Iterating the cannon

Hi, I am Jonatan Ersarp from Group 17. I am the Lead Designer on our rendition of the project ”Planet Suburbia”.

Today I am going to blog about the avatar of the game. In our game the player takes control over a massive anti aircraft cannon, in order to defend the earth against an alien invasion. For my first concept art I took inspiration from telescopes, since the game takes place in space. The sheer size of these telescopes fascinates me and fits quite well since I wanted to create a massive cannon. 

For my second part of inspiration, I looked back to an old hobby of mine. Skateboarding. ”Would it not be cool to have an AA cannon riding along a skateboard halfpipe?” Sounds wacky, but it could work.
The result looked like this:

A nuclear powered, skateboarding doubled barreled AA cannon. I made some other concepts, but this was the one my group liked the most. However, they did not agree on it being nuclear powered, or having two barrels. The latter I understand since it directly effects gameplay, two projectiles would need to be shot, or one projectile alternating from each barrel. The team wanted something more artillery looking, thus my first iteration started.
I replaced the barrels with a typical tank looking barrel. The animation in place for this cannon also shows how the whole barrel repels backwards once firing. I personally think it gives the cannon a heavier feel. With the correct amount of camera shake and audio feedback we will be able to simulate a heavy cannon. I completely removed nuclear power and honestly kind of forgot about the whole ”power” part of the cannon.
The team demanded some sort of visual feedback on what the player was firing, so I added bandoilers attached to the main platform of the cannon. They have windows where you can see the ammo, when firing the cannon these would be animated to really give life to the cannon. The team was satisfied! However, after a week the team and I had a discussion on perspective, camera angles and what not. We were all rather confused and the day after we had our meeting with Marcus, he too was confused. After the meeting I decided to simplify the cannon. The decision was made that the cannon would be attached to the HUD, to give the player a feeling of being inside of a cockpit. Previous cannons were meant to be placed on the surface of our ingame planet. This decision lead to a new iteration of my cannon.

Lack of time and other work caught me off guard, so I did not put down much work on this iteration. Basically, I just removed the bandoilers, ammo boxes and the skateboard halfpipe. This concept worked well when looking at gameplay but I did not realise I broke the entire art style we had established with other assets ingame. A new iteration was needed, and I took my time to make this new one work.

This is my final version of the cannon. I added some details to make it less flat, made it more dark and also added the oh so important black outlines. What I failed to remember with my previous iteration, was that all other art assets had black outlines. I’m quite pleased with this version of the cannon and as it looks now it is the one that will be seen in the final product.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

// Jonatan Ersarp

About Jonatan Ersarp

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