Challenge 1 Prep

Hello everyone!

This week was a lot of working towards getting ready for challenging stage 1. We came up with several good ideas in meetings during this time, so it was interesting trying to get things together in a quick manner.


I met with Professor Patel last Thursday and we discussed the concepts that I had and some of the ideas we had going forward. She seemed to like the painting and cooking concepts and the fact that they had high potential for humor. She thought the painting concept seemed a little highbrow (I'll discuss that one later in this post).
As for the digger concept, she liked the ideas I had, especially that I explored so many game play styles, but thought I did not have enough different directions as I did with the platform combat game. I made a few character examples exploring possible options.

The ant idea was especially popular in our team for a 'God Save the Queen' mode 

Regarding the combat platformer, we came up with new ideas based on the last round of concepts I created.

For the paint concept, we came up with a mechanic that would require the player to manage a paint resource. Using one's abilities would sap their paint resource and they would have to receive more paint by successfully attacking other players or finding paint that would enter into the scene randomly during the battle. In addition, we kicked around the idea of the character's abilities affecting the environment by making it change colors, but we're still working out the details of how that would work in scope. 

We added onto the paint idea by expanding it to the whole theme and expanding the world where it would take place. One idea was that characters would be based on famous painting styles, as well as the abilities they would use.

Monster themed on 'Garden of Earthly Delights', a cubist creature,
 a pointillist lady, and a Van Gogh styled Cypress Treant

For the chef battle idea, we thought it would be interesting to expand upon the customizeable nature of food. We are playing with the idea of having the abilities be upgrade-able based on skill trees as the battle goes on. One example we had was having the skill trees be based on the 4 flavors of the tongue: sweet, sour, spicy, and bitter. Oh, and there's umami, too, but I still have a hard time believing that one :P Remy (one of my designers) explained it to me, and I guess for all intents and purposes it would be good to have.


We've decided to go forward with the platform combat game. I'm too excited about all of the possibilities for this one and the ideas we've come up with so far. I feel like it'll be a really good chance to stretch my creative reach and explore things I haven't really seen in games so far.

Tune in next week to see if we pass the first Challenge!

Hey everyone. So this week was a week of more concepting! I'm still not very used to creating art for whole game concepts. I enjoy making concepts for singular characters or perhaps character sets like I've done in the past, but there's just so much more to think about with worlds and environments. I guess in that end it is also very exciting and challenging.

I was very unsure of how long to take on a single concept piece. After talking with one of the professors for a bit when I had questions about concept art, she suggested I work small and quick with thumbnails and silhouettes. This was a bit of a leap from where I was working (concentrating on one or two images and fleshing them out more than greyscale). I sat down and tried it though, setting 5 minute timers for about 20 minutes and seeing how many concepts I could come up with.  I'll have to play with pushing the thumbnails smaller, though I  don't know if Id' want to; I still like having some details.

These were all concept environments for the fighting game. Some relate to the character concepts I have, some relate to some of the mechanic concepts in theme, and some are just random shots in the dark.

These are more of the 'fleshed out' ideas that I had. I think I spent more time than I should have on just these few characters. Some of them wouldn't be able to work in the fighting game mechanically. For example, the moth spirits. I came up with them because their wings would be good for customization to hint at what each player had chosen for their abilities in the first part of the game. However, them having wings would mean they'd need to be able to fly using them which would change our fighting mechanic considerably. The oddities at the bottom... well, they were based on a few references I had from cubist painters and Salvador Dali's pictures. They were created from the prompt of my teacher to 'push it more, make it weirder, don't stick to tropes'. I'm not sure if I suceeded in that sense, but I do plan on making more 'weird creatures' to see what everyone thinks.

example of an in-game fight using our dark-light death mechanic

The mole game is progressing along slowly. It feels like there is a big dichotomy between the games art direction-wise. The fighter is so nebulous and vast as to what the art direction can be, while the mole game is more slow paced and seems to know what it is.

I'm definitely going to work on shaking that up this week and pulling some more weird concepts out of the hat for this one.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for Week 4!

Introductions and Concepts

Hello everyone. My name's Liznel and I'm the Art Lead on Team Swanboats. I'll be your host(ess) through this exciting world of game development. This blog was created to fulfill some requirements for our senior capstone project and to document the trials of the art side of Team Swanboats. As this is an intro post of our ideas, this one may get a little long-winded, so please bear with me. =)

Team Swanboats was first banded at the end of last semester. We met up a few weeks ago for our first meeting came up with several concepts. Last Tuesday, we pitched two ideas to our class that seemed to get pretty good feedback. These are the ideas, and some accompanying concept art for both of them so far.

The first idea was a for a 2-dimensional multi-player game where the player takes on the role of a mole. The player digs around, plants traps, and harasses player opponents and NPCs (non-player characters). One of the end goals we kicked around was that because of mole's shortsightedness, their reason for attacking each other is that they think 'other' things around them are enemies. We've taken a lot of consideration into the gameplay based on the mole and it's characteristics. For instance, we have the idea of players being able to place scent based markers to tell what they put down. Or, and this was suggested in our first class, to utilize vibration in the controller so the player can tell when/what other things are around them.
This game's style of play was inspired by Worms and Bomber Man.

Artistically, I'm considering two different avenues as of now. I played around with two very different silhouettes as I'm still not convinced on whether or not the game should go in a realistic direction or a more stylized one. Over the summer, I worked on a game involving wildlife. The game was meant to be realistic as it was going to be ported to play at an aquarium to teach about the invasive species in the local area. We would have meetings with members from the aquarium, some of whom had a lot of in-depth scientific knowledge and gave critique on the fish and animals I was working on for the game.
I feel that if we did this for our game, and by that I mean making the moles realistic, there would be less design involved. While I'm not against this, I would still like to be able to push them to be stylized. I think a good medium between the two is to exaggerate the differences in shape of the species of moles in the picture above. I would still like to explore the more 'cartoony' look such as the example on the side. I'm a sucker for cute characters and moles seem to have a history in games of being rendered particularly 'cutesy', save for a few examples...

(Pictured above starting with top right and going clockwise:
Resetti from Animal Crossing, Monty Mole from Paper Mario,
Naked mole rat from Fallout, Mole from Harvest Moon) 

 I would like the player to have a fun experience playing this game and be reminded of good times playing with friends. A little friendly competition never hurt anyone, but it would be an honor for this game to end up being a 'friendship breaker' the likes of say, Mario Kart, Mario Party, or Dokapon Kingdom.

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Our second game concept was for a multi-player fighting game that works in two parts. The second part involves any normal fighting game similar to say, Super Smash Brothers. The characters stand on platforms and use their skills to lower the health of up to 3 other players. The first part however, is where it differs. Players will have the ability to choose their own character, but these characters do not come with their own skills. Players can choose their own skills to equip for their character's kit in a draft mode to the game.
This game concept draws inspiration from 'non-traditional' fighters like Super Smash Brothers and Awesomenauts, and card games like Magic the Gathering.

This game's art direction had a little bit more of an open-ended feeling. For this one we only had the mechanics, and nothing really to go off of for art style or direction, so to start with, I came up with these two ideas. Fighting games are usually very character heavy, so I had to think of a way to scope back on that as I am only one artist. The mechanic of the game itself helps in this way, since the moves are chosen and are not specific to one character. Because of this, I pitched these two starting ideas.

The Magic Academy concept came about because I like wizards and witches. I feel that having chosen abilities would work with playing as either a witch or wizard because they could be so open-ended. There's room to have a tinge of humor in the 'spell cards' they choose, hence why one of the spells involves a gelatin shield. The inspirations for this idea lay heavily in anime like Little Witch Academia and Card Captors.

The second concept went more in the direction of having the fighters be literal blank slates. I'm not sure one could get any blanker than something akin to a test dummy. The 'Builder Bots' come from a universe where bot fighting is very popular. Moves for the bots are chosen from the Bot Fighting Winner's Hall of Fame, and the bots themselves would have customization choices with different heads to switch out and different colors in order to make them more distinct.
This concept erred more on the line of silly, cartoon violence with big, possibly goofy weapons. In our meeting today, the idea was brought up that the bot's fights could be something televised and commercialized, similar to monster truck rallies. However, we're not entirely sold on this idea as we're afraid it might seem too close to one of the directions done by last year's seniors.

I feel I'm going to move more forward with the magic academy concept, and work on diverging from that direction. Our Lead designer wants me to explore the use of familiars as the cards selected, and I agree with that direction. As a child, I loved reading books such as the Dragon Riders of Pern and would often wonder what it'd be like to have a dragon or some sort of mystical creature as a companion. If we could have that feeling expressed in our game through that mechanic, I'd be happy with that.

I'd like for the player to take away the experience of wanting to learn more about the combinations of the moves they select, and which ones synergize the best to them. I want the experience from this game to be one of curiosity and thinking on how best to utilize one's options.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for next week as we should have some screenshots of our prototype thus far!