Artifact 3, Heartbeat bat

Artifact 3

So this week I am going to write about my work with the bats power up effects.

I started my work with experimenting with some different lightning effects and my first visual thought about the power up. Since the power up literally would give the bat energy and make the bat empowered, my first thought was to make the bat look like he got empowered with lightning and that the lightning would crackle out from the bat wings. I then tried to make a quick animation with the lightning effect to see how it would look if I made it a bit electric. But I came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t really fit our game environment and the sparkly theme that we had decided to use for the bats dash effect.

After that I started to try different options with a more glowing and sparkly visual for the power up. I used Photoshop and many different brushes combined with colors and also different effects in Photoshop such as “brightness and contrast”, “selective color”, “Hue/saturation” and “curves”.

The hardest thing was to choose the right color that matched both the background and the effect that caused it. Our power up effects are consisting of different colored glowing fireflies that the bat pick up. For our game we are going to have four different power ups. 

One power up will give the bat a power to shoot projectiles that will clear the game environment from obstacles and enemies. Another power up will give the bat extra speed that will make it more easy to get a higher score for the player and the third power up will make the bat toxic and clear the environment from enemies and obstacles. The last power up is called “bat sense” and that will give the bat the ability to foresee different hard encounters like obstacles or hard turns.

So for the colors

I chose to have a blue color for the projectile power up since it matched the projectile that will be in the same shade. I also chose to use a sparkly and glowing style of most on the power ups to have a consistency in the game just with different colors. 

  

 For the speed power up I chose a yellow/golden color since it will match the pickup fireflies that gives it. I also felt that yellow was a good choice to show a faster speed.

For the toxic power up I chose green since toxic is generally associated with a green yellowish hue. 

And for the last power up that gives the bat a “bat sense” I chose a white color that sparkles with many different colors.

Artifact 2, Heartbeat bat

Artifact 2, Heartbeat bat

So this is week two of my blogging about the group 12 game project “heartbeat bat” and this week I am going to write about the construction about the bat character that you play as. In heartbeat bat you play as a bat that is trying to fly as fast as possible without getting hit by any obstacles that slows down your speed or get caught and slowed by enemies. By gathering speed boosts the bat can fly faster. 

Since we chose to have a cartoony visual I wanted the bat to also look cartoony and fit the rest of the game environment. The reason for choosing a cartoon visual is because we wanted to stay true to the original game design document made by group 7 which had a cartoony visual. Group 12 liked their visual style of heartbeat bat so we decided to stick with that. Our whole game are therefor going to be in a cartoony visual style but also with a touch of realism since we didnt want our game to be to abstract looking. 

I started my work with trying to figure out what kind of colors that would fit on the bat and with our environment. I first tried a brown color with dark brown eyes but realized that I thought it would fit better with a more grey color scheme.

I therefore chose to use grey and shades of grey for the main part of the bats body. The colors of the bats wings are grey and pink shades since I thought it would make a nice contrast to the grey with some pink.

 On the eyes of the bat I decided to use different purple tones. For the shadows on the eyes I chose to use shades of wine-red and darker purple.

 

After I was done with the basic colors and shadow shades for the bat I decided to also give the bat dark brown hairs on the whole body and a purple red nose to make my bat look more animated as I mentioned in my last blog entry.

I used Photoshop for this whole progress with a mix of soft brushes and hard brushes. For the brown hairs I used a slim shaped custom made brush.

When I was done I tried different colors for the bat with the help of “selective colors” in Photoshop and decided to change the bats dark color to be a bit darker and the grey colors to be a bit cooler.

In the end I also tried to enhance to eyes of the bat to be more expressive so I used the blur tool and the dodge tool to change the eyes to look more realistic and glossy since I wanted the bat to get more character.

In my work with the bat I experimented with a lot of different textures and filters but I decided to stick with my original made bat since I thought it looked more cartoony and fitted our game environment better then.

See you next week!

Artifact 1, Concept Bat

Avatar Bat- concept

I am now going to write about the first artifact I have been working on during our game design class where we are creating a game from another groups design document from the previous game design course. I have been working on our avatar for our game we will create“Heartbeat Bat”. My first artifact I got to work on is the concept for our character in heartbeat bat. The character is an bat which the player is controlling by flying. I started my work by sketching many different concept ideas of how the bat could be looking and I then showed my sketches to my group so they could help decide which one of the sketches they liked most. We decided to go for a cartoony look on the bat with big eyes and ears and a bit of doglike appearance.

Some of the sketches:

I wanted to have an animated style of the bat, a little like on Pixar style animated movies. My group chose between different kinds of feeling expressed by the bat and we decided that we wanted a cute character that is most of the time a happy and kind of innocent bat that gets an eager expression on its face when the bat is speeding up to reach its goal, which is to get home as fast as possible. The faster the bat gets home the higher high score the player will get.After the group decided about the main visual feeling and style of the bat I started to sketch a front position and a side position of the bat aswell as wings in different angles and positions.

The sketches of our chosen bat style: