Transition

Finishing up/starting the end transition for my waterfall scene. These transitions have proved challenging to blend rocks into flat land again.... that is one reason why I'm going back and adding more detail to the foreground of the other backgrounds, the more detail in the foreground the better it looks next too the waterfall.

I'm not 100% sure about the bridge where it joins with the land :/ but hmmm..... Never mind, I just fixed that then... I also finished the end transition. I'm quite happy with the way it looks, it blends well with it's transition :) . Alright, well time to move onto something else, probably animation..... :S yay.... :P

Fixie upie stuffs

today I'm working on fixing up the foreground of all my backgrounds. I'm just adding more detail to make it easier to blend with the transitions better.

The example I've put is just a rough sketch and I will be working more to improve the detail in the scene. More updates later.

      

Waterfaaaaall

Ooooook soo so far we have 5 different backgrounds made.

I just finished the waterfall themed backdrop. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with this one, it's animated and I worked pretty hard on it. I like the way it's scruffy and cartoony but still fits the nice style of our game.

When I first deemed the background finished I showed my team mates and they weren't so happy with the bridge. The bridge was very plain looking and straight. Peter commented saying he'd rather have more of a falling down bridge because in ancient Greece they wouldn't have clean cut wood. I worked on that and I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

< that is a picture of the original bridge. I really like the moss and rope edges on the new bridge.

I really like getting peoples opinion on my work to improve it to the best that I can.

Now that I've finished the waterfall I will be making the transition images that will layer over the sharp edge on the image and blend it into the next background.

Bricks and other jazz

 < Brick
Hades is placing bricks in Persephones path to try to stop her leaving the underworld.
these are the brinks. I designed them at the beginning of term 1.
Close up the blocks are not anything fancy, however in the game they will be much smaller and the colours and pictures show nicely.

We have matching button images on the bottom of the phone screen to match the blocks. These buttons are what you press to destroy each colour block to free up the path for Persephone.

Each block can only be destroyed by pressing the matching button. Each button activates a different god power. Such as, the blot is Zeus, the water is Poseidon, the rock is Artemis and the fire is Apollo.

Backgrounds

Alright, soooo backgrounds! yay fun fun fun :)

I explained in the previous post a little bit about how our game has parallax background and now in this post I'm going to be explaining how I design backgrounds, what style of art our game has and why and how the parallax backgrounds work.

Ok to start off I think I will explain my process for background making.

Deciding on a backdrop scene:
Josh and I meet up at TAFE and discuss what environments we want for our backgrounds and how we wish to display the landscape in the best way. We talk over what we like and don't like or what sort of things we especially want and so on. We then take the ideas to Jamie and Peter to get there opinions on what we have brainstormed.
Once we have decided on a background we all think will look good one of us will work on it at home and come back to show the team the work we have done, then we talk about what we like and don't like about it. That is our process for creating a background.

Style:
The style we went for in our backgrounds is a sort of hand painted. We really wanted a nice unique style for our game and as Josh and I are quite skilled artists we decided it would be good to have a hand drawn game. We thought about using vector art however we all agreed we wanted really unique art for our game.

Alllllright now moving onto how I actually create a background:
First I find pictures of what I'm drawing, such as caves.

Then I sketch out an outline for what I want in photoshop

Sketch

After I've sketch out something that I like I then start filling it in with colour. There is 4 layers to this background, the background caves, then the stalic tights, then the rocks down the bottom and finally on top is the pathway.

Background

Stalic tights

Rocks

Pathway

Each layer of the background will move at a different speed to make the foreground seem closer and the caves seem further back. 

I'll explain more about the backgrounds parallax and not parallax reasoning in another post. 

That's all for now.  

Group game update start sorta thing....

Sooooooooo this is the start of my blogging about 'Escape from Hades' our team TAFE assessment game.

This post is a little summery catch up thing as we have been working on this project for 6 weeks or so now.
I am the main artist working on backgrounds and animation. Josh is also working with me on backgrounds and he is designing the GUI as well.

Theme:
Our theme is about Greek gods. We're basing it on the short story of Persephone and Hades. Persephone the goddess of spring and Hades the god of the underworld.

Story:
There are many many many different versions of this story, so The Legion of Awesomeness (Jamies name for our team) talked about it and settled on our own retelling of the story.
Hades forced Persephone to become his wife and tricked her into eating food from the underworld cursing her to live there with him, however she can spend some time during the year above ground every year thus bringing spring to the world.
When Hades first kidnapped her, Persephone's mother Demeter was distraught and stopped performing her job of sewing seeds in the earth thus causing a famine. When Zeus decided Demeters famine was becoming a problem to the gods he helped rescue Persephone from Hades. Demeter promised to make crops grow during the time Persephone is with her above the ground and make nothing grow in the time Persephone is away, this then is winter.

The way we will be telling this story is to have Persephone running along with different background playing behind her. We have Spring backgrounds that will cycle round for a time then will transition into underworld themed backgrounds, showing Persephones time above ground and below ground.

Backgrounds:
We have 4 different backgrounds made so far. Two are parallax and the other two are flat images. We have an equal number of parallax to flat to make the transitions work. To really make our game appealing and interesting we wanted moving backgrounds that were not just flat images but more 3D, however the backgrounds are scrolling and this caused problems with the way the transitions lined up, such as the foreground moves faster than the backdrop so the foreground would change before the back and it got really messed up, so now we have flat backgrounds to transition over the top of the parallax backgrounds so the player will see a new background while the parallax one lines up again behind the see able backdrop.

Persephone:
I am working on a run animation for Persephone currently.
My interpretation for Persephone is a young, olive skinned, beautiful woman in flowing dress and flowers in her hair and on her dress. I did a lot of research on Persephone before I started designing her, as I really wanted to capture the feel of the spring goddess.

Hades:
I haven't worked on Hades design yet, however I really like the look of the Disney Hades from the movie Hercules. I'm going to research more into Hades and his roll as a god then work on his design.

I think I have covered everything, so enough boring talk for now, I will continue to update with what I've been working on and why blah blah and such :)

Final blog about game level StarLand

A final view on the work I did on my level.
Over all I liked the work I got done, I like the style and feel of the game level. There are a lot of things I could have/wanted to add in to the level, such as with the golden gate I would like to have a opening animation, however :/ I don't.
I would also have liked to improve a lot or the textures too, just spend more time getting extra details into them.
The starting point of the level would look much better I feel inside a room, I room with 5 doors , each one leading to a different level.

Things I do like about the game however are the floating lands. I really like the way they look and the texture I used for them. From underneath they look really impressive. I'm happy with my skybox, however I would like to make the edges blend the edges to look less like a box and more like a sky because you can see where it joins with the sides and that makes it look bad.

I like the layout of my level. The colours and the style look bright and cheery to fit with the game idea. I used a unity texture for the grass but after discussing it with Percy we think that the grass on the mainland would look better in the same texture as the grass on the floating platforms.

Over all I'm happy with my game level. There are things I would add or change but I like what I have here too.
 Link to the video :D
https://vimeo.com/78683478