First impressions; designing a themed main menu

The very first thing a player sees when he/she starts up a game is, in most cases, the main menu. And since, as we all know, first impressions matter, it matters greatly to set the theme and feel for the game! We had previously decided to have the player play as a tailors ”little helper” (think of the mice in Disney’s ”Cinderella”), and so we wanted to use the main menu to make that connection. As such we concluded that the menu should depict the tailors shop.

Looking at reference pictures from shops in the early 20th century, we came up with the following sketch as a base:

We then took this sketch and made it solid, with correct perspective (which for that matter is the first time we applied some lesson from the parallel 2D-course), and defined things further.

At this point my work as ”clean-upper” began as I were to take this sketch and define all lines and values digitally. Previously (in this project at least) the clean-up method didn’t require too much detailing as it was mainly animated (each frame is only visible for a fraction of a second). This on the other hand, required me to make everything very solid, as the player would be looking at it for at least a few seconds.

I decided to start by just lining everything out as best I could (not everything was completely defined) and later go in and add details and make it look good. Midway I realized that this approach was a bad choice for this case as it would end up terribly messy, given the amount of seperate objects. Thus, I started grouping objects and coloring them.

Now I say coloring because that is what I originally did, as it made it easier for me to distinguish between the various sections and artefacts this way. I continued this process for all elements and later added some more details as well as volume for the clothes in the back (as you can see, they were quite flat at this point).

Lastly I felt that it needed even more distinction between objects and the floor/walls and so I added some shadows as well as occlusion on the counter. I also finally converted it to grayscale in Photoshop as to fit the theme and general style.

Although it’s not the nicest piece of work I’ve ever done, and even if I could’ve worked on it more, I feel that it suffices for it’s intended use.

Now I’ve seriously drained my entire bank of unique tasks as we as artists are running out of tasks in general, and also because most of the tasks are very alike.