Week 6 into the project

For this week’s blog post I have chosen the subject of game over screens. In the game that we are making, there will be two different ways to die, therefor also two different illustrations of the fail states. On the one hand there is the sleep fail, and on the other there is the heart attack, an obvious fail of course.

The images are in their first stage of iteration right now, I’m not certain if I will keep them this way. So I’m really grateful for some constructive feedback!

The biggest challenge with both of these images was constructing expressive poses for the main character, poses that would convey the correct message clearly in a few seconds, because that’s how long the player will be looking at it.

Working with the sketches of different poses really took me back to the previous 2D course and the basics of drawing, which worked as a great recap for that. I also thought a lot about what it says in “Drawn to life” about capturing the first impression of the feeling or expression you have in mind. So I did just that, I tried to capture the first image I had of an old man falling asleep in the middle of the street and what a sort of stereotypical heart attack would look like.

I have been thinking about the colors and how they should differ between the two images, so for the sleep-fail I wanted a softer and calmer setting that went along with the characters expression of peaceful sleep. When it came to the heart attack, I wanted to load the image with a lot of red and complimentary colors, I wanted the image to just scream high blood pressure!

My main concern is that I spent all my effort on constructing the pose, and then sort of just threw together the background like a quick afterthought. Another less serious concern is that I’ve made the main character look a lot like Albert Einstein, haha! However that might be a good thing, it could make him easier to recognize and relate to…

I made the sleep-fail screen at the beginning of the week before the color study day with Felicia, and the I did not reflect so much about incorporating the color of the background in to the shading of the character. In the heart attack image I at least had it in mind when picking color for the shades, so I hope that is something that comes across to the viewer.

Hopefully this has been an interesting read! That will be all for this week.      

The version below was the work of a very tired mind, in the middle of the night…