Game Development – 1st Blog Entry
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Hello, and welcome! My name is Peo Björn Johansson, and I’m currently studying Game Design and Graphics at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. In this series of blog entries I will write about the progress of the group project that I’m currently participating in. The group consists of a team of six people, half of which are coders and half of which are artists. I am one of the artists. We are developing a video game in the so called “space shooter” genre. It is based on a concept that another team of students designed previously. All team developed their own concepts, and the teams could pick whatever concept they desired to produce as an actual game except for their own. The concept that our team picked was “Potato Pirates of the Prohibition” and is about an air plane pilot who is smuggling potatoes for use in brewing alcohol. The game takes place in the United States and during the later years of the prohibition era, in the 1930’s. We are currently in the third week of development on the game, and in this blog entry I will showcase some of the work that I did during the last week of development. Since the game takes place during the time period that it does, it made sense to us as a team that the general feel of the game would reflect this. For example, the background music in the game will sound similar to the style of music that was popular during the 1930’s. And we also decided that the game should have an art style inspired by the contemporary drawn cartoons of the era.
During the last week of development, one of the artifacts that I worked on was a number of smoke puff sprites (pictured above), for use in effect animations. For example, they would be used when the avatar air plane or when enemy planes are hit by projectiles. This is to accentuate the impact, to give it a bit more “oumph”, so to speak.
During the process of making these smoke puff sprites, I drew inspiration from cartoon depictions of smoke puffs and clouds in general, and the smoke effects from the game “The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker” (pictured above) in particular. The smoke effect from this game stood out to me in the way it utilized small 2D sprites in a way to create one coherent effect. My goal while making these smoke puff sprites was that they would share a common, simplistic look, while still being different enough o not look repetitive. They should be able to be interchanged with each other, to be mixed and matched in various animations as a visual effect in the game. As they’ve yet to be implemented in the actual game engine, I cannot say how well they would work in the finished product. But I can say that judging from the goals I set out for myself, I am satisfied with my work.  |
