CAGD 495 - Sprint Blog 2

February 19, 2026

I am the 2D artist on the team that is creating Little Arthur. Over the course of this sprint, I continued working on assets that I had begun working on during the first sprint, finishing those and moving on towards UI icons for the player to view in-game. I completed a total of 9 points across 7 cards, which is an improvement from the previous sprint–however, it is still not quite at the pace that I am aiming for in order to have a personally successful sprint.

This sprint was challenging for me because the first set of work that needed to be done was straightforward, but involved a lot of time commitment due to the importance of the card. I was tasked with creating an illustration of an imagined scene from the game for the background of the main menu. This card was broken up into three stages–sketch, color blockout, and final render. The sketch went smoothly. I produced two sketches of possible main menu backgrounds, which I then got approval from Robert to move forward with one of them.

Then came the color blockout. I kept the overall composition and color blocking fairly simple, because the field of view for this drawing meant that I would have to add a lot of detail in the end. The full castle is in view, as well as the surrounding walls and small outcroppings of towns, so the more that I could direct the player’s focus onto the main subjects, being the castle and King Arthur, the better. This card was completed with only minor difficulties as I was challenged in picking colors that would read well to the viewer.

The last phase of this set of work involved the most daunting task–the complete render. This card was an undertaking all on its own because of the scale of work that it required me to do before I felt that it could be considered complete. I had to fix the perspective on many of the buildings surrounding the castle, make the castle itself much more detailed rather than a collection of shapes, and render a large landscape–which is one of my personal weaknesses when it comes to illustration. I am very proud of the work that I was able to complete on this card, regardless of my confidence going into it. There is a high amount of detail in the work, and it effectively draws the viewer into the game while not becoming a severe distraction from making the player start playing the game.

The next work that I was tasked with was to create special ability icons for all four playable characters. These cards were interesting for me to complete because I had never created UI buttons for character abilities. I needed to create icons that would quickly express to the player what their ability did without needing to read anything. For King Arthur his ability was a circular slash of his sword. This one was the most straightforward of the bunch, as I was able to create an icon with Excalibur that had motion lines implying that it was being swung. The next icon that I completed was Sir Gawain’s icon, a ball of heat that would be emitted from the player upon casting it. This icon was straightforward because of its symmetry, and I used iconography of the sun to quickly convey that it was extreme heat being cast in a radius around the player.

I completed Sir Lancelot’s icon next–I had the most trouble with this icon because I wanted to convey a spear being thrust without the icon being too visually busy for the player to glance at, and understand what was being said. I ended up using only the spearhead and adding simple motion lines that contoured the spearhead to indicate a thrust. The final special ability icon I ended up making was Sir Percival’s icon. His ability is to slam the ground down, so I chose to have a lightning strike breaking the ground into pieces. I had a couple of ideas to draw an icon of his fist, or a 2D character slamming the ground, but I did not feel that those were understood as quickly as what I decided on in the end.