Week 3

The weeks fly by very fast now, and we are slowly getting closer to GGC and the end of the course.
At the third week of the course I have finished Ilimarinen, done some rough sketches on the wedding guests that will appear in the game, worked on some frog concepts and started to finalize the wolf monster.

I have tried to keep a consistency in the art style with a soft shading and a hard outline.
Ilmarinen is the master blacksmith and a god in the kalevala epic and he is our other main character that will be playable in our game. I have been Inspired by Tove jansson and moomin trolls while creating both characters but I have tried to still keep an own art style. For the weapons on ilmarinen I have used textures and I have also used textures on the clothes as I did with Väinämöinen.

Here are some work from the week.

BGP week 2

In the second week of Big Game Project I continued to finish one of our main characters Väinämöinen. At first I was planning to finish the second main character and the wolf monster as well but I had to remake väinämöinen so many times that it was no time left for the other two.

When making väinämöinen I started with looking on different facial expressions to try to get a believable character that would fit the description of being old and wise as well as having a lot of stamina and fighting spirit. 

Since the old sketch of väinämöinen looked to old and sad I focused on making him look a lot younger and angrier. 

I used a lot of soft coloring and shading when I made the skin and I used different textures for the clothes. I also putted a strong dark outline on the character.

When I felt that the character was done I divided all the different parts on a sprite sheet for our animator.

The feedback I got from a meeting with an art teacher was to make the sword look a bit more special and mythical, so I will focus on that later when the rest of the characters are done.

BGP week 1

So this week our class started our Big game project course. My group are making a game called Kalevala which is based on an old finnish national epic containing 50 different rune songs. I am responsible for character art. We are going for a quite simplistic style with inspiration from finnish artists such as Tove Jansson and Joseph Alanen.

Here are some of the concept sketches and early 2d characters I made :)

Artifact 6

Artifact 6

So our game project is coming to an end and most of the graphical part is finished for our final version. Even though it feels like we could have done so much more if we would have the time, I feel happy and very proud about of own and first made game for the game designer education.

So this week I am going to write about my work on the menu screen. For the beta I did a menu screen with a simple font. I used a moon and sky artwork that Lisa in my group had made for the outdoor level in the game that sadly never got finished due to the time limit. On top of it I drew some simple forest trees and added some shadows . The menu screen had the options “Play”, “options”,  “credits” and “quit game”. The menu screen was enough for the beta but now when we are working on our final version of our game we wanted it to be a bit more suiting.

When I started on the final version of our menu screen I was thinking that some clear bluish colors would fit very well since the gameplay is consisting of colors in different blue shades on the cave level that the player fly through. Therefor I decided to go with one of Lisas other background pictures with a forest and a cave. The colour theme for Lisas picture was in turquoise and greenish shades which fitted together with the colour scheme in our game.  

My first vision was a very colourful and clear background that oozed of blue mist and a clear crisp sky with stars but after some communication together with the group we decided that the strong blue hue was clearly out of the colour range from the rest of our games colours. So I then started to experiment with the turquoise colour combined with the darker clear blue and it gave quite a nice effect.

I started to work on our logo and realized  that black did not seem to fit together with the rest of the colours and I wanted it to stand out more so I changed the logo to white. I then added some effects called “Bevel and Emboss” and “Drop shadow” and changed the shadow effect until it met my groups expectations. 

When I started to work on our game menu text I tried a lot of different fonts and after around 17 different options I decided to go with the font “Papyrus Regular”in size 18 pt.. I added the same effects as for the logo and putted the menu text to the middle under the logo. We had decided that we was not going to use the "option" in the game menu text and instead have a "highscore" option so I changed that.

After that was done I started to work on the details. I added some stars in different sizes across the menu screen and I painted some mist. I then worked on the saturation and shadows and I used tools such as “dodge” and “burn” to get a more glowing effect to the stars and for getting shadow edges around the menu screen to focus the players eyes more to the middle. I also painted some shadows with the "burn" tool on areas where needed and some glow effect with the "burn" and "dodge" tool where it was suited.

When I was happy with the look I experimented with where the logo and text would best be placed. I first placed them on the left side of the screen but later decided that middle seemed to give the player a more balanced visual.

As a last effect I added one of the fireflies made by Lisa, to work as a mouse pointer and I also duplicated it four times to get it to show more in contrast to the background.

Background picture made by Lisa:

 

Final version