Art/Design Advancements

Lets start off with Design eh?

So just moving onto the pitch Document now, thought I'd give it a bit of TLC so I wrote a little on the game overview side:

Hexicronic is a strategy/action game where you have to draw a path for a spaceship through many different locations in space in search for unimaginable fortune in the form of a “Hexicronic”. To make things challenging, while navigating through the space asteroids will be flying at the player in which they have to defend against using their reflexes and quick thinking. Asteroids will fly in on the screen randomly some with different mechanics so it doesn’t get so repetitive and can indefinitely increase the difficulty level as the player attempts to keep their spaceship in once piece through the levels.

In the search of the “Hexicronic” you buy the cheapest ship you can find with all the money you own. Now you must travel across the vast space which is the universe, upgrading your ship as you go along with money you salvage along your journey. To do that, a path must be navigated to avoid death and scavenge valuables in the attempt to find the “Hexicronic” to ultimately gain untold riches! 

As I said just a little bit to describe the game, since it is more on a pick up and play game for Androids and such I thought against writing my usual essays of back story. 

I have also written on the mechanics of "Path drawing" and "Asteroids" so I need to get some art to accompany them to make sure it all looks dandy!! 

A problem I've en counted with design - art limitations is that I'm unable to draw up a spaceship the looks visually pleasing and I'd really want more than one spacecraft available to the player, I feel having multiple options in an app is a real repayable factor in these sort of games as I have found out the hard way a lot of wasted time later! Ideally I want 3 different space crafts with each different strengths and weaknesses like one more agile, one more durable and another maybe in between the both. This I feel would give the player a satisfying sense of picking "their" own spaceship rather than being handed one and then getting the luxury of still getting them both eventually, this can always lead to future updates with more space crafts more ideas which can make the game easily playable many a time just to get all the upgrades/spaceships or even new backgrounds. 

My inspiration from these ideas are a mixture, a bit from a game called "Hill Climb" some from "Pokemon" and then also from these images I found: 

Obviously I have to minimise my thoughts here since I'm talking post release but I am trying to prioritise the idea of making this repayable since it is the core strength of a game like this, I feel if it's only entertaining on the one play through then we'll have done something wrong. 

So... Now art! 

I have set out to create some cool backgrounds for our game, given we're going for a geometric look this is what I have made: 

I have made a lot of these quite dark mainly because I was mainly thinking they'd be subtle background images that you could only just make out while defending your ship but the grey scale in the middle is a favourite at the moment so I'm going to go ahead and try to make more similar to that. 

My biggest challenge is creating the space craft... which I'm going to have to work on... ALOT! 

Design Advancements

Over the past few weeks we were dancing around the idea called "escaping rygon 5" which sounded pretty cool. It starts in a prison which the player has escaped and then they have to find parts to build their spaceship, so they can eventually escape the solar system. 

Now after a lot of discussing we've come to an idea where the player can create apath through space and must get from one side of the screen to the other. Now once the path has been created their spaceship will follow it no matter what, while this happens asteroids will come at the spaceship which the player then has to flick away. With all of this there will be a shop to upgrade the ship and buy boosts ect... 

In the mean time I came up with some diffrent asteroids that could play a part in the game: 

Basic ball – Stays still but player can throw it.

Basicv2 ball – Moves on the screen and the player can move it.

Solid ball – Asteroid cannot be moved by the player but can be moved by other asteroids

Solidv2 ball – Asteroid moves but player cannot interact with it, course can be changed by other objects though. 

Fire Ball – Quick speed asteroids which the player can fling away, objects that get hit by this ball speed up slightly. 

Molten Ball – Travels at normal speed but when it interacts with an object it explodes both itself and the object it 

collided with creating small shrapnel. 

Ice ball – Travels at slow speed, when it collides with another object it slows that object down. Once an object has been hit by the ice asteroid it can then be destroyed by throwing a basic asteroid at it. 

Black hole – Gradually sucks all objects around it in. 

NINJA BALL – small, fast asteroids that deal small damage but are hard to catch. 

Gold ball – A rare asteroid that can be broken open with a basic asteroid, which in turn gives the player money

The Growth of My Art...

So I'm attempting to become more artistic this year so I'm starting simple. I've made a lot of terrible art and some okay, it helps that we've gone for a geometric art style meaning my inability to do art as a whole is much less of a problem.

This was me attempting different art styles before the geometric decision and even though I know this is crappy I did feel happy about it and got a nice sense of accomplishment. 

After looking at the images that we wanted our game to look like I tried to follow the same direction. 

This being the mood board with all the lovely pictures, all above my skill cap. 

These are my attempts at art but my team members gave them some good reviews so I'm quite happy with them.  

Attempting art

So I'm trying to dabble in a bit of art so I can understand it and maybe even do it. I have created a bit of concept art which SUCKS but the background turned out okay I think.

The problem is making the planets look... well... good. It looks too terrible. The blue line in the background was also a mistake which I couldn't undo so I had to make the best of it with lots of layer editing >.<

Thinking...

Onto another week developing the idea of our game and I've spent some time thinking about what gets me to keep playing an app I play on my phone. 

Using my real life experience with addictive games I mainly pin it down to having to collect enough money/points to unlock cool or ridiculous advantages or visual aesthetics! With this I suggested we implement a money system to allow the play to keep saving for upgrades and the continuation on playing. Using mini games to acquire the coins the player will have several different places to find these games, some of which will be very difficult while others easy with less reward.  

It's an obvious and simple idea but I feel it should fit well into the game. 

Another idea I liked is placing the player in a solar system rather than just a planet. Each planet will have a mini game to collect coins with (same mini game just more difficult ect) and each planet will have a shop with upgrades to your ship. This will make the playing field look much bigger and suggest that there are more options but the problem comes when we need it to not look shit... and space is cool... so we have to make it look simple but good at the same time! 

This is just the doodles that I used to get some of the ideas while I draw a story for myself so I can immerse my self within. 

The Final Stretch... Kind of.

Towards the end of last year I had felt beaten by a lot of the pressure and stress so it felt good to have a long 1 month off uni. 

Now back at uni, much has changed. 

We have a new room and have lost two tutors, James and Ben who were both really great people and teachers and it really sucks to not have them this year. It was especially nice to keep getting updates of Ether every lesson with them and I wasn't too happy with this turn of events. On top of that I felt the whole "choose your own group" was irritating but what can you do eh. 

We had our first "Production" lesson tonight with our new tutor Peter who seems really enthusiastic and just a really nice guy overall. 

I am also looking forward to next production lesson since Peter said he would try to give us a Q&A testing lesson to help us prepare for the industry and to just help give us some knowledge about it! :) 

Anyway... back to today... 

I'm part of the "The Cloudy Lime" Group:

Darren: Programmer

Will: Programmer/Designer

Me/Max: Designer

We have a game concept called "Escape from Rygon 5" which is about a person whom is wrongfully accused and placed in a maximum security prison in space, with the objective to escape. The way of escape is by collecting parts for your spaceship off several planets near by and when attempting to collect these parts or travelling to the planets there will be little puzzle mini-games to entertain the player. 

The Game is to be made for Android and seems to be are solid concept so far. 

That's about it for now anyway... Till next time!