Monday 20 October 2014

Hay Ewe! (a long post, with lots of pictures)

This month a project I helped out on in the summer gets released, It's a mobile game called 'Hay Ewe' and it was a fun casual project that was made by a small team with a lot of love and not a lot of resources.

Matilda (from a design by the awesome Zhuo Wang)


As I've been freelancing again, I've really enjoyed working with small teams again, and reminded of how adaptable you need to be. In this case I was presented with an existing character and a loose art style amongst a lot of place-holder art. A key issue that perhaps I didn't quite iron out to the extent that I'd hoped for was matching the existing character style already set out. Especially hard as the team was working remotely, plus we didn't have time for much concept work, mostly conceptual design was just rough notes and suggestions. It's not all that sexy, but as its a 2D project it's kind of all that's required, plus it's nice not to get too bogged down also.


Area ideas
Some super-basic character concepts - nothing says highly intelligent predator like a Killer whale with a Rubik's cube right? (Didn't make the game if that answers your question) 

The costume and collectable objects were the first contribution, and kind of a nice and easy way to engage with the forming identity of the game.

Collectables

I've always  preferred illustration over UI and graphic design but my input ended being a pretty even mix of fun illustrations and some functional UI design - involving lots of roughing and revising, plus a lot mistakes and redesigns.

Early sketch and development out for the in game tutorial 'Ewe-tube'
'Hay Ewe'  as one might suspect, is not a game that shy's away from puns, like at all. Ever.

As soon as someone dropped the 'Ewe -Tube'  pun an idea quickly formed of having a beat up old BBC style computer on which player can watch (handily text lite) videos explaining the various hints and hazards of the game.

First pass at tutorial
I love big chunky analogue buttons that animate, and liked the idea of a forgotten pc in the bottom of a barn covered in hay and with chickens roosting on it etc. I felt pretty happy thinking "If this sort of thing was good for games like 'Machinarium' it'll be swell here!"


It was about the same time we that we decided add 2 entirely separate shop screens to the same format, that we realised that this was actually a TERRIBLE design for a multiple aspect ration mobile menu system to work... And so back to the drawing board until we started to get something a bit more appealing, flexible, and with even more terrible puns.

Reworked flow and final shop and dress up screens

As much as I love having User Experience and UI specialists on hand to help with wire-frames, flow charts etc. massively failing at UI design is a pretty useful experience. I did however get the chance to do some nice illustrations too which was super cool.

Red+Blue col-erase sketch


Some interiors for level transitions.

The backdrop and illustration stuff's always great fun (as you get to do pretty drawings) Even with the map there was plenty UI to consider, and even with a zoom-able screen it's challenging not to over clutter things.

An original working and a final screen-grab of the level map, sadly no sketches for this one.

Big props to the Rainbow Rocket Studios team for getting the game out - It was a real fun project to help out on.



  

Tuesday 14 October 2014

Train Guy Update

I've been pretty busy on my freelance projects, and getting stuff together for thought bubble (under a month left now...) so I haven't been able to add much of 'Train Guy' project for a time. 



Currently the game revolves around brawling atop of a moving train to protect it's cargo, key part of this is obviously the design for the actual trains. Fundamentally I want to have an upgradeable train that consists of 3-4 upgradable components, all of which can be upgraded with more visually outlandish iterations. In short I wanted to have a train that can part by part be upgraded from a old vintage Steamer, to a futuristic Mag-Rail bullet train, via some glorious 30's sleek body work (I'm kind of a fan of incongruity) Below is the first step of dividing assigning sections to the an upgradable quality. (Cant wait to mock up some variations based on these)


While the visual aesthetic is still floating around a few possibilities I really loved looking at the old rusting trains with pipes valves and tanks galore, but even condensing some of that into a reasonable simple design was really tricky. I realised pretty quickly that this sort of inorganic design is actually pretty challenging to get down through drawing and painting, so this was a great project to switch to 3D for a little fleshing out. 



Ultimately this game could even be in 3d at this stage so it's been a really good exercise in figuring out the  direction for this project this has been as much of a 'game' design exercise as a visual one.

 It's a bit of a slow train, but for now I feel it's getting somewhere.


Thursday 2 October 2014

Isometric assets


Recently been playing around with doing some isometric game stuff. My personal work tends to the untidier side of things at the moment, and I've been doing some really rough and ready concept work over late summer early autumn too - so it's been a while since I've done any fully rendered stuff. Actually been pretty fun!