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.
Hello Tara!
SvaraRaderaI think that your work this week with power ups is looking good! You seem to have had a thought behind every design choice, and it was nice to see the many designs you tried before you found the one you liked. The only one I’m not sure of why it looks like it does is the “bat sense” one, why it is a mix of colors instead of a single one like the rest. And I’m not seeing what the gameplay difference between the projectile and the toxic power up is, it sounds like they do the same thing.
I have only seen an early version of your background, so I’m not really sure how it will all look together, but I like that you have thought about how the power ups would work with the rest of the game.
Your first try with the electric wings looked interesting, and it’s always nice to see how things look with animation. I would like to see how your sparkly power ups look in-game, will the different parts/sparkles move around or will it be static like in the pictures?
One thing I would add is some kind of modification to the body of the bat as well, perhaps making the eyes light up in different colors, as right now it looks like it’s just the wings that get the extra boost.