Letters
Hello and welcome to another one of my blog posts! Today I will write about an art task once more.This week I have taken some art assets to work on. One of them is the main menu of our game. To be more precise I have been designing the game’s title – Aetherial, and also choosing font and color for main menu words (like “Start the hunt”, “Exit”, etc. – See picture 1) I have always liked working with letters, or names and titles to be more exact. Twisting them for their purpose and meaning. (For example band or song names) So I thought I’d be fun and exciting to once more create interesting letters. This time for our game title. I did have to contain myself from not overdoing it and not letting my imagination go too wild, so the player can actually easily read the title…. The QA for this task, one of the artists, helped me with just that. Apart from the title and menu letters, the whole set up of the menu (see picture 1) with the whale boss in the background, was my idea. I showed a prototype of the idea via PowerPoint to my team members and they seemed to like it. The whale will float in from the right side of the screen, and when it stops, the menu letters will appear. The harpoon is there, because, well, (spoiler) the player is meant to use the harpoon to attack and tear off whale’s armor plates.  To go back to the title, which is the main struggle of the task… For every letter, I made a new layer, so I could transform each one of them the way I wanted and move them around separately. Starting with letter “A”, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it or how it was going to look, so I kind of followed my hand, making smooth curves… Which resulted in the letter you see in picture 1. The ‘A’ became “floaty” which suits the environment, where everything is floating/flying. The color blue has a reason of course, it is the color nuance of one of the floating islands made by one of the artists. Letter E. My favorite. I wanted to include something from the gameplay, and I noticed that one of the enemies, the manta-angler creature’s head is kind of shaped like an E, and that’s the story of how it became the letter E. The coloring is almost identical to the creature’s original colors. Some of the details, like teeth, are missing, as it had to look like the letter ‘e’, so details had to be excluded. T… This is one of the letters that had to change. I made it look more like a T in the final version, and less edgy (see picture 2)… The yellow –blue color combination also suits the environment and is alike the player avatar’s colors which are light blue and yellow-orange nuance. H… It didn’t turn out as cool as I wanted it to be. Like with A, I just followed the flow and hoped for the best. In the end, at least it looks like an H, which is easy to read. As for the color, it is of another floating island’s color nuance, which fits with the blue color of letter A and partially T. R. Another letter that had to change. The first version was a panick-faced R with one of its feet inside E’s mouth… I knew it would be too much, so I didn’t mind changing its design to what it is now. Its design is nothing special, but sometimes a simple and readable design is needed. I… I had to change letter “I” as well as R and T. Initially, it was sitting on R’s “face” and looked like a simple ‘I’ with a mermaid tail. ‘I’ is one of the letters that is tough to modify and design, so I am quite happy with how it turned out, with its cute head and pointy bottom, looking almost like an island, floating. L…L wasn’t very easy to design either. It does look pregnant, but I didn’t want it to look like a plain L, so I added some curves here and there. The bottom line resembles a slug. One of our enemies is a sky slug, so it makes me at least think about the sky slug.  Last part, the background “cloud” behind the title… a tricky part that I had to redraw a few times from QA point of view. It is hard to know what fits with the title, so to add a cloudy look was initially a thought. I am glad that one of the artists is QA’ing my tasks for another point of view, and since he is studying graphics in his minor, his input is important and knowledgeable. Note that picture 1 is a prototype. The placing of Islands and other attributes might be different in the final version of the menu. My task is solely to create the Title and decide upon a font and color for Menu words.  |