The Critter Communicates
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At the time of writing this, our game is 6 weeks into production. We’re still mostly using placeholders, the assets that have been put into the game are not textured and we are still lacking anything even closely related to animations. It’s hard to imagine that in a little over two weeks Critter Flux has to be complete and ready to be presented at the Gotland Game Conference. And here we were, thinking we’d be able to avoid crunching… However, I wasn’t planning to discuss the current state of panic in my team, in fact I was thinking I’d write a little about my work with the 2D icons that are used to communicate how our critter is feeling to the player. According to our styleguide the graphical style of our game is low poly and heavily stylized. I wanted the 2D art to be consistent with the 3D models in the game, our models had sharp edges with clearly visible polygonic shapes. I consulted google for inspiration and looked up modern low-poly art, however I did have a good idea of what I wanted my art to look like before the research. I enjoyed drawing them, to give the icons life I applied some shade to the images by using darker colours in the polygons at the bottom, shifting into brighter colours near the top. I also used strong black lineart along the polygon edges to further enhance the sharp and edgy feel. It was important the icons were more like simple symbols, not too descriptive or detailed as that might be interpreted as some kind of speech or communication from a greater intellect than our little monster possesses. Keeping it simple presented me with a few challenges however, how do you express tiredness or anger with a universal symbol anyone could understand? I had to narrow it down and allowed myself to focus on a western perspective of symbols, after all, we’re not very likely to be honored with an audience from other parts of the world than our own little corner.
Above and below you can see two versions of anger and two versions of sleepiness, I wasn’t too happy with the ones on the left and re-worked them into the new versions on the right side. I still wasn’t too happy with having to resort to using “Z” as a sign for sleep, it did go against my idea of not being too detailed or communicative but I suppose sometimes one needs to compromise for what is actually a clear message to the player.
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