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Over the course of taking the concept of Day of the Piñata and making it into a full game I have been working on the many objects the game needs. The player will play as a piñata raging through the streets on Dia de los Muertos, to wreck the festive decorations. These objects are the ones the piñata will stomp down.
To begin the process of every object I do a few quick thumbnails in no more than three shades. I do this to single out the idea best fitting for its purpose. It helps me to see what has an interesting shape and what doesn’t, it also forces me to think of more and hopefully better designs before I pour a lot of work into something that might not work out. When I have made a few I single out the one I think works best. For example I like the in the middle on the lowest row best, but the one to its left looks more like an altar that could be found on Dia de los Muertos. It also carries candy and other goodies, which made sense for it to do in the game because the player will be rewarded with candy for the piñata to fill it up every time she/he destroys one of the objects. 
Therefore I picked the last mentioned design over the one that appealed most to me personally. This is an early stage to kill your darlings. This is getting rid of ideas I like but might not have a place in the final product and doesn’t contribute to the player’s experience.
After the thumbnail process I redo the design to fit in the game. I do this on a piece of the background that I have access to, or something that has the same color scheme, to better match it in the object.
Following our design document I use saturated colors and celebratory decorations, most objects were the decoration itself, such as the balloons. All objects are made with many layers in the Photoshop file and are kept this way to allow change in color or form later, letting me or anyone else in the team add more variation if need be. This is all to save the time it would take to redo all the different objects from scratch.
I have a pallet of a few colors that I try to reuse as much as possible. It is the color of the flowers that you see on the parade float down below, the red/orange, yellow, purple, blue and green. I use these to give the objects a unified look and feel.
 This goes for other factors as well, such as the form of the flowers themselves. I use them in the float, altar and flower pots and they all have a specific shape for each color. The yellow ones have very sharp angles with thinner leaves than the orange ones, while the blue ones are round and hang in bundles with smaller flowers at their tip. This gives the flowers and objects a consistency they wouldn’t have if I made different flowers in different colors for each object.
Lastly I remove the background of each object and make sure to cut it down to the right size for our game. I save it and upload it to Source Tree, the program we use to share files with the programmers of the game. If I decide to change the look or color of an object I can do that and as long as I upload the new file in the same size, with the same name as the first one, the new sprite will replace the old in the game, without any extra work for our programmers.
This leaves happier faces all around 
About Matilda Nagy
2014 Graphics
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