CAGD 495 - Sprint Blog 6

 I am the 2D artist behind Little Arthur. This sprint, I had a fairly productive sprint with 9 points complete across 7 cards. I began this sprint by continuing my work on the game poster. During the previous sprint, I had managed to block out the scene and finish two out of the four characters. However, I knew that there was higher priority work that needed to be done besides the poster, and my work on the poster had already taken significantly longer than I had initially estimated. As such, I discussed with my producer, Nathon, and had him change the 3 point card to focus mainly on polishing the characters. Then, once I was able to get other high priority cards out of the way, I could come back and finish the background to the poster. 

Although the iteration of the poster with only the characters rendered looks extremely incomplete compared to the final product, it would be far from an exaggeration to say that completing the characters was 80% of the work for the entire poster. I kept the value range fairly limited because I wanted certain things on each character to stand out and pop against any other details. The glow emanating from the faceshields of the helmets, the crown, and the sword were the primary details that I wanted the viewer’s eye to be drawn to.

  

After rendering the characters, I made a set of input buttons that would be used to indicate button prompts within the game. This card, among the other ones I completed this sprint, was one of the primary reasons why the background of the poster was sidelined. The beta build was due this Tuesday and it was integral to the beta that the game would properly tell players what inputs they needed to press in order to actually play the game. I kept each button fairly simple and non-descript–I wanted to make it so each button would be usable regardless of if the player was using an Xbox Gamepad or a Dualshock.  I also made a blank keyboard key so that my programmer, Chase, could add text onto it if the players were playing the game using a keyboard. 

My next task was to draft and create an icon for the game that would be used as the desktop or taskbar icon. I had a handful of ideas for this icon. My designer, Robert, wanted a design in which King Arthur and Halfdan, the primary antagonist of the game, were facing each other with a Holy Grail in between them. Although I drafted that design, I heavily advised him against moving forward with it primarily because it lacked readability. When it comes to desktop and taskbar icons, their size is extremely small on the screen so I was aware that the level of detail that I could fit into the icon was not that much. When looking at other video game icons, they typically kept it simple and had the first letter of their game or some sort of mascot.  That was the direction that I took the other designs in, and we decided on using an acronym design with Arthur’s Excalibur in the center of it. 

I am fairly proud of the way that I managed to render the sword. Robert requested that it take the appearance of a magically enchanted blade, and I believe that I was able to fulfill that to a T. The design of the sword originated from an Illustrator object that I made for the game’s main screen, but to make the textures appear more grounded and eyecatching, I painted shadows and highlights over the sword. I utilized many different layer styles in order to preserve the detail of the sword while bringing out an array of colors. I began with purple and erased parts of it at an angle to give the sword a sheen. I duplicated the layer in order to make it stronger, but when doing so, I came across a happy accident that I had not experimented with before. Locking the transparency on a layer and then erasing while on the same layer erases the color and turns it white. When I did this process to a duplicated purple layer, it made parts of the sword turn golden. Although I stumbled onto it, I feel like it takes the enchantment a step further and makes the icon stand out. Then, I added a red center glow and a flame silhouette to the sword and was done after some adjustments and an added drop shadow.

After completing the icon, I created very simple decals for the sparks and the blood in the game. These decals appear when a player attacks or is attacked by an enemy. I set the spark decals up to be able to be used as a decal sheet, and gave each of them a slight shape variation so that the sparks did not appear very uniform when ever the effect activated. With the blood, I made a handful of pools of blood that would appear and dissipate on the ground based on how many attacks landed. I also created a couple of smaller and rounder blood spots to fly out similarly to the sparks when attacks land.

The last work that I completed was the poster background. I was excited to finally be able to finish up this card, because I knew that it would ground the characters in the scene. I struggled with the color palette in the background initially because I had a hard time making everything appear warm, inviting, and made out of wood without it looking visually unappealing and completely homogenous. However, I was able to develop a sort of visual hierarchy as I knew certain areas would be much darker than others. I kept most of the detail in the background fairly simplistic because the multiple characters in the foreground already had made the composition very busy. After some lighting passes on the background, characters, and foreground most barrel, I added credits to the poster and finished off there. Overall, I am happy with what I was able to accomplish with the time allotted to me. Although I would have changed some things about the poster composition, I think it turned out well and represents the game accurately.