Enemy Design
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After a rough wake-up call last Thursday, we had to adapt our concept to meet basic expectations and criteria. For me, that meant that many of the assets I had made were going to be scrapped and had to be replaced by new ones. Our main character, the piñata, would only need minor changes. The most work was going to be put into the new enemies. Instead of random objects that people generally associate with Mexico, we would now have souls as enemies. The piñata is now a representation of Satan who has come to collect the souls of the seven deadly sins. The goal of the game is to collect the souls to add them to your parade towards the gates of hell. One of our aesthetics was to go for a clear distinction between good and evil. In our narrative, the piñata is thus evil and the souls are representing good. I’ve told my team about my doubt about that specific aesthetic with the addition of the seven deadly sins. In my opinion, the seven deadly sins are not a representation of something good, even if there is something more evil to compare it too. It works towards making the piñata less evil by making it seem as if he is doing us all a favour by taking the seven deadly sins to hell, which is not what we wanted to achieve. I also had my doubts about how we were going to visually represent the seven deadly sins. I had made some sketches of simple souls before that and I wanted to work those out further. However, the sprites would be downsized considerably to fit the game screen and would thus lose a lot of room for visual imagery. Even now, I cannot find a suitable way to make the seven deadly sins properly recognizable as souls. Furthermore, we would also only be using 4 to 5 of the seven deadly sins in our game making their representation even more difficult. How is the player supposed to recognize the seven deadly sins when they will only encounter 5 of them at max? Both issues have me in doubt about the new direction we are going in. A simple solution I suggested was to make the seven deadly sins simply souls. I could make them distinctive enough with colour and some slight variations without having to worry about making them recognizable as Wrath, Envy or Lust for example. Even though I had expressed my concern about these issues it was decided that we would do it anyway. I have thus spent this week trying to create the seven deadly sins. For the Alpha I had made one mock-up enemy with their own bullet in various colour variations, which would be enough to decorate the Alpha a little bit. The final designs had me struggling. The idea was to have the possibility to mix and match everything. I thus made a circle for a head and various tails and I will be working on creating different faces, accessories and perhaps even limbs or clothes. I also had to decide on 7 colours to represent the seven sins with. Even if we weren’t doing the seven deadly sins I still had the idea to make different enemies distinguishable with their colour and their unique tails. Now I must tackle the challenge of creating the seven deadly sins that are still recognizable even when downscaled to their intended small screen size. Regrettably, my main mock enemy used for our Alpha presentation resembles a balloon more than anything else.
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