BA2a - Starbound Art Test

This week we were given our new brief, and I chose the Starbound promo art one. I've been really interested in this game for a while, but haven't yet played it. The character races are very cool and it might be hard to pick favourites. I do however like the floran, novakids and avians a lot so may work with them the most. 

These are a couple of the characters I might try to draw.

BA2a - Week 15 Summary

I did some more colour iterations for the new twilight design, looking also at how the glowing marks would look on her body. I thought maybe something like showing the bones through would be interesting.

I did a more detailed drawing of the twilight state, looking at how the netting would flow on her body. Decided that having fish/other water elements to the netting made it look more interesting, so the right one is my final design.

Also made more solid design ideas for the normal state, experimenting with different fish ideas. The one I liked the most was the right one.

 Here are their model sheets with callouts.

When I drew these I tried to make them very influenced by telltales style, but also try and implement monkey islands look into it too. I'm not sure if I quite achieved the looks I was going for, but I like their design a lot and feel proud of what I achieved in two weeks.

And here is the final concept piece, with my character in the twilight zone fishing with netting for her wares. I wanted to get some influence from sirens that call men out from their boats, but they usually no clothing so I thought that might not be right for the companies we're looking at.

I'm not sure if I'm 100% happy with the final design, but I'm proud of what I've done in these two weeks.

BA2a - Week 14 Summary

After some research, I started sketching up a couple of ideas for both the twilight and the normal state of my character. I started first with the normal state one on the right below, thinking around how it would transform in twilight state. I decided to have her missing an arm, most likely lost gaining her wares for her shop, and that arm would be a phantom arm in the twilight state. 

I wanted her to have glowing marks/tattoos on her body in the twilight state, as is obvious on the left. I tried a couple of colour schemes to get my head around the design, and then decided to try more colours for both of them.

I used colour masks for both of her states, and with her normal one i was trying to think about the faded out colours that pirates often wear, as I see her as a pirate that now sells wares.

With the twilight form I wanted to see what colours would work well together, looking at what colour for the glowing parts would stand out most against the skin colour.

I wasn't sure on the design for the twilight state in terms of clothing, so I started doing some silhouette drawings for them. I thought that lots of fish netting would be an interesting take on it.

I decided on this kind of look for the characters outfit, consisting mostly of netting but very broken up/used.

BA2a - Telltales / Monkey Island Art Test

Today we were told about our art test briefs, and I chose to do the Telltales/Monkey Island one where you have to design a normal and twilight state of a character that sells wares in an underwater temple. 

When I started researching about this project, I found that telltales had already made a monkey island game, Tales of Monkey Island, and a character called the Voodoo Lady really caught my eye.

I really like her design, and have some ideas how I might get inspiration from it.

My first thought was that the character would be human in normal state but gain fish-like qualities in twilight state such as the Zora from The Legend of Zelda.

I also associated the twilight state with glowing tattoos/body parts, similarly to a glow-stick. I am going to start sketching as soon as possible and try to get my ideas down so I can quickly form final designs.

BA2a - Week 13 Summary

This was the last week for the indie dev project, so this is my prototype as finished as I could make it. I made a background for the battle scene, thinking again about the water character vs fire candle enemy.

Also finished the candle enemy's sprite sheet, as well as the player character one. They both have an idle, attack, heal, being hit and dying sprite. The water character also has an extra attack that I never got round to using.

Character Blueprint

Enemy Blueprint

Update of the battle managers blueprint

In order to get the top down feel I wanted from the part before the combat, I decided to add an invisible cube for the character to move on top of and have the background below it.

Almost have the Battle UI working as I want, but with more time I would work more no it making it more aesthetic and have all the elements I wanted. 

Here are some screenshots from the Turn based battle. To give the feel of being in the background, I added another invisible cube that the characters sit on. 

After the battle is over with either the character or the enemy dying, it returns to the main walking area. 

If I had more time, I would add more elements to both the character and the enemy in battle, as I feel like its not hugely fun to play as they do very generic back and forth battling.  I would add more attacks and make the enemy work more randomely. I would also add more enemies, so that you don't always get the same one when spawning a battle.