the end, another artist Marie from my group helped to adjust the lightness based on my fog shape which made it blended with other fog much better. This will be the final look of the fog shape we are going to use at BETA presentation on Monday. Sometimes you think it’s just a small thing, but it takes much longer time. This is not a bad thing as long as I gained my experience and the outcome is satisfying, I am happy:)  |
