Game Development Log 1.
|
This post will be about a specific artifact in our game, Fancy Mansion. Specifically, the design-choices and drawing of the moneybag, used as an item to be picked up to increase the players overall score in the game. Fancy Mansion is a game about picking things up and increasing your own monetary value by stealing items. In order to represent a valuable items, first of all we chose iconic objects to symbolize this. The first object, the most basic design, was a bag of money. It’s easy to see where this comes from, looking at such huge comics like Donald Duck and his uncle Scrooge, there’s always a bag of money at hand. It is, in essence, a very iconic valuable.
This is what I designed first. I felt that this was very clear and well-represented what a bag of money would be in the fancy mansion. However, after discussing it with our Lead Art, Marcus, it was clear that it was flat, and needed more volume to it. It also lacked the golden touch that we had agreed to use for objects to be picked up. We discussed how to accomplish this for a while, and decided that using an “open” bag and let some coins look as if they’ve fallen out. With this decision, we decided to get rid of the dollar-sign as well, as we felt that it was no longer necessary to represent the value.
This is what we ended up creating, approved and finished for the final version of the game. Art-wise, this is complete. The coding for picking up items and using other items are still incomplete. We feel that this better represents the overall art-style of the game, it doesn’t look as flat as before and we managed to include the golden touch to indicate a valuable item. This bag has a heavier color-palette and overall more colors to begin with, making it feel more alive and approachable. This particular item is something we went over and scrapped the initial idea of, as we were unhappy with the looks it had, as well as the feeling it delivered. To accompany this object will be a standard sound-effect for picking up items, and a glow-animation when you pick it up. This is to give the player feedback for when he or she does use the pick-up key. Our coders might not have insight in the work process of our artists, but they felt happy with the improvement as well.  |
