Magic Writer – Blogpost 2

So this week we implemented our power ups into our game, well, one of them at least, we got to start somewhere. So my assignment for this week was to draw the icons for these power ups. Yes I know that my primary role in the group is to be the Lead Sound, but that does not exclude me from all the other works that needs to be done. And even though we only implemented one power up in our game this week, we figured that I might as well draw the icons for all of them instead of just that one. The power ups are “Piercing”, “Bounce”, and “Freeze”.

I think the power ups are self explanatory but I will go through them just to be on the safe side.

“Piercing”

The Piercing power up causes the next projectile thrown by the player to penetrate all the monsters in the same lane.

“Bounce”

The Bounce power up causes the next projectile thrown by the player to bounce on all the monsters on the screen.

“Freeze”

And lastly, the Freeze power up, this power up instantly freezes all the monsters in their place making them unable to move few seconds.

Balance changes can and will most certainly be made.

When tasked with this assignment I was told that they needed to be in the size of 256×256 pixels, but as with almost everything else at this point in our game, changes to their sizes can be made. Anyhow, since these pictures were kind of small, I figured that the most important thing would to make them simple in design so that it would be clear to the player on that they did just by a quick look. So for the first picture, I quickly realized that nothing says penetrating/piercing more than a huge hole in the torso that you can see thru and a big rock behind the monster. To give the picture a bit more feeling I decided to draw a surprised look on the monsters face. Because, who would not be surprised if they suddenly had a big hole thru them? For the second picture, same thing there, clearest way of drawing “bouncing” was to have some kind of object bouncing on the monsters, in this case the same rock that I had used in the “piercing” picture. The lines and stars on the monsters heads suit no purpose except for visual effect.
I had to give the “freezing” power up some extra thought, did it freeze the lake slowing the monsters down, or would it freeze the monsters in their place? By looking in our concept document I found out that the purpose of this power up was to temporarily stun all the monster. So now I had to figure out how to draw it in a manner that the picture would be clear of its effects. My first thought was to draw an ice block on the water and giving the monster a cold blue color, realizing that this was not clear enough, I scraped that idea. Just giving the monster a cold blue color would not show that it was frozen in place, I had to take it a bit further, So I decided to encase the whole monster in a block of ice.

Lastly, I also had to draw some kind of life bar for the player. We pointed out that the monsters attacks the beach where the wizard is relaxing. Since it is not the player or the wizard that gets hurt we figured that we might have some other kind of object instead of hearts that could represent the players life. We came up with the idea of having sun chairs instead of hearts, you know, nothing says a beach more than sun chairs! No but really, the wizard really likes his/her sun chairs and can’t relax on the beach without them, so by defending the beach the wizard defends his/her sun chairs. And Voila! I had painted some sun chairs!

That’s that for this week, see you again in 7 days!

About Anders Schultheiss

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