What about a title?!
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Much the same as last week, this week’s sprint consisted mainly of finishing up some small stuff here and there. A few of the bigger approaches this week were the design and creation of a title, which we had completely forgotten about, and an animated intro to provide a better explanation for the story. In this week’s blog post I am thus going to talk about multiple subjects. The idea of the animated intro came quite late into the project, too late actually. We were lacking something to tell the story of the piñata to our audience and I had a good idea for an animated or slideshow inspired intro. Although we added it to our sprint, I realized that with all my other assignments this week, I would not be able to finish it for this sprint. After a discussion with the team we decided to scrap it. The result was a nice little surprise though. I started doing concept sketching for this intro sequence before the sprint and already had some material to show. The team got really excited over the design of the Satan Piñata. Since we were still looking for a way to properly communicate to the player when the main character was hit by a bullet we decided to use the concept of the Satan Piñata for that purpose. The idea is to make the Piñata flicker between his normal piñata form and his Satanic version when he gets hit. Although my fellow artist was quick to point out some of the complications that could arise and probably will, we decided to at least give it a try.
The title was one of the most important things I had to complete this week. When we looked at our game state and what still needed to be done we suddenly realized that we have had a temporary title on our main menu for a long time. We had completely forgotten about it! I took the task upon me and begun drawing some concept art for the title. After a few rough sketches, I asked the opinion from my teammates. They picked the elements that they preferred and I would continue working with those. One of them pointed out that we had had our eye on a Mexican font that we had wanted to use for our earlier concept and suggested I could use that. I loved that suggestion and even though I did not want to straight out use the font in the title, I did roughly redraw the font. I did this both to get an original feeling as well as make it look a little less perfect, which would fit in more with our game. I wanted to keep the colours simple and dull to keep the focus on the most important part of the title, the piñata. On top of that, the result is something that looks almost western, which fits in nicely with our background. The dark red cross through ‘dead’ is part of the story behind the game. There is inspiration from ‘day of the dead’ but it also refers to the piñata’s true nature. It can almost be read as an act of arrogance from the piñata. The Piñata part of the title was a combination of the things that my teammates preferred. My fellow artist preferred a sketch where he felt that the ‘P’ and the straightness of the letters resembled the piñata visually. Another teammate preferred a font that was bolder and a little bit more rounded. I thus tried to combine these two fonts into one. Combined with the finished colours, the result is something that can be compared to the piñata sprite we have in our game. Because of the duality of the piñata however, I wanted to incorporate that into the title in some way as well. Since at this point the title is a static image I had the idea to create a small animation that would represent the other, less visible side of the piñata. The result is a burning ‘~’. The animation is relatively short and thus does not have the highest amount of detail but I felt that it was more than sufficient considering the time I have spent on it. I must move onto other assets! There is plenty more to do after all!  |
