BGP (Scrap Pirates) – Week 7 & 8
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The two final weeks of the project was pretty hectic, so I will write a post about both weeks now instead. Week 7 marked the Beta, which went well and we got a lot of positive feedback from the playtesters. The game demo felt well-balanced so we decided to dedicate the two final weeks to final fixes and tweaking, and implement what hadn’t been implemented yet such as the opening cutscene and main menu. Since we felt satisfied with the level design for the demo, I spent the two final weeks working on menu graphics (both pause and main menu), fixing a placeholder graphic I had done earlier and creating the main menu animations.
(Main Menu and Pause Menu buttons, the light coloured ones in the left row are the version that is used when a button is selected.) The opening cutscene to the game shows the two player characters encountering the abandoned terraforming vessel in space and boarding it with their ship. When the team discussed the main menu design, we decided to link the main menu to the cutscene by showing the player character’s ship travelling around space. I created the first tests for the main menu in Unity, but unfortunately I had a newer version of the engine (which I hadn’t realized since I had worked very little in Unity on my own computer) so I couldn’t export the animations or anything from my version to the other members of the team. Upgrading the other team members’ version of Unity felt like a big risk to take this far into the production, so I recreated the main menu in After Effects and made it as a cutscene instead. I didn’t have that much experience of working in After Effects before this but it was a lot easier than I thought and recreating it went rather smooth. I could also time the ship animations that I did for the main menu to the music that we had, which added some comical touches to it such as the ship colliding with the game logo just as a noise was heard in the music. It ended up being a rather big file in the end though, so that was a disadvantage with the video version of the menu.
(Unity version and After Effects screenshots. Except the ship and the game logo, I created the graphics for the main menu. Lead Artist Christoffer Svensson made the ship and the game logo was a collaboration between him and the producer Jenny Grip) But that was pretty much what I did during the final weeks of the project. I helped out with playtesting and some things here and there, but I mainly focused on the main menu and the menu graphics. I’ve learnt a lot of things from this project, especially when it comes to level design, and even though it would have been nice to have had some more time to work on the game before GGC, it feels like we managed to create a really good demo of the game. I was rather unsure on how we would do the level design at the beginning of the project but it all turned out well in the end. Well, I don’t have that much more to say about the project. Thanks for reading!  |
