CAGD 495 - Sprint Blog 1

 I am a 2D artist on the production of Little Arthur, which is a game headed by Robert Austin as the Design Lead and Nathon Polling as the producer. This first sprint as a 2d artist has been a very new experience for me, as I have exclusively worked as a Design Lead for past production projects during my stint at CAGD. As such, the learning curve has primarily revolved around making sure that I am constantly communicating with my designer in order to produce the work in his intended vision.

This sprint, I completed 3 cards centered around the UI of the game, for a total of 5 points. My workflow for Illustrator is to sketch the base concept on paper, take it into Illustrator, and create paths in order to formalize the idea. One thing I did that is consistent with all of the UI icons I created this sprint was that I turned it into a 3D object within Illustrator, and used the 3D materials tool in order to bevel it and give the object three-dimensionality instead of appearing flat on the screen. My reason for doing this was that one of Robert’s main requests for the aesthetic style of the game was to have it emulate a “storybook” feeling. As such, I wanted the elements to be gilded and ornate, reminiscent of the literal cover of a nicely kept ancient storybook.

The first graphic that I created in Illustrator is the individual player HUD. This player HUD contains a health bar as well as two slots for player ability icons later on. The main challenge of this part of the UI was the challenge in trying to keep the UI simple, but interesting, ornate, but not too over the top or distracting to the player. I believe that I was able to achieve this, and as such, most of the in-game UI has been completed (with the exception of player portraits, which I intend on doing once 3d modelers have finished each player model).

The original sketch, full and empty health bars.

Afterwards, I finished creating a dash UI icon and mockups for main menu buttons. The dash icon was straightforward–I just needed to indicate motion or movement that would be quickly understandable to the player, so I chose an arrow and added flourishes that would emulate gusts of wind. As for the main menu button mockups, the UI wireframe has not yet been completed. What I did to circumvent being blocked was take the most common and likely words to appear in the menu UI and create mockups with five different fonts so that my designer could see possible options as to what the UI buttons would look like. We decided against full buttons and instead chose text buttons because it would be too clunky for the main menu that I intend on implementing later on.

The dash icons, concept to finish.

The final selected font for the game UI.

Full stop, I should have completed more work. In hindsight, without the responsibility of designing the game, it opens up a ton of freedom for me to put my head down and complete many cards where I typically would struggle. I simply did not manage my time well enough in lieu of working on other projects. The very thin silver lining is that my work is not blocking anyone from moving forward. However, going into this next sprint, I am fairly certain that I can complete a minimum of 12 points. I have gotten over the hump of learning Illustrator and will be able to produce vector graphics at a much faster pace in the future.