Project Brief- Vertical Slice (Engaging with the audience pt 2)

For this unit we have been told we are working for Nintendo. We are working together as a class to create a vertical slice of a game.

Our working brief is to create a game with the following attributes:

• Fun and engaging for a young audience.
• No violence or sexual themes.
• Completable in 5 – 10 hours.
• No multiplayer.
• Story heavy, gameplay light.
• Bright and beautiful art style.
• Simple UI.

Tasks(Overview)

Task 1

• Nintendo research
• Audience analysis
• Contextual research
• Artist research

Task 2

• Narrative structure
• Annotated rough designs x 20 – 30
• Developed Stage – Developed designs with screenshots and development rationales.
• Final design/s. (Story, Models, Concept art, SUI, Splash screens, Title cards, Credits, Controller layouts, Textures, Animations, UI designs etc.)

Task 3

• Evaluation

 

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Nintendo Research

Founded in 1889, Nintendo is most well know for it work in the gaming industry throughout the last 50 years or so. Nintendo original started out by making playing cards, their original name was Nintendo Playing Card Co. A name they would be using up until 1956. Their handmade cards were extremely popular at the time, and they were required to mass produce them to keep up with the high reputation and demand that they were having at that point. In 1963, Nintendo Playing Card Co had been renamed to Nintendo Co due to the fact that the company were now intending to branch out into other areas of business. They started up a taxi services, in which they decided to name Daiya. Although successful at first, the taxi company was forced to be shut down due to it being too expensive to keep open and running. Nintendo then decided to attempt to open a range of hotel services named the love hotel chain, as well as a TV networking service and a restaurant that primarily focused on selling rice, all of which failed eventually.

Nintendo then entered the Japanese toy industry. Creating toys such as the Ultra Hand, Ultra Machine and the Love Tester, Nintendo still struggled to meet the development speeds and times that other companies such as Tomy and Bandai were able to also provide at the same time. Because of this, they had to shift their focus from toys to family entertainment venues in 1973.

Game & Watch

Going forward a few years, Nintendo released the Game & Watch, a system that had games that were usually linked to the hardware it was on, and had no interchangeable cartridges. The Game & Watch was really successful throughout Japan, and would originally be the building blocks that Nintendo themselves would use for years to come with future consoles. The Donkey Kong Game & Watch was the first ever appearance of the D-Pad. The directional pad was extremely popular and successful, following the success Nintendo patented the design and used it on almost every console and handheld released after this. Some of the most notable titles released on a Game & Watch were Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong 2, Donkey Kong Jr, Donkey Kong 3, Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros and Zelda.

There were also multiple different versions of the Game & Watch released. All of which were optimised for the games they were released on. Some of these included:

Silver

This was the first Game & Watch released, a game called ‘Ball’. This generation of Game & Watch was named ‘Silver’.

The next generation was the gold Game & Watch. Which released games such as Lion. Helmet and Manhole.

The Multi-screen Game & Watch was most known for being the design that Donkey Kong was played on. Most notable, the multi-screened Game & Watch looks to be a huge inspiration for one of Nintendo’s most successful consoles, the DS, or Duel Screen.

The tabletop Game & Watch is something I have only found out existed while researching the topic. It looks to be a mini television with the controller attached to the base of it. I’m not sure what the size of it would have been, but I would imagine it may have been played on someones lap, similar to a laptop.

This was the last generation of Game & Watch to release, the Crystal Screen Game & Watch, which included games such as Super Mario Bros, well a port of the NES version which was hand held.

The Game & Watch was definitely an interesting concept. Every one you had almost felt like a limited edition version. They were customised to fit the game it played, which was nice. It was also revolutionary to have a portable handheld at the time, despite the extreme limitations that came along with the hardware.

Nintendo Entertainment System

The first home video game entertainment system ever released. This console was revolutionary for its time, releasing with games such as the original Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda, later releasing games such as Zelda 2 and Super Mario Bros 2. The controller design re-introduced the D-Pad that people were so fond of on the Game & Watch, and reinvigorated it here.

The Legend of Zelda was one of the first games to release on the system, and is one of the most revolutionary of its time. Its open world layout was new and different to anything ever done before hand. You spawn into Hyrule and you can go into any direction that you want to, which gave the player a sense of freedom in which they most likely have never experienced in any other game prior to this being released.

Game Boy

The original Game Boy released in 1989 to astounding success and praise. The design of the system was revolutionary at the time. The D-Pad had made its way from the Game & Watch and was now a major part of any game, as well as a stereo speaker system. The system required you to buy cartridges for it containing games, it was the first of its kind to do so. Some of the bigger launch titles that released side by side with the console included Super Mario Land & Tetris. Although some of the bigger titles to release later on the system were The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Pokemon Red and Blue, Pokemon Yellow, Donkey Kong and the beginning of the Kirby series of games.

Super Mario Land was launch title that released alongside the Game Boy. This was the beginning of Mario’s handheld history, as it was the first Super Mario title to be released on a handheld console. The cartoony art style is very stereo typical for any game at that point in time. Back them Mario games never really had any sort of identity that they have now. That being said, the basic art style of the game is very appealing for the younger audiences, and I would imagine that it would be attractive to the younger people in the community. But due to obvious hardware limitation on the Game Boy, the art style wasn’t translated very well into the actual game due to the fact that the Game Boy had an 8 bit graphics chip, which did perfectly for the handhelds of the time.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

The SNES had a new 16 bit graphics chip that was a lot more powerful that the previously mentioned NES. Meaning the graphics were given an incredible update following the NES era, with full vibrant colour and more detailed sprites for a much better, more seamless experience. The controller now featured A, B, X & Y, which differed from the previous NES controller which had two face buttons. The new controller also featured shoulder triggers on the top of the controller, as well as the returning D-Pad, which was being a staple of any controller at the time of the SNES release.

Super Mario World was released in 1990, and was also a launch title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The comparison between this and the last console Mario game, Super Mario Bros, is quite drastic considering they are less than 10 years apart from each other. The sprites and colours this time are extremely well done and create a great experience when playing along side them. The soundtrack was incredibly nostagic and had never really been done before, in terms of quality.

The games art style is translated into the game really well, if not better than the box art and art work. The game really stands out and is extremely appealing to any sort of younger audiences who would be interested in a Mario game.

Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 was released originally in 1996, and was the first Nintendo console to make the jump from 2D to 3D. The new controller featured 3 handles for the player to hold onto, as well as a newly implamented anolog stick, which was ideal for movement in 3D games. As well as this, they also decided to remove the X and Y buttons in favour of the C buttons, which was essentially a second stick in some games or used for item management in other games.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time released in 1998, two years after the original release of the Nintendo 64. The game was a perfect example of the graphic capabilities of the Nintendo 64’s hardware. It was nothing like anyone had seen previously. The games graphics I feel appealed more to an older audience, which i thing is what they were going for when originally developing the game.

The art style and atmosphere in the game compared to previous entries was a lot darker in tone. The graphical textures and character models were as realistic as you could get at the time which only increased the adult like focus for the games audience.

Nintendo GameCube

The Nintendo GameCube released in 2001. Some of its launch titles included Luigi’s Mansion, Crazi Taxi and Batman Vengeance. The controller was the first on a Nintendo console to feature two analog sticks, the c-stick was brought in to replace the c button on the previous console, the Nintendo 64. The c-stick was also useful for camera control.

To showcase the power of the GameCube, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda; The Wind Waker in 2003. The games huge world lacked loading zones and the graphics, although different, were a huge update from Majora’s Mask, which was the last mainstream Zelda game released back in 2001 for the Nintendo 64.

Most people hated the cartooney art style when it first released but the game has aged extremely well for today’s standards and is commonly considered to be one of the best Zelda titles ever released.

Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii is one of the most successful video game console of all time, and is by far the most successful Nintendo console ever released. The console included the ‘WiiMote’, which was the consoles controller, along with a ‘nunchuk’, which provided analog control and was required for most games. The new controls for the Wii got rid of a traditional controller and replaced it with a wiimote and nunchuk, the wii remote had a main gimmick of motion controls, the player could use them in game and they were quite useful.

Released in 2010, Super Mario Galaxy 2 uses the Wii’s motion controls extremely well as on of Mario’s key moves is mapped to a swing of the wiimote. Due to it being a first party Nintendo title, Nintendo knows how to utilize their hardware to the fullest, which is why the game controls so well as a platformer.

Nintendo Wii U

The Wii U was released in 2012. It came along side the new controller called the Wii U Gamepad, which was similar to a traditional controller. It had all the normal buttons a controller would have, two analog sticks, a front facing camera and the newest addition, a screen placed in the center of the controller. This screen was used mostly for item management, maps, information and most commonly, off-screen play. This was when you could switch from the TV to the gamepad and play exclusively on that screen, this was useful for when the TV was being used by someone else.

Released in 2015, Super Mario Maker was, in my opinion, one of the best games to release of the Nintendo Wii U. The game uses what the Wii U provides so well, with the gamepad being utilized perfectly, in that using it was a core part of gameplay. The game was really popular at the time and attracted many non nintendo gamers to try the platform for the first time due to its difficult levels and hard difficulties.

Nintendo Switch

The Nintendo Switch was released on March 3rd 2017 and released along side The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The Switch is what you would call a hybrid system, It is a home console that can turn fully portable with no limitations whatsoever. The Switch’ controllers are called Joy-Con controllers, and they can be used in multiple ways too. On its side, one in both hands, placed in the controller and played traditionally or placed in the switch and played like a tablet. It is also one of Nintendo’s all time best selling consoles behind the original Wii released in 2006.

Released along side the Nintendo Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released on both the Switch and the Wii U. The game was able to showcase just how powerful the Nintendo Switch was for a hybrid console, to run a game as large and demanding as Breath of the Wild on what is essentially a portal console is generally impressive to really think about. The game was the series first look into a fully open world, where the player can essentially do what he or she like in whatever order. I would also describe it as a sandbox experience, meaning that general real life rules apply in the game, such as getting hurt due to being too hot or cold, and wearing the correct clothing to prevent it. The player can also be struck by lightning, set things on fire, chop down trees etc.

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The Evolution and Growth of a 3D Character Model: Super Mario

The main genre in which I am going to be focused on is generally Nintendo games, this is due to the fact that our unit is based around games that follow the child friendly rules.

Super Mario had its 3D debut on the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64. The game was highly praised at the time for being a great 3D platformer, and a good example of what a platformer should be. The graphics though, haven’t held up well in today’s standards, and the game hasn’t aged well at all.

Due to the graphical limitations that came with a console such as the Nintendo 64, the finished model used in game is quite pointy and low poly. Although for Mario’s first 3D model it represents him quite well. His textures are quite low resolution, things such as his M on his hat, his eyes, brows, mustache, and hair are all noticeable when playing the games on a higher resolution, such as the Wii U’s virtual console.

Super Mario 64 was remade on the Nintendo DS as one of its launch titles in 2004. The game has better control, better graphics and implemented multiple new feature such as extra levels and playable characters. Mario’s model is also very much improved due to the limitations of the hardware not being so limited. The games resolution was running at 144p, which is lower than the original’s 480p resolution.

Mario’s model from Super Mario Sunshine is dramatically improved considering it was the only time fans saw him since Super Mario 64. This model really showcased the improvement in hardware in which the Nintendo GameCube included, and revealed what it could do.

Super Mario Galaxy released on the Nintendo Wii back in 2006. Mario’s model has stayed the same since this game. This model was just basic Mario, as apposed to Super Mario Sunshine’s model, which included F.L.U.D.D on Mario’s back. The Wii had the graphical requirements to be able to have a model that was identical to any game art made for Super Mario Galaxy.

The Nintendo 3DS was also capable of including a high poly model of Mario in Super Mario 3D Land, which was a launch title for the system.

Super Mario Odyssey’s Mario model is the most high quality we’ve seen yet. Released in 2017, the Nintendo Switch is powerful enough to be able to include Mario at his best. The textures are very high quality, the denim on his clothes, the hair on his mustache and the stitching on his cap are all featured here in amazing quality.

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Adapting a 3D character model: Link

Some games are required to change how a character looks to suit certain requirements or needs. Things like age range and target audience are things to consider when designing a character in game.

Nintendo released the first 3D Zelda title back in 1998 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The games art style went for a more realistic art style to target older audiences, and it marketed itself as being a much more mature Zelda title.

The game was remade in 2011 on the Nintendo 3DS and the graphics were dramatically improved. The graphics take a more realistic turn for a Zelda game, with overall detail being greatly improved.

Being on the same console,  Link’s models is much improved from his The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time counterpart. This is due to the fact that The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask required an expansion pack in which improved graphics and hardware in order boost the power of the Nintendo 64, which explains the difference in graphics compared to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The character model for Young Link in Majoras Mask 3D is a reused one from Ocarina of Time 3D, which isn’t the case for the original N64 title, which featured a brand new young link model.

When Nintendo revealed the next 3D Zelda game in 2002, this wasn’t at all what the fans were expecting. A cartoon design for the whole game gave the impression that the game was a lot more childish and lighthearted. While the game is lighthearted, it isnt at all childish, and people who criticized its different art style when it first released now realise how good of a game The Wind Waker actually is.

While different, this toon design works quite well with the games story and plot. The art style matches the flow of the game itself which is a good thing. Thinking of this game with a more realistic art style is somewhat unsettling, although that may be because we haven’t seen what it could have looked like.

Toon Link would also be used in multiple Zelda titles after Wind Waker, such as The Minish Cap, Spirit Tracks, Phantom Hourglass, Wind Waker HD as well some cameos in Super Smash Bros and Hyrule Warriors.

Due to the criticism that came with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Nintendo needed to win the fans of the Zelda series back over with a more realistically styled game. Twilight Princess was released for the GameCube and Wii back in 2006, and was originally praised as being the ultimate successor to Ocarina of Time.

The art style was the most realistic we’ve seen in the series so far. The detail put into every texture was immense and set the tone of the game extremely well. The darker plot that came with Twilight Princess suited the art style even more, as it portrayed that the game was meant to be taken more seriously as a main entry in the series.

When designing Skyward Sword, I would imagine the development team decided to go mixed Wind Waker with Twilight Princess. We get hints of realism in the game but with the art style being so cell shaded.

The art style, although similar to previous entries, is also quite unique to this game. Link’s model isn’t really detailed but is detailed enough to appreciate what the creators were going for when they designed the game.

The game is a lot like a water painting, the views and scenery are like pieces of art, and it was a smart way to work around the Wii’s lack of powerful hardware and draw distance.

Breath of the Wild’s art style is very similar to that of Skyward Sword’s. The cell shaded approach is evident again but also works just as well as it did last time. Link’s model is very cartoon like but also give the impression of greater detail on his facial features and clothes as well as realistic animations for running etc.

As shown in this screenshot, the world maintains a certain level of consistent detail, things such as individual blades of grass, rubble and rocks are all here to make the world feel more alive and enjoyable.

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Audience Analysis

As we have not come to a final idea for our game, I will be using Gamefreak’s Pokemon as a mental reference as it is fits the criteria for what the brief is asking for, with the exception of multiplayer, however the game can still be enjoyed thoroughly without multiplayer. We also need to consider that we are creating a new IP so we will refrain from analysing older audiences that specifically play the games because they are existing fans or grew up with the game, and as we haven’t decided on a genre we can’t consider fans of the genre yet. Presently our audience will consist of kids and parents, as primary and secondary respectively.

Analysis

Our game will need to be bright, appealing and enjoyable in order for parents to deem it suitable for their kids, and more importantly for kids to want to play the game. We have discussed different genres and feel that the best story-heavy genres for kids are: RPGs with straightforward steps and controls, platformers that are visually appealing with a good balance of game play and story, sports games that are light on controls and mechanics (such as racing) with a campaign of some sort, educational games with a good amount of game play and interactivity and simulation games that are light, straightforward and easy to learn. The game also needs to be enjoyable when played solo, which these genres usually are, for example, Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Mario Tennis, Cooking Mama, Professor Layton and Pokemon. These games all have straightforward stories, controls and mechanics that are unique to them. The games ideally should have as little hand-holding as possible, but with an in-depth tutorial to make sure the kids understand and can keep coming back to the game after periods of time without needing a refresher of the controls, their progress, etc. We’ll have to cross over things like the console/platform and age to know if they’ll need to be supervised or will need to take extra care when using the controllers, like for Wii remotes; some games require you to wear the wrist strap to ensure you don’t let go while swinging. If the game will be on the Nintendo Switch, we will have to take the same precaution as it has some motion control. We’ll obviously only need to think about this if our game has motion control.

Understanding – What do they already know?

Primary – Kids know that games are a quick source of entertainment that can be picked up at any time and that they have stories that are as straightforward as: bad guy does something bad, player (hero) has to stop them.

Secondary – Parents know that Nintendo produces mainly kid- and family-friendly games that can appeal to a very wide audience. A parent might be a bit wary about letting their child play an online multiplayer game, especially if the playerbase has a mix of ages, so seeing that the game is singleplayer only might put their mind at ease.

Demographic

Primary

• Who? – Young children
• Age? – 5-11
• Gender? – All genders
• Location? – English-speaking countries – US, UK.
• Wealth? – The income will depend on the household as some young children receive pocket money from their parents weekly, for doing chores, etc, whereas some children might only receive games on their birthdays or Christmas or other special occasions as games are only getting more expensive. There are also a lot of spoilt children that get anything they want, whenever they want.

Secondary

• Who? – Parents of young kids
• Age? – 25+
• Gender? – All genders
• Location? – English-speaking countries – US, UK.
• Wealth? – Parents might be reluctant to preorder games for their children or buy them at full retail price at any time of the year so will likely buy the games for their kids on special occasions, like birthdays, Christmas, the end of the school year, etc. However, parents that will buy preorders for their children will need to have a relative amount of disposable income to buy the game at any given time. As we are being commissioned by Nintendo for a game, full retail price would fall somewhere between £25-£40 for a 5-10 hour game.
• Religion? – Some religious parents might be reluctant to buy games with demons or scantily clad women for their children, or some parents might be very selective of the games they buy for their children regardless of the content: they might stick to educational games or simple simulation games.

Interest

Primary – Young children and kids will be interested in a bright game with a compelling and interesting story. The main reason kids would be drawn to our product would probably be because of colourful and cute characters that catch their eye. In-game, kids would want to perform actions where they can immediately see the result on screen. In short, they would want games to be appealing and immersive.

Secondary – Parents main interests would lie in the safety of the video games as well as any stories with morals and good lessons for their kids. Alternatively, they might want a simple straightforward game that they can hand to their child as a distraction while they are busy. These parents would still prefer a game with minimal violence so they would not have to supervise their kids while they play.

Environment

Primary – Young children will likely get information about games from word of mouth, such as at school from their friends or at clubs. They will see adverts and news about upcoming and new games from kid’s gaming magazines they might read, such as 110% Gaming, and for slightly more mature children, perhaps magazines like the official SEGA magazine or Retro Gamer. Free might also get their information from things such as Argos catalogues or Scholastic Book catalogues, which are typically free at the Argos shop or distributed at school, again, for free. The adverts would be colourful and eye-catching.

Secondary – Parents will see the game being advertised online on e-commerce websites such as Amazon or on the sidebars of websites they browse (assuming they don’t have adBlock). Adverts on sidebars are typically animated and designed with bright and bold colours and lettering, usually with a rhetorical question and big arrow pointing to the “Buy Now!” button. Other ways parents might hear about upcoming titles is through other parents or their kids begging them to buy/preorder the game.

Needs

Primary – The needs of the kids would be: an exciting, appealing and most importantly fun game to play during their free time, or when they’re procrastinating from doing homework. Other games that fall into this category fit the needs of the child, but kids also need an “educational side” to the core gameplay and features:

• No autosave feature. This will discreetly teach kids responsibility and the agony of forgetting to save your game or work after hours of work
• Limited hints later into the game. This will teach kids to not be so dependant on others and help train their brains to recall information better and more effectively
• Hard work equals result and reward, or sometimes it doesn’t. Kids need to know what is and isn’t worth it; for example, a kid goes climbing up a hill in a game and all that is waiting at the top is a piece of health. This teaches the child that they should think critically when making decisions and that there won’t always be a reward after hard work which can help them develop their empathy towards others.

Obviously, these aren’t required for a kids’ game to be fun, but if a game that is aimed at children it should have some elements that educate and teach and train a child. Some games can teach concentration, but adversely some can teach procrastination.

Secondary – Parents need a game that they will be content with their child playing that will minimize supervision. I won’t be discussing parents that buy games for their kids regardless of the ESBR/bbfc rating, and more focusing on busy and concerned/wary parents.

Busy parents will need a game that will keep their kids occupied while they go and run some errands, do some chores, etc. For this, we will need the game to be “difficult”, in the sense that some sections will take five or more tries to accomplish (but will still be doable by a child), thus bringing the playtime up a teeny bit so that the parents have enough time to do their work. However, those segments should not be frustrating to the child and rather rewarding once they complete it so the parent will not have to help them every five minutes or calm down their child if they become aggravated. The game should also be relatively clean so that the parent is comfortable leaving them unsupervised.

Concerned/wary parents will need a game with absolutely no drugs, no swearing (perhaps even no dialogue) and no negative or religious symbolism. They will want a game with child-friendly symbolism and characters, stories with morals and role models, and limited cartoon violence so that they can leave their child unsupervised while they play without any worries. The parent should also be able to understand how to play the game by just watching it so that they are able to help their child if they get stuck.

Customization

We need to keep in mind that our main audience is kids but we need to highly consider the needs of the parents almost above the child’s as obviously the parents will be the ones who decide and purchase the game for their kids. Our game must appeal to both working and home-based parents so the price should be a reasonable amount, such as £29.99 for at least 5+ hours of gameplay. The game should have replayability and, effectively, babysit the child for short periods of time when the parent wants a rest. A parent could also use the game as a reward for the child when they’ve completed chores or homework or the parent can allocate free time for the child. For this to feel like an achievement for the child, the game must be easily picked up with a generous yet logical amount of save points so that the child can come back to the game easily even if they only play it once a week.

Expectations

Primary – Kids will expect a playable and enjoyable experience and, being that we have been commissioned by Nintendo, they will be expecting a fun-filled adventure with simple gameplay elements, fun characters and pleasant graphics.

Secondary – Parents will expect a polished, bright, fun and beautiful game that they feel their money is worth. They will have known Nintendo longer than their kids and possibly grown up with Nintendo games and consoles, so they will know exactly what to expect from us: a wittily written, easy to play fun-for-the-whole-family type of game. They also expect to get their money’s worth in terms of graphics, length of the game, replayability and most importantly fun.

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Contextual Research

Game Analysis

Undertale

There are multiple endings to Undertale, however I will be focusing on the true pacifist ending as that is the most story rich and it sticks the the brief of aiming it at children.

Plot:

Humans and monsters lived side by side on the earth, until one day war broke out between them and the humans decided to banish the monsters underground and seal them there with a magical barrier that could only be crossed with one human soul and one monster soul or the barrier can be broken entirely with seven human souls. Many years later after the war, Chara, a human who had fallen down into the underground who was then adopted by King Asgore, Queen Toriel and their son Asriel. One day Chara had a plan and killed herself, then gave her soul to her brother this let Asriel pass through the barrier, however last moment he had a change of heart and decided to stay in the underground, very soon after he died from his injuries. His father was struck with grief and swore that to every human that falls down there, he with take their souls and break the barrier himself. Toriel was angered by Asgore’s behavior and fled to the Ruins, so she could protect any fallen humans. In Asgore’s attempts at breaking the barrier, he hired a ‘great’ scientist named Alphys who aimed to preserve monster souls (monster souls are destroyed immediately after death, unlike humans where they can stay intact after death) in order to destroy the barrier, she experimented with a substance called DETERMINATION and injecting it into a golden flower to give it life, eventually it succeeded and became a vessel from King Asgore’s dead child Asriel, reborn as a soulless flower, Asriel, now calling himself Flowey, felt no emotions, no happiness or love, driving him insane. Over time Asgore had accumulated six of the seven souls in order to destroy the barrier.

A long time after that, a determined child, named Frisk fell into the underground, from here the players actions dictate the story, (for the sake of my research I’ll focus on the True pacifist route.)Once you fall you encounter, Toriel, she guides you through the ruins and helps you understand the world you are in, she is the Tutorial in a way. Along the child’s journey you encounter enemies at first, however you will soon change their views of humans and become friends with them, they will help you along you journey, giving you moral support and comic relief. among these characters are some of the main characters that make your journey, you first meet Sans and Papyrus two skeleton brothers who just showed up one day in the underground. Papyrus wants to capture you to prove himself to the Royal Guard so he can become one himself, however through his poor attempts of puzzles and a lot of comic relief he realises you are a very determined child and eventually gives up, Sans on the other hand is quiet lazy and laid back he doesn’t necessarily care that you are human, he only wants to have fun and look after his naive brother and crack a lot of skeleton puns, a skeleTON ammount. You meet a lot of other foes that become friends along your journey, like Mettaton, the famous robot who has his own tv show that you are a guest on, where he tries to defeat you through various funny challenges and trials, some impossible to complete to add tension, however you always succeed thanks to Alphys who saves you every time Mettaton tries to kill you. Once you make it to a certain point in the game, Waterfall, you realise you are being pursued by Undyne the Head of the Royal Guard, this is because she had been notified by Papyrus that he found a human wearing a striped shirt. Undyne is a tough fish like monster and she’s the one thing in the way of you confronting Asgore and leaving the underground. Eventually, after a house hangout and a fight, the fight makes Undyne realise that they don’t want to hurt each other, since they both dealt 1 hit point. They eventually befriended each other and Undyne left to go hang out with Papyrus. That leaves you, the player to confront Asgore and is joined by all the friends you made along the way to persuade Asgore not to fight, this was all Flowey’s plan and he absorbs all the monsters souls and becomes the true Villain, Asriel Dreemurr, throughout the fight you call out the names of your friends souls, saving them from Asriel’s control, then you call out Asriel’s soul directing attempting to save him, Asriel soon begins to lose the will to fight and begins to cry, he destroys the barrier and asks the player to take care of his parents before he disappears. The barrier destroyed the monsters along with the human enter the human world and start happy lives together on the surface… The End.

Story Analysis

Undertale’s story put under situational Archetypes is Voyage and Return, Frisk falling into an unknown area and returning home at the end of the journey with new friends and experiences, as the game ends with returning home this tells us as the player that the journey of the underground was way more important and interesting than the destination, yes it was the thing that drove Frisk to follow their journey but the friends and new experiences they met along the way meant a lot more than just going home. This game has a lot of depth to it, which is good for an experienced player who likes finding Easter eggs and the whole story, however playing it through with a simple mindset is also very enjoyable, there is nothing forcing you to find all the secrets, I think the backstory is obviously not child friendly, however the overall fall and journey home is an interesting concept, the fighting mechanism is also a very friendly one, where the game allows for players not to fight if they choose to, and for that you are rewarded with comic relief from most of the characters you spare. I think if a child played this game I think they’d enjoy the story, you have the hero, the unexpected villain, the ally’s, a king who’s trying his best, the funny characters that you don’t take seriously, the characters are a huge part to this story and it truly makes the journey. I want to look into the characters more, select a few and analyse them, align them with the common character archetypes and see where my research takes me from there.

Summary

I want to see how well I can align Undertale’s characters and events with the different Archetypes, and from there I would like to analyse a couple of the characters to get a better understanding of what that type of Archetype is.

Undertale Character Analysis

I made this table to help me identify the Archetypes quicker I will now take a few to analyse in more detail. For this game analysis I wont choose the Hero to analyse since the character doesn’t really have many characteristics and is based on how you play and pick decisions. I will be analyzing the Mentor, Shapeshifter, and Guardian.

Mentor- Toriel

She fits the role of the Mentor really well, she’s a caring character who looks out for the child, and once she realizes the character is strong enough she leaves them and you don’t see her until the end of the game, exactly what a Mentor would do, she fits the role perfectly. Her name is Toriel, a play on the word Tutorial, she teaches you the way of the land and guides you through the Ruins. She teaches you the first rule in completing the True Pacifist Ending, don’t kill monsters.

Shapeshifter- Mettaton 

Mettaton is that one character you constantly have to question yourself whether you should trust him or not, that’s why I chose him to be the Shapeshifter, he fits the role perfectly. You don’t know if you should take his threats as jokes or not, however ultimately he is a robot who was death and violence, you can’t help but love his jokes and charming ways. I would say the relationship between Mettaton and the human is a interesting one, Mettaton surely loves to bully the child but also comes around at the end and really likes the human.

Guardian- Undyne

Undyne ultimately has one goal, to protect the underground, she’s a determined monster who wants to protect the things closest to her and we can’t argue with that. She fits the role somewhat, she is the event in the way of getting out of Waterfall and into Hotlands, She is the main obstacle in Waterfall, and once you leave waterfall and enter Hotlands, Undyne follows you and begins to burn up due to her metal armor you then give her water from the conveniently placed water fountain to your side, from then on she treats you as a friend, and looks out for you when you call her on the phone.

Villain– Flowey (Asriel Dreemerr)

From these characteristics I have learnt that he is one of the deepest characters there is in Undertale, and he fits into so many Archetypes other than Villain, such as Shapeshifter and Guardian. At the beginning of the game he greets you, coming off as a friendly flower with friendliness pellets, and explains that if you collect them all you will gain LV which stands for LOVE, however you soon realize that they hurt you and Flowey is in fact a bad guy. He is the ultimate character in the way of you and your friends freedom, he is he final boss and also the key to leaving the underground for good.

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Paper Mario

Plot:

One day, Mario and Luigi are just chilling when their day off is interrupted by Toad. Princess Peach has been kidnapped, yet again. They rush to Bowser’s Castle and find that she is being wed to him, without her consent. The marriage officiant is a mysterious figure, naming himself “Count Bleck”. Angry at the interruption of the ceremony, he orders his minion, Nastasia to hypnotise them both into marriage, thus breaking what is known as the Chaos Heart. Count Bleck uses the Chaos Heart to open up a hole called “The Void”, which will destroy the universe.

Mario, Luigi, Peach and Bowser are all separated and snapped away by Count Bleck. Mario lands in a town called Flipside where he meets a wizard called Merlon and a Pixl named Tippi. (A Pixl is a helper that grants Mario special powers.) They embark on a quest to retrieve all eight of the Pure Hearts, the “good” counterparts to the Chaos Heart, as this is the only way the Void will close. On Mario’s journey, he comes across a Scottish oaf named O’Chunks who is then revealed to be one of Bleck’s minions. After defeating him, he receives the first Pure Heart.

Peach awakens in a mysterious castle, surrounded by many Toads, and also many of Bowser’s minions. She doesn’t remember much of what happened before Nastasia took control of her mind. She wanders around the castle until she bumps into Nastasia, who teleports her elsewhere. The exact same thing happens to Luigi, except she uses her mind powers to transform Luigi into an evil bandit, naming himself “Mr. L”.

Back to Mario, he eventually comes across Bowser who is not happy to see him as he ruined his wedding ceremony. They have a brief fight, Mario winning, and Bowser decides to join his team. They then find Peach in Flipside, but she is in a deep slumber and Mario has to make a spicy soup to help wake her.

After she wakes up, they continue their journey and bump into Mr. L, who is accompanied by O’Chunks, and they engage in a fight. O’Chunks runs away, and Mario, Peach and Bowser take off Mr. L’s mask, revealing him to be Luigi. Luigi says he doesn’t remember a thing. After this, they receive the sixth Pure Heart and, upon returning to Flipside, they discover the Void has grown un-tellingly large and grow fearful of the near future. They carry on to get the seventh Pure Heart, but the world they try to enter is already deteriorating and disappearing, and as Mario walks he finds that he starts disappearing too.

Mario awakens in a place called the Underwhere, separated once again from his friends, including Tippi. He wonders around and finds the queen of the Underwhere, who teleports him to the Overthere, where he once again reunites with Peach, Luigi and Bowser. They find out that the queen of the Underwhere and the king of the Overthere have the final two Pure Hearts, so the team receives them and they go to save the world. They are teleported by Merlon to Bleck’s Castle for the final showdown, and defeat him and return peace and serenity to the world.

Story Analysis

Super Paper Mario’s story put under situational Archetypes is Overcoming the Monster and Star-crossed lovers. The game begins with Mario being called to action, being whisked away to another land and then ending with him defeating the “monster” (Count Bleck). The B-plot of the game follows Count Bleck and Tippi slowly realising that they know each other, as they were once engaged in a Romeo-and-Juliet-esque relationship, where they came from different lands and their parents didn’t approve. The story is quite long and, as it takes place across many worlds where they meet lots of characters along the way, is anything but forgettable to the characters and the player. After the player completes the game, they are free to wonder around the worlds again and remain in the same world, leading us to assume Mario stays there too. The game includes a lot of callbacks to previous entries in the Paper Mario series, although it is not necessary to know the references as they don’t defer the plot in any way. The story is not hindered much by the gameplay as, although it is an RPG, the battles aren’t turned based; rather Mario (or Peach, Bowser or Luigi) jump on enemies or use Pixls, making the boss battles quite fast paced, despite the bosses talking back to indicate their health or the battle progress. The story itself is quite ‘goofy’, in that a lot of characters have goofy quips and catchphrases that repeat through out the à la motif.

 

Super Paper Mario Character Analysis

I decided to make another table to help me outline who the characters are and match them with their archetypes. I feel like I did a good job of identifying and matching the archetype to the character.

Villain- Count Bleck

Count Bleck fits the role of villain as he is the main antagonistic force of the story of Super Paper Mario. He has his drive and emotion all related to the loss of his love, which convinced him to commit world destruction. Laying out his characteristics and needs/wants allowed me to step back and realized that he is not a typical villain as there wouldn’t be much struggle battling him. The best part of his appearance is the token top hat and monocle which bad guys usually wear in old movies, however the fact that his suit/cloak is black is quite telling of how his two personalities (his good and evil personalities) clash with each other, creating a flawed yet relatable villain.

Trickster/Guardian – Dimentio

Dimentio is a confusing character, he is a guardian and trickster, and later a proper villain. For some of the game, he convinces Mario and co. that he is a good guy and reformed, then turns around and reveals he is still evil and serving Count Bleck; it’s then revealed that he does not want to serve Count Bleck as he feels he is too weak and held back by his past. He wishes to control his fellow minions and assume Count Bleck’s role as world destroyer, but its clear that he needs control and direction by the fact that even he can’t carry out his master plan for world domination.

Guardian- Nastasia

Nastasia is one of the only female characters in the story and rather than being a typical bad-ass female that answers to no one, she works under Count Bleck and over the course of the story discovers that she is in love with Count Bleck. She uses hypnotism to take control of Bowser’s minions and other characters, but gets upset by the fact that she is usually left uncredited or without the praise she yearns for. When she finds out that Count Bleck is still in love with his previous love, she gives up and stops serving him.

SUMMARY

Researching these games will allow me to develop a story when the time comes. I’ll be able to have a better idea of the stories concept. This has also given me the inspiration I need to start the rough ideas for the game. Characters have much more of a personality, even the most simplest of characters.

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Visual Analysis

KLAUDIA:

I have chosen this image as my visual analysis because as the brief describes, it is’ colourful and beautiful’. It is definitely eye catching as there is a lot going on, even in the background. The main focus of the image is obviously the girl and the little bear she’s holding as they’re on the main plan. The shadows are unusually done- the bear has yellow shadowing while the girl’s hair reflects in the colours of the background-sky.

The characteristics of the two are very animated, the eyes bring the most attention. With the bear they’re kept in the blueish scheme however once we move onto the girl we notice a random mix of pink, orange and greens. Apart from the random coloured reflections, we do actually have a bit of actual shadows and highlights. They’re random as well but at least they’re there e.g. a snowflake on the girl’s face has a shadow underneath it. In the real world that wouldn’t be the case as the snowflake is not solid and is rather transparent but the game presents it as solid object that gives off a shadow.

We can tell the texture of the bear only by the fact it has several lines drawn on showing the direction of the fur. These lines have a shadow underneath to show the depth of it as well which is a nice touch considering the shadow work is a bit off throughout the image. The same technique is applied onto the fur on a girl’s coat.

The pink of the coat plays well together with the background, it doesn’t contrast but instead plays along quite well. The background consists of a colour scheme including pink, orange and purples.They all mix really well to create a sunset effect or the well known Northern lights assuming the scenery is in a cold place.

Throughout the background there are noticeable swirls of what we can assume is wind and snowflakes floating in the air.That’s an addition to the already quite overwhelming background. It definitely catches attention- especially a child’s attention,which will contribute to the interest the image receives.

The image as a whole is very appealing to the eye, it definitely remains in the child friendly area and represents a form of an individual art style.

Doing this visual analysis allowed me to see how colours can be used to mislead the eye as well as the out of place shadows because assumingly kids won’t pay too much attention to the realistic detail. This made me come to a conclusion that a lot of kids illustrations aren’t really accurate and the details make us wonder why it’s done the way it is when it easily could be done accurately with the right inclusion of shadows, eye colors, transparency etc. This knowledge can be applied onto making a character for the game- avoiding the same mistakes.

 

SEAN:

Upon looking at multiple different concept art, I decided to look more into Nintendo games, and their concept art. I think this would be useful to me due to the fact that it is the sort of art style we will be aiming to provide when making our own concept art and models.

When analyzing this piece of concept art, there are multiple things that I want to discuss regard visual elements & principles. Some of the elements that I think apply to this art including colour, light and texture.

When looking more into the colours of the art, its obvious that the artist was trying to use more vibrant shades of orange and yellow. The colours work well with the sandy vibe to the area, and the sunset theme reflecting off of the sand and crystals in the area is working really well to provide the viewer with a sense of what they area in the is going to really be about. Some of the smaller colours also stick to a specific rule, none of them are really primary, a lack of any real shade of red, blue or green is evident. Instead, we have light purples, oranges as well as aqua blue and lime green.

When discussing the light in the image, I believe there is a lot to talk about here. The sunset theme of the desert works to cast shadows on a lot of the objects in the image. The sun also manages to make glimmers of light on Mario’s hand, nose and hat as well as the shards of crystals stuck in the sand. I think the colours used really work well to make the lighting in the area in the art that much better, and it works really well.

The textures in the image are meant to give of a roughness, for example, the sand, although meant to look rough, the art style it is given give off a more smoother look. The brush strokes are generally going in one direction, which gives off the impression that the textures are smoother than the artist may have first intended when making the concept art.

This piece of concept art is very interesting due to the fact that it represents what looks to be the finished game. This suggest either Nintendo knew what they wanted it to look like from the start, which is unlikely, or the concept art we have here was made quite late on in the games development.

The colours that are present in the image are quite interesting to really analyse. Most of the colour in the images have a blue-ish tint to it all. The purple mist covering the castle in the distance has shades of blue mixed into it, the castle itself, which is supposed to be shaded out is also a very dark shade of blue and grey. The green colour is most visible to first glancing at the art. The moss and rust growing on the Guardian matches the environment as it is placed in a grassy swampland, backed up by what looks to be water in the bottom of the image. You are also able to see trees to the left and right side of the art, which further backs up the location I had previously suggested.

The shapes of everything in the image have a distorted, warped look to them. This is most likely due to the fact that it looks like the concept art was created with what looks to be water colours. This washed out water effect is most likely inspired by the actual games art style, which is cell shaded. Because of this, the overall detail and texture in the game is lacking, which isn’t exactly a bad thing, it is just the art style that the development team went for.

I also thought it would be useful to look into some character concept art from popular Nintendo games such as Super Mario Odyssey. In this concept, the art shows Mario and Cappy. The art demonstrates how the player would throw Cappy in the game as another move to add to Mario’s move-set in game. This move is a key and essential part of the game, and the concept art shows the player how this is going to look in game.

 

CHRIS:

Ultimate fishing simulator is a game produced by a company called Ultimate games, they are a sub-company to a large group known as PlayWay. This company was founded in 2011 and has made a multitude of games within the last 10 years and one of their most notable games was this one, ultimate fishing simulator. The game takes a mostly realistic art style direction when focusing on the game where the players hands are made to look somewhat real and the fish are textured correctly to feel like the real thing. This is done effectively to make players connect more with the game and teach them the way of fishing.

The mountains and background areas are done with relatively lover quality to give more focus on what’s going on with your character and your fishing rod, rather than the scenery. This strategy could have been both effective or not depending on the type of game but in this situation, I feel that it has worked out well. The designs see bright colours used for most of the objects in the scene apart from the clothes on the player’s character which could have been used to make a contrast with the bright coloured fish that get pulled up with the fishing rod. This is effective in bringing the players attention to the caught fish instead of somewhere else.

I believe that the style of this game would suit the two potential ideas that we came up with, these being ‘Vlad’s fishing adventure’ and ‘Prop Escape’ and would make the games look much better than if they were made using a different style. This is just based upon potential ideas and might not suit the final chosen idea.

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Artist Research

KLAUDIA:

AKI KONDO

Aki Kondo is a creator of the world wide known Rilakkuma character who is a very laid back bear with a light approach to life. Aki has worked with San-X to release the project in 2003. As the years moved on, the bear has collected a very big popularity which could be compared to the most famous Hello Kitty-a Japanese creation.

All of this is a result of Aki graduating Junior College of Art and Design at Joshibi University of Art and Design which then allowed her to move onto employment for San-X in 1997. After releasing Rilakkuma in 2003, Aki left  her job at San-X and became a freelance illustrator and designer.

The demand for this bear is growing each day, as a Netflix show called ‘ Rilakkuma and Kaoru’ is launched, the popularity will increase even more creating a bigger demand for the merch and anything related to the brown bear.

Aki Kondo has always wanted a dog, one day she saw a very spoiled chihuahua which made her come to realisation she doesn’t just want the dog itself, she wants its life.

Aki mentioned that she wanted the bear to make look a little out of place- that’s where it’s bent posture came from. Her beliefs where that the bear should appear to be cute but at the same time out of place.

That hasn’t led her character to success at first, Rilakkuma has taken its time to gain popularity as people weren’t really used to cute characters with not as positive personalities and outlooks on life. Another example of a character like this that appeared later on is Gudetama- a miserable egg.

Artists have started creating characters which represent the everyday reality and feelings. We assume that the characters are aimed at kids which will mean that we want the today kids to grow up with the understanding of how feelings and life work, that not everyday will be filled with happiness and that things do happen.

By doing this artist research, I was able to explore the depth of the character created. There isn’t a lot of information on the illustrator itself, however the character managed to get the fame it deserves for its individual outlook on life. Allowing kids to see and be a fan of a miserable character develops a better view on life as the reality is put into cute characters. This information is useful for when we come up with the plot of the game, will kids appreciate the realistic world or do they wanna escape the world covered in sweets and pancakes?

 

CHRIS:

Anton Fadeev

Anton is a Russian environment concept artist who has been working on a lot of scenery designs for something called Duelyst. There was not much personal information on him however just by inferring the picture he has of himself on his webpage, he seems to be quite young (probably mid 20s-early 30s) and has done quite a fair bit of concept artists.

The design I chose to look at of his of a cliff with bright waterfalls flowing down towards a calm ocean.

I like this design as it is simple yet good to look at and fits with the specifications for our unit very well. It is very bright and has a good mix of dark greens/browns with the light greens and blues. I like the idea of having something rest atop the cliff which in my opinion would work pretty well for a simple game concept. I’m also a fan of the fact that it clearly didn’t take many complicated colours to make this image which shows that simplicity can also work really well. I believe this will come in handy as good reference material for when we work on the game we choose to go with.

 

Brandon Reimchen

Brandon is the concept designer and head of the concept art department for CGSpectrum. CGSpectrum is an online school of animation and Brandon is one of the mentors there. He received his degree in Fine Arts during 2003, after which he began working in the video game industry as a concept artist. The companies he has worked for include EA, Activision, Capcom, Gree and Disney Interactive.

The work of his I chose to look at was the scenery of a floating island.

I like how the style of the concept was designed and uses the small light from the campfire to illuminate the entire design. Personally, I believe that this style would only suit the game we are making if it’s a really specific idea however I chose to look at it anyway because I enjoy concepts like this one and It could come in handy throughout the unit. The use of different shades of greens mixed with yellows shows good use of lighting and works well with the blue rivers that transfer into light and dark purple colors when they fall.

It isn’t completely what the unit asks for as there is a lot of dark in the scene however I think that it is still a colorful scenery that would appeal to quite a few people.

 

Chris Xia

not much is known about Chris other than the fact that he is a character concept artist that has been working on Duelyst. Even though there is no information about him I chose the design of his to look at because I like the style and I believe it is easily referenceable for our unit. The design I chose to go with is a red-clothed assassin under the name of Kaido Assassin.

I like how the design uses simple colours like red and black in order to bring out the light of the character in comparison to the long, dark blade he is holding. I’m also a fan of the Chinese-style headwear he is shown wearing, it allows the design to become much simpler as the hair and some of the facial features are not needed to be included because of it, it is also a good design piece as well. while I don’t think this specific style will fit perfectly with our idea, I believe it is a good reference and starting point to build upon in order to create our own characters and concepts. This can be taken in many ways, for the character, the weapon or even how the clothes are designed. An example of this is how the top is tight-fitting however the leg-wear is quite large and easily movable. This was used by the Asian countries for easy movement.

 

Hideki Konno

Hideki was born on May 13^th 1965 and is a video game director and producer who works for the company Nintendo. He had joined the company in 1986 which realised his dream after the admiration due to playing Famicom games (a console that was remodelled into becoming the NES.) he was the lead producer for the Mario Kart series of games for years and in 2015 Hideki began managing Nintendo’s mobile projects at their Entertainment planning and development division. This lead to the production of the popular Mario Kart Tour in 2019.

The specific game I chose to look at for research is Mario Kart Wii. The game was released worldwide on April 27^th 2008 and was a massive hit throughout the globe, causing people to still play the game to this day.

The game is designed using mostly bright colours so the style suits what our units specification requires, therefore it is a good art style to look at for reference. The game has a simple texturing on the road that is easy to identify even for new players and doesn’t use to many high textured pieces. They also use contrasting colours for the out of bounds areas on most tracks in order to help players identify the difference between the race track and the off-road area.

After looking at the scenes around the character, next is looking at the actual playable characters/vehicles. They are designed with bright colours such as red, blue and yellow in order to stand out from the track and draw attention to them, on top of this they are streamlined and resemble actual go-karts and motorcycles in order to add some connectivity to them and the real world. They are not super high-quality models and designs however they look good and are not to complicated to make, this makes for popular designs as it isn’t to complex for the eye to look at.

 

 

SEAN:

Justin Sweet

Working in the illustration industry for over 20 years, Justin Sweet has worked on multiple big name projects for movies and video games. Sweet is most know for working as a concept artist for multiple big movies and projects such as The Lion King remake, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Jungle Book remake, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: The Dark World and the Narnia films.

Sweet has a very recognizable style of art. A lot of the work he does are very similar to one another and share a visual art style. In this piece, a women looks to be gazing into a circular pool of water, a cloaked figure is standing in the distance, watching. They both seem to inhabit a cave like structure of some sort, with a cliff looming behind them.

More recognizably, this piece is something he worked on when working as an illustrator on The Jungle Book. The art sees Shere Khan standing on an above bolder. Mowgli is crouching down below him on a different bolder, another figure is slightly visible in the bottom of the screen, lurking in the shadow. The style of the art is similar to before, which helps to give his own work personality and will possibly help people to recognize his work in the future.

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Story Ideas

During a table meeting we planned out some rough ideas for a story for our game, we wrote down our rough ideas on A3 pieces of paper, this will give us a good basis for our future story.

Jessica and Carla, Wrote down multiple ideas on a piece of paper unlike Klaudia, Chris and Sean who created stories that had more detail. Chris and Sean worked together to create 3 game ideas (the 5th, 6th and 7th photos) Carla’s ideas were displayed on one sheet (photo 1), giving more of a game style and genre, as well as what she’d include within the game, she also did a small analysis of Candy Crush, and gave the pitch of ‘Candy Crush with a plot’ which we thought would have obvious copy write issues, she also was focused on a game for a phone, it was a good idea, but since we are working for Nintendo we should really pick a Nintendo console for the game, since we have to do control layout etc. Jessica’s ideas, were also displayed on one sheet (photo 2) and she had a similar mindset to Carla, when we said game ideas, she focused on what would be good things to include in the game and what would teach the young audience correctly, right from wrong. She spoke about a spirit animal or a familiar of some kind, which would help the player. She pitched that having gender neutral characters would allow the player to have more freedom to imagine the characters in their own way. Klaudia had two ideas (photo 3 & 4) the first one being ‘Jump for the Lolly’ in this she described both gameplay and story elements, it was an impressive idea and it opened a lot of research ideas branching from that. ‘Ms Curly’ was her other idea, at first glace the rest of the group wasnt interested with this idea since we thought it was another ‘free hairdressing game’ you see on multiple different free games websites, however after she explained that it indeed had a story to it, the gameplay of this was very similar to her other game, however with different elements sprinkled in, still the same idea of collecting something to move on. Sean and Chris had multiple ideas, all of which were vastly different from eachother. The first of them (photo 5) was the idea to make a fishing adventure game, in which the player was required to collect fish in order to feed a friendly shark. The shark would then let you progress by riding on its back to different levels. The second (photo 6) was mostly in line with the idea to promote a safe environment for children when playing video games. A kart racer for kids, where the karts and arenas were harm proof and filled with pillows and bouncing walls. This would be beneficial for children to play due to the fact that it had a significant lack of harm or damage that came to the characters in game, the idea was one of the less developed but was kept in as a concept. The third idea they had consisted of the player taking control of multiple variations of typical house hold item, with the intention of escaping the house through a designated escape route. The player would have to do so whilst staying undetected by the human who would be freely roaming the household at the same time. They had also come up with a difficulty system. Playing as smaller items such as a lamp would provide the player with an easier experience whereas playing as a microwave would be a more difficult. They had also come up with a mode to play as the human, looking for the items and stopping them from escaping. The difficulty modes, as you’d expect, would be flipped as the smaller items would provide a more difficult experience for the player.

Summary

After making our ideas we had a difficult decision to make, we needed to pick one or two we liked in order to develop apon them and do further research if needed. So we decided to vote, and Sean and Chris’s ‘The escape, of the household items’ and Klaudia’s ‘jump for the lolly’ were chosen to be developed further, before developing them we obviously had faults with each idea, however if we address them now we can work together to fix then in the long run.

Sean and Chris’s idea: The lack of story potential that came with this idea was an immediate problem in which we had identified in the beginning, but we was intrigued by the pitch and was optimistic in that we wanted to explore the potential that the idea had, so we furthered the idea and developed it further as a team.

Klaudia’s idea: The story for this idea, is very ‘set in stone’ and it would be very difficult to change it in a way that would keep to the original feel of things. In her idea she only mentions three characters, this would be difficult to add more characters to a story that has already has a ‘set in stone’ story. We do still want to develop it and see where the story goes.

From the development of these ideas, we will have another vote on what we should develop even further and eventually become our final vertical slice of a game.

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Additional Visual Analysis

We noticed that our idea for Animated objects could be referenced to Beauty and the Beast. Animated objects in this film include; Mrs. Potts, Maestro Cadenza, Madame de Garderobe, Plumette, Chip, Cogsworth and Lumière. Doing some additional Visual research will not only give us more inspiration into creating the objects but it’ll also give us a good basis if we want to build this idea up further.

Their designs don’t seem awkward and they work very well as a face. They come across friendly. They are also household items, that don’t have cartoony arms and legs, they use their own object assets to mimic a nose, arms and legs instead of them protruding from their bodies looking out of place. They all have eyebrows, which is a good idea since it’ll show expression on a character as well as a mouth. Each character has different facial characteristics making them all look unique, for example the eye shapes on each character aren’t the same, along with the noses and expressions. I think the colors they chose for each character all works well, having the teapot and the cup the same colors looks way more coordinated than if they were different. The off-white and purple, contrasting with the other objects pleases the eye, since they are all neutral toned.

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Story Developing #1

Name- Jump for the lolly

Characters- Li’l sister, Li’l brother

Villains- Evil bees

World- Sweetie island

Story- Li’l brother/sister is trapped somewhere on the island after running away and getting lost during a game of hide’n’seek. (Backstory- the siblings have been teleported to the island out of nowhere. They’re clueless but no matter what they will always look and for one another.)

He/she’s gone and one thing’s for sure.. they need to be found. As the main player is trying to find the other sibling, they collect sweets from the island to get energy and save some for the trapped sibling. As they’re doing it, he bees realize THEIR sweets are being picked up and the chase begins. To lose the bees you could easily drop all the sweets and recollect them later.

As you arrive to your missing sibling with no sweets, they will be very exhausted and crying therefore depending on their mood you might have to run back and collect more sweets before being able to fully escape them.

The villain- The bees can chase or sting the sibling, if chased you can avoid losing you sweets by hiding but you can just drop the sweets and the bees will disappear. If you get stung by a bee, your energy level drops by a lot and it takes longer to get through the island.

To win you need to find the missing sibling while making sure yours and their energy levels are high enough to move on by eating the collected sweets.

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Story Developing #2

Name- The Escape, from the household items.

Characters- Objects, scientist, child

World-  A Neighborhood

A mad scientist who devoted his life in order to insert souls into in animate object is finally successful, and manages to bring a spatula to life. He spends the next few years bringing multiple different items to life, toilet paper, TV remotes, mugs and other cutlery. After living in harmony for many years, the Scientist passes away due to old age. Following his death was a yard sale, in which all of the living items were sold to multiple different families. Confused, the items must escape their new ‘home’ undetected by the human families living there, in order for them to return home…

Although interesting, this story idea didn’t have enough depth to be the final idea, and adapting it was a key part of my job. We knew we needed to keep the story simple, and easy for younger audiences to understand when going into the game.

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We decided on the second game idea, we realized that there was pros and cons for both games, we had voted for the best one, and overall discussed why we chose the one we did, Chris and Sean obviously liked the idea they came up with more since they created it and thought there was better room for improvement compared to the other. Carla chose the second one mainly because she thought it had the most flexibility and it wasn’t completely set in stone unlike the other game. Jess believed she could do lots more with story developing if she chose this one. Klaudia, though compelled to her idea, she agreed to step out of her comfort zone for the sake of the project. Overall we all decided that this was the best idea, even if it took a little persuading.

 

Treatment Sheet

Attempt 1-

I liked this idea, however I would have struggled to complete the story if I had went with this attempt.

I really wanted to give homage to Undertale, so I had placed Flowey imagery within the story; “flower generator” and Flowey was also the reason why I chose yellow for the color of the button on the device. Nauka and Rika, their names are both Science in Polish and Japanese. I chose these names because they are unique, I wanted unusual names similar to Frisk from Undertale. Though I didn’t develop the characters personality, due to the lack of time, I imagine Spatchy the Spatula’s personality is similar to Sans from Undertale, lighthearted and the comic relief.

My image of the opening scene would be an old retro TV, with the news reporter explaining what has happened. Then it would cut to the main characters running away from the house.

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Character Ideas

These are some of the object ideas we threw together when sitting around a table, speaking about the kind of objects that would help during the missions too. These are some objects we are wanting to model in 3DSMax too.

 

Chris did some concept art for the child and scientist.

 

 

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House Plans Inspiration

Basic House Plan

I wanted to look for inspiration in which I could use to draw up my own designs for levels. Most house plans that I looked at were all consistent in their designs. The rooms are labeled and semi-detailed in what the rooms consist of, sofa’s, tables, chairs etc.

I liked these designs due to the fact that they were easy to replicate, and make an example of what one of mine would look like. I attempted to replicate this house plan when designing my own levels for the game.

Level Concept Art

I decided to make a smaller level in game, the level consists of a single room, with only one small room being the bathroom. Easy to escape, but hard to not be detected while doing so. The human would be walking around the flat while the chosen item roams the room completing a certain amount of tasks before making their escape.

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3DSMax Modeling

I started modeling some of the games characters in 3DSMax. I then wanted to analyse the screenshots I took while doing this process:

I began by creating a cylinder object which emulated a handle for the spatula. From there I decided to build the stem of the spatula.

This part was a little trickier to create due to the fact that it required me to make three separate holes to create the design for the top.

When designing the facial features, I wanted to make them as child friendly as possible. The large eyes and brows are unrealistic and cartoon like, which is the effect I was going for.

I wanted to add legs to the spatula, but upon looking more at our original designs, we decided to remove the legs from the model.

I decided it would be best to remove the handle and start again by beveling the neck out from the base of the top part of the spatula.

The finishing stages included creating a nose and mouth for the spatula in order to add character to it. TurboSmooth was also added to this model to finish it off.

The finished version, I had slightly altered the shape of the hands to make a more rounded shape for the Spatula. I also added teeth in the mouth.

To start with, I created a simple cylinder object and created a hole through the middle of it.

I created a second cylinder shape in order to create the brown colored cardboard piece with sits in the centre of the roll. I also created a piece of toilet paper hanging off the side of the roll, to add more identity and character.

I wanted the face to look similar to the spatula’s face design, to keep consistency within the designs.

I used a flat circle plane and molded it in order to form the cowboy hat design that is present in the final design.

The final cowboy hat design is formed really well in my opinion. A good use of the chamfer tool in 3dsmax was key in creating the correct curvature needed to make a realistically design hat.

The finished model is presented really well. The hat while out of place, still provides the character and recognition that any character needs in gaming and anywhere in general.

The photo item design was intentionally different. The face of the item is put onto the person in the photo frame, which i though was a smart use of the character’s design.

This simple design of a USB stick character was made as being one of the smaller characters in game.

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Rigging and skinning the human characters

To further our work, we decided it would be a good idea to attempt to model the human characters who would feature in game. So we got started as follows:

To begin with, I created a cuboid shape and molded it into a more body looking shape. I also made a symmetry modifier, this would make the process a lot more precise an time saving. I created the arm by beveling out from the side of the body in order to make the more muscular top part of the arm, followed by beveling twice more to emulate the look of an elbow. I repeated this process when making the wrist and hand.

The creation process for the legs was not dissimilar to the arm creation process. It required the same steps that the arms did, with beveling out to form the top half, knee and bottom half of the leg, as well as the foot.

The first version of what the human body should look like.

I began going round the body and making some of the features more curvy and smooth. Things such as the legs were now more rounded, which would help out once it came to skinning the model.

Me adjusting the line of symmetry to match with the form of the body.

I make this quite head shape as a place holder, this was because we were modelling a head separately, and it would be imported in once it was finished.

 

The body was finished, we imported the head and changed its skin color to match the character we had designed.

We created the bones for the character and named them all accordingly.

The controllers consisted on 9 circles all aligned in specific spots. The base of the model, both feet, the waist, the elbows, the hands and the head.

Skinning this model in particular was a difficult process, its always very precise and picky.

The skinning process required a nice gradient of colour flowing through the limbs, as shown here.

Posing the model was also a picky process, as the arms malfunctioned a lot of the time, which required me to fix them.

I made a clipboard prop in which was intended for the scientist to hold in his final model.

Once the model was finished, we were required to use a PolyDraw tool in order to make his clothes.

 

We wanted to make the head of the child look more child like, to do so we were required to look at example of 3DSMax models online, and attempting to repeat the process of what they did throughout.

We created a neck by extruding the hole underneath the head of the child.

Final Rendered

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Video Game Splash Screens

A splash screen is a screen which shows up while a game or program is loading. It can contain logos, names of developers, the current version of the software/game or can be a simple loading screen with a symbol to represent loading. Splash screens for apps and mobile games are typically quite short and sweet, such as the Twitter logo below as mobile users (everyone) will want to get everywhere as quick as possible, so loading times and loading screens are minimal or sometimes non-existent.

Some game consoles have splash screens, although nowadays it is rare that they’re flashy, iconic or even memorable: most simply show the logo for a few seconds then fade to the menu. The Nintendo Switch loading screen is probably the most memorable in recent years, especially with its distinct clicking sound when the animated Joycon slides down.

Splash Screen Recreation

I decided to recreate the splash screen/loading screen to the mobile game, Pokemon GO. I added a fade-in effect for the Niantic/The Pokemon Company screen (which is absent in the original) and an abrupt cut to the loading screen. I also added a cell-shaded effect to the image of Charizard to make it look a bit more dynamic and vibrant. I even recreated the loading bar and applied an ease in to the first keyframe and an ease to out the last keyframe. I think the recreation is very true to the original and maybe even a slight improvement, however I should have changed the font or made it bold for the “Remember to be alert at all times. Be aware of your surroundings.” as it blends in with the background a bit and some parts are almost unreadable. This has helped me to understand the components for creating a splash screen and I will use the skills when it comes to making the final splash screen for our game.

I also remade the Nintendo Switch logo using Adobe Animate as more practice for when I make the final splash screen.

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Primary Research-

Games I (Carla) Played As A Child

Super Paper Mario is a side-scrolling/three-dimensional non-turn-based RPG featuring characters from the Super Mario series. It is one of the first RPG games I played and fits the criteria of our project perfectly. The game is quite story heavy and, although it was difficult for me to comprehend the complicated story when I played the game when I was a child, as I have grown and replayed the game I appreciate the effort the writers and game developers put into making it and I have grown to love the whole Paper Mario series as the witty humor and characters are present throughout.

Super Mario Galaxy is another game I played when I was little, probably one of the first Nintendo Wii games I played. It’s a linear platformer where Mario has to hop between planets collecting power stars to power an observatory to reach Bowser. The game is quite simple and straightforward, giving the player a clear goal right from the beginning. The levels are also structured quite simply but the graphics make the experience pleasant and memorable. The game is filled with happy and colourful characters that are kid-friendly and comical which makes the whole game fun and enjoyable for anyone of any age.

Banjo-Kazooie is a platforming collect-a-thon game released in 1998 for the Nintendo 64. Developed by Rareware and licensed by Nintendo, it lives in the hearts of many who grew up during its release, including myself despite first playing it years after the release. The game, despite having very out-dated graphics by today’s standards, was a masterpiece and a flagship title for the platforming genre of the time, almost besting Super Mario 64. The game is colourful, action-packed and filled to the brim with witty dialogue and edgy (but kid friendly) humour, evidently written by Brits.

The game perfectly fits in with our criteria for making a game, as it is quite story-heavy with simple to understand controls and mechanics, beatable in a few hours, and child friendly. The game is definitely one of the brighter titles on the N64, visually and story-wise, which made it perfect for kids and their parents alike.

I am glad that I kept the box for Banjo Kazooie and that it is in okay quality because looking back I can now appreciate the extra work put into the blurb and the colourful boxart, and we can use this when we make a blurb/description for our game.

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Experimentation

I decided that I wanted to do some experimental work for the project, namely making some clay models with the modelling clay upstairs in The Store. I stuck to one colour when modelling as I figured using multiple colours and layers of clay would have taken a while and the clay likely wouldn’t have set in time. Obviously I used white for the eyes to distinguish the “bodies” of the items from the eyeballs.

The first model I made was of a small mug. It was the easiest thing to start with and making it hollow was done in a pinch (literally). I started by making the mug as I knew it could be done quickly and easily and wouldn’t have required any other colours for you to know that it is a mug. The hardest part of modelling the mug was making the handle and ensuring it would stay on the model; this was expected as the model is tiny and it was hard to keep even the model in shape while I was trying to attach the handle.

Obviously the model isn’t perfect, but I’m happy with how it came out, especially the eyes and mouth.

Profile Of Muggy

Next I decided to model a candle. From first glace, I would imagine it would be pretty hard for someone to discern what it is. I could have modelled it to look and be a bit more stable and cylindrical but I’m glad with how it turned out as its good practice and experimental.

I also modeled a TV remote roughly the same size as the candle. Next to Muggy, it was the easiest to model as all I had to do was make a flat shape and pinch it in certain places, and add “buttons” and an “infrared censor”. This is the model I’m the most happy with as it came out looking most like the object I was aiming for, while simultaneously being quite easy to model due to its simplicity.

My spatula model is definitely the best of all of the models, considering my use of different colours, but it was also the hardest and longest to model of all of the models I made. It was also the largest. I decided to model the spatula as from quite early on in the project I knew we would be including a spatula one way or another. I used a different colour for the handle so it would be easier to identify what it is.

I started by doing a rough sketch of the outline (and grooves) and modeled based almost solely on the sketch. I later used a crafting knife to cut out the grooves one by one.

Size Conparison

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Deciding on Our Company Name

In our first meeting, we had to decide on our team/company name. A lot of the names we chose were quite random and had basically no thought. For some reason, I was drawn to naming our company after an exotic or tropical fish. We found the absurd fish, the “humuhumunukunukuadua’a”, a Hawaiian fish that was the “state fish” from 1985-1990, also known as the “reef triggerfish”. The voting was split between two choices; “Bean” and “Kunuku” (humuhumunukunukuadua’a), with Kunuku being voted for the most.

Splash Screen Rough Designs

With the name of our company chosen, we felt that we’d need to design a little logo to use on the splash screen inspired by the fish it’s named after.

By the time we started to make the third rough design we found we were strapped for time so we designed it digitally and decided to develop it to be the final logo design.

Splash Screen Storyboards

This storyboard is quite simple. It just depicts the “Kunuku fish” swimming around in the sea while waves and bubbles float around him, ending with him freezing and the words fading in to meet him. I used the third rough design for use in the storyboard.

I decided to include the Nintendo logo in this splash screen as I knew I would need to include it in the whole splash screen once it was completed. I decided to utilise the sand from our final logo design (below) and thought about how I could animate the fish and sand. I used colours for this storyboard as the sand in black looked like mould (ew) and I thought it would have been out of place to only have the sand in colour so I decided to colour the fish too.

Final Logo Design

I used the existing base of our third rough design to make the final logo. We decided to give the fish a bright colour palette, but couldn’t decide on which colours, so we used multiple colours to form a rainbow gradient. We applied a filter to the colours to make it more vibrant and to represent the vibrancy of Hawaii and then added a sandy-looking background to represent the seaside of Hawaii using a special brush we downloaded from Brusheezy. The words “Kunuku” and “Studios” are supposed to look ‘splashy’ and represent water and the sea/beach further, we designed them to be messy and without order to represent a child style and to appeal to kids more.

Final Splash Screen

For the splash screen, I separated the layers of the original logo using Photoshop and copy + pasted them separately into Adobe Animate. I used the regular brush tool to animate a shadow of the fish falling onto the sand then resized the fish to make it look as if it was falling. I then tracked the words to come diagonally from the sides of the screen to meet the fish. Instead of having the Nintendo logo appear first, I decided to have it appear after our logo as I noticed thats how most game splash screens are (developer then publisher). I like how the splash screen came out overall but I think the animation could have been a bit smoother and I should have made there be some more movement to the fish. I designed the Nintendo logo by myself based on the logo I drew in the storyboard.

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USER INTERFACES ( UI’S)

User interfaces as well known as UI’s are an interaction between a computer and the user. In a game it works as an interaction between the user and the game/story. It’s the control of the whole game therefore all our responses affect the game.

UI’s can be recognised in a form of a map that appears on our screen during ,before or after the game. They usually appear as a screen in which we decide what happens next: pick a level, change the username, hair colour of the character etc. In simple words, we’re allowed to change the settings and we’re in control of what happens next.

These kind of user interfaces are typically found in kid friendly games. Icons are big and clear which eliminates any confusion for the children. The colour scheme is very obnoxious which will obviously attract the attention of a child right after starting up a game or between levels ( when the UI appears).  Other interactions- settings, appear right under the levels for an easy access and once again we don’t want kinds confused looking for all different settings.

Right here is an another example of a user interface. This one here presents a page a user gets to see after completing a stage/level of a game. We’re informed about the success so far and have a possibility to move onto another level or restart the game. This easy set up allows avoiding confusion for the kids and makes it clear to follow through.

The lettering in these sort of UI’s always seems to be very bold which of course makes it more readable as well as eye catching which is what we want in a game in general.

The visual part of UI’s is what counts, especially in a children’s game. If we want an interaction from the user then we need to make sure the interaction will go smoothly. If the user can’t see the commands because the background is too distracting or the writing /font isn’t big enough then the whole point of UI automatically can become a failure.

The design of the UI’s does indeed play a massive role in the game.Many things need to be taken into consideration. The layout, the colour scheme and how informative it is. It’s worth remembering that some people are colour blind, so if colours used are the ones a player can’t see then what happens next? The game is pretty much unplayable for them.

The two main types of user interfaces are the CLI ( command line interface ) and GUI ( graphical user interface ), these are the ones we mostly notice- menus, next level display, end of the game/restart the game, enter a username/ name for the character.

It is right to say that the game hurts itself if the UI provide too little or too much information. New players may find it hard to interact with it if like mentioned before, the UI’s aren’t easy to follow or clear enough to understand.

A good UI will be there to provide information and once that is absorbed, it just stays out of the way.A good UI will have one most important characteristic- USABILITY. We need to be able to use it comfortably and that’s not questionable.

If we play a game a lot, we can manage to learn all the important interactions and memorise them for our advantage. We can memorise a good interaction pattern and get rid of the bad one for a more enjoyable game play.

Many people believe that UI’s should be left to an artist to design as it involves the eye catching design. It’s a logical process and does require a bit more than just artistry. What we can expect is the person who has come up with the game and knows it very well to come up with the UI’s, in that way they know what to include and where to include it.

This is an example of a UI where the user gets to decide what a character looks like. We can see that a character generator can be found under the UI section since it’s us that decide what happens to it and what it ends up looking like. This type of UI, allows creativity and individuality which then can make the game more enjoyable as we’re aware of the fact that we created our own version of a character.

The additional option to customise a character is quite popular within children’s games as it adds a bit more to the game and allows more playing around which means the gameplay hours will extend.

After researching the internet on UI’s, I have come to six statements which are good to think about when designing UI’S:

1. Predict what the user wants to know, and give them that information.
2. Information must be easy to find.
3. Your UI should be easy to use and navigate. Use established patterns where you can: Everyone knows that Ctrl-Click adds items to the selection, so don’t make it swap items instead.
4. Make the user’s location in the menu system obvious, and make it obvious where the user can go and what they can do from there.
5. Minimise load times and avoid animations in your menus.
6. Eliminate or simplify repetitive tasks.

This information is useful for people ( mostly designers ) who have come to the work with UI’s for the first time. Knowing how they’re useful and how they work allows more detailed work and an easier gameplay for the users as everything is put together nicely.

The list is short and informative, if it’s followed then the UI’s should be useful for the user, as in this project our main focus is a game for children, it’s important that we focus on the ease the game can be played with and don’t include unnecessary, additional stuff which can lead to confusion.

Researching UI’s will be helpful as we try to focus on how it affects the game and how the interactions between a user and a game are made. Knowing the information provided, will make it much easier for us to know what to include and what is unnecessary especially with the fact that the audience for the game will be children and everything needs to be made clear for them.

Klaudia’s GAME ANALYSIS 

Spyro Reignited Trilogy-

This game is a product of Toys for Bob and is run on Nintendo Switch. The trilogy was released in November 2019 even though its original release was supposed to be in September, it’s still very recent. It’s priced at £34.99 and consists of three most loved games – Spyro™ the Dragon, Spyro™ 2: Ripto’s Rage! and Spyro™: Year of the Dragon. This spin off was a celebration for Spyro’s 20th anniversary.

It’s a platform game in which you play as a purple dragon- Spyro. While on your adventure, you collect diamonds which then all add up. Your goal is to set all the other dragons free from crystal prisons which are all over the world. Main world has a portal which allows moving onto different levels.

The game’s plot and design seems to fit the young audience. Its colourful and lively world and characters are obviously very pleasing for the eye.Everything seems to be rounded therefore there’s no sharp edges – no promotion of violence.  The cute looking dragon with massive colour matched eyes seems to be followed by his companion- a small,shiny dragon fly everywhere he moves. This shows bonding between two characters that are nothing alike, no exclusions. It sets off a good example for children as it shows that even though there’s no similarities between someone, they still deserve to be included.

The game has a huge popularity. Steam rates are 10/10, showing that the whole concept has its fans and attracts the right audience. According to the internet, it’s age rated 10+ however these days even younger children would be found playing it as the graphics and the whole story are appropriate.

By researching this game I believe that as a group we can get some inspiration from this game and use some techniques they’ve used- no sharp edges, bright attention catching colours, friendly looking characters. In that way we’ll be able to produce a child friendly game that would attract the right audience and gain a big popularity within that audience or beyond.

GAME MAPS/WORLDS

From here we can move onto looking at some worlds/maps presented in certain kids games.

Maps/worlds in games also come under the UI’s category as they’re the interaction between the game and the user. They need to be easy to follow to allow more ease for the user. Complicated worlds/maps will create a lot of confusion for the user- especially younger ones therefore we need to make sure it’s clear and easy to follow through.

For that purpose we can look at the layout and the colour scheme, once again it’s worth remembering that not all users can see the entire colour circle so it’s worth considering what we include. With the layout there can be a bit of a play around, we want the layout to be interesting and eye catching but like mentioned before- easy to follow!

That’s not as challenging when we think of it, most kids games have a similar looking world/map as the user can get used to it through other games and apply that knowledge onto a new game. This allows us to use the layout from other games with slight improvements, adjustments.I think this is a good time saver but also allows individualism as you customization.

Nearly all maps/worlds in these type of games are 2D and not animated except e.g buttons lighting up when you click on them etc. We want to keep it simple and playable for the user’s sake but it’s not out of the idea that we might be able to add some 3d elements if necessary.

In certain games a map shows areas that are locked off for the user until they reach the level. They tend to be shaded in grey/dark colours and change the colours to the colour scheme once you unlock the levels.This is a good tactic as it allows focus to be gravitated towards the levels we’re currently on and stay on them until they’re passed and we can move further on with the story.

When we create our own world/map for the game, we can look at the layout and whether we will add levels onto our game or just keep it on running as you go. With that we will know how to set it all out and whether numbers will be included or not or if the levels could just be named using letters. For the world we can think of a shape, size and colours that will attract the user’s attention. We want it to represent the game as at the end of the day, it’s what we see at the beginning of the game/middle of the game.

Like previously mentioned, researching maps and UI’s can be linked under the same point however this additional analysis will help while we come up with our own map/world as we’ll be more aware of what it should look like.

Down below is an experimental piece of a ‘start’ screen.

This is an experimental piece of a start up screen. It has very vivid colours which usually attract the younger audience. It was created before the subject of the game was established therefore for now it doesn’t match the whole scientist idea. It represents some sweets with a background that fades out with darker edges.

To create it I have used a software similar to Photoshop- it has the same tools therefore that wasn’t affected. To begin with I have created the outlines to make a guide to follow and while doing so I have looked back at an image of sweets to once again have a little to guide to follow while outlining. Once the sweets were done, I coloured them in with a watercolour brush- my favourite. To add a bit of shading I have used the watercolour brush with a dark-brownish colour as I didn’t want it to be rough and then blurred everything in to create a softer transition. I added details like the little dots and dark insides once again using the watercolour brush ( in all cases I went with a lower opacity than 80%).

From there I was then able to create outlines for ‘ Start’ and then coloured the letters in using a bigger opacity with the watercolour brush. I have added several lighter/darker shades in to create a more outstanding and bold look to the lettering.  I could’ve used a line under the letters as a guide to make sure the letters are all on the same level because as for now they appear tilted to the side which doesn’t look ‘ professional’.

Next I have created a layer for the background- I’ve done this last because backgrounds tend to distract me from the rest while in the making. So once the layer was created, I started off with making sure the brush size is really big to cover the whole screen,I used a lighter pink which then I faded into a darker one at the corners. I like doing it because it makes the whole seem more interesting and allows the focus on the centre as the lighter colour surrounds the middle.

I wish I have added more sweets and made them more detailed as that would make the whole more put together. The colour scheme is very sweet and ‘candy’ like which fits the idea we went with at first but I could’ve expanded the colours to make it more interesting and not so repetitive. If I was to redo this rough idea I would change the set up a bit as well and make the sweets more spread out to use up the space better.

Like mentioned it was only a experimental piece therefore it is quite rough but at least it represented an idea which fitted the previous game ideas.

Next, I have created a level screen. Now I am more aware of the subject of the game- household items are involved which explains the use of them on the image above. The background’s slightly lighter than the center which brings more attention to it.

I have started off by creating a circle in the middle using and airbrush with a high opacity and then I lowered it to create the outline of it which is more translucent than the middle. From there I have left the background alone for some time and moved onto the objects. I created them using a high opacity with a watercolour brush-like usual. To add shading I have clicked on the colour used and went down a little into a darker shade to add the shading which was then blended in using a blend tool. It looks very rough for e.g on the sofa with which I had some troubles with as I couldn’t get it to look like a sofa. To solve that problem I have added in some pillows so that it would be more obvious.

The objects look very cartoonish which was the aim however I wish I was able to make them resemble the real thing more. As this was only a rough idea I haven’t made it detailed which could’ve been done with bit more time.

From there I moved onto the background because it all felt really plain, I used a lighter blue than the blue in the centre. I have added the tiniest bit of shading with dark blue at the corners but didn’t extend it towards the centre, I used an airbrush for that with a lowered opacity. To make it more interesting I used a sprinkle tool and sprinkled stars with low opacity using different colours that stood out from the darker background.

Before I was finished I had to add the ‘level’ onto the middle circle. I’ve used a high opacity watercolour brush for that and created a little outline first which was then filled in with the same colour. I done it in white as it stood out amongst the dark background. For the number I went with red as it reminds me of the vintage interior colour scheme so I felt like it fitted in well. After seeing how well the red looked, I replaced one of the letters in ‘Level’ to red and made it an accent letter.

It is only a rough idea of the level screen therefore the details aren’t as accurate however if I was to redo it again I would keep most of the elements but just improve the quality of the work in order to add the professional touch.

I’d like to make more of these screens and test out different ideas to see different types of UI’s that will fit into our game. The screens I’d like to create experimental work for include start, level and the world map.

WORLD MAP:

I decided to look at this game world map because I think the whole set up is very clear and easy to follow and that’s something we’d definitely want in our game. It represents an island- something we want in our game as well. The island’s separated into few smaller lands of different weather conditions which then join up in the middle so ideally we start at one point and work our selves onto the other end.

The colour scheme is very subtle, no harsh colours were used here and are all kept in earthy tones especially with the ocean around the island it brings up the colours even more. The colours are not too contrasting therefore children will find the map very easy to follow as well as due to the easy layout.

There is an UI pop up message with information for the player. The font used is very clear and bold so no confusion will be created here unless the player can’t read to begin with.

Throughout the map we can notice no sharp elements, all corners are rounded and smooth. Even the mountains which usually have a sharp peak, are rounded. This presents a more idealistic world with no violence or hurtful objects.

The level and lives appear on the right hand in a circle where they’re visible and easily accessible. The dashboard icon is on the left in the same shape as the profile icon, making it very accessible too.

For the UI work in this project, I will be creating a world map or a level screen to go with the game.

Before moving onto creating the final piece, I have created some random sketches of different UI additions that would also appear on the screen e.g potion bottles which show the chemical usage.

This picture represents a full, half full and an empty chemical bottle which shows the usage of the chemicals.

 

A good idea would also be to add a circle with the character you’re playing with inside it on the right hand side of the screen. Characters could possibly be switched by clicking on the circle and selecting the admired one.  Chemical usage would appear on the bottom left to not take the concentration off the centre of the screen.

Before colouring in the liquids inside the bottle, I looked at variety of colours that stood out to me and chose the favourite one…

From there I proceeded with adding colours to the empty bottle and copying and pasting the same bottle but with different volumes of chemicals.

 

Here I continued my experimentation with the chemical bottle and showed different volumes of it. To go from here I’d like to do a energy bar that would contain the same liquid inside and possibly some more experimental work on the bottle shapes/ containing.

Like mentioned above, I made sure the liquid inside the energy bar is the same as the one inside the bottles as it creates a whole theme and in simple words- looks nice and aesthetically pleasing. I went with purple in both because I feel like it’s an universal colour and it would stand out from the background so both these UI’s would be noticeable.

This is my first- simplest idea for the bar however I’d like to look at other shapes that appear in some games therefore I’ll be doing so to see if there’s a pattern that is being followed in all of them.

 

In the examples above we can notice that the shape is very rounded and there is no harsh edges at all. This shows that they’re from a game aimed at a younger audience- they’re not promoting sharp objects or at least we can assume that. There seems to be a pattern of using some shapes in the left corner to represent and actually show that it is in fact an energy bar. While creating an improved version of the energy bar in our final piece, I will take that into consideration and come up with a shape/object that could represent the energy levels and make it easy for the player to be aware of it.

These are some examples that I think are worth giving a chance to and will definitely expand on them. The first one is very rounded and the object/shape to represent it would overlap the bar.This isn’t the worst idea however it isn’t my favourite. Next we have a battery inspired bar which has sharp edges, it doesn’t go along with the theme of no sharpness however definitely stands out amongst the others. Lastly we have my favourite- the simple rounded shape which has all the things kept inside with no overlapping etc. It’s very simple and easy to understand. The energy levels as well as the object/shape would be inside in a small circle.

I will look into making the energy bar look like my favouritised idea and adapt it to fit the rest.

Looking at more than one ideas allowed me to see what I like and dislike therefore I was able to pick a favourite and have my focus set on it.

Now I will be working on an UI screen for the game. Since the game takes place in a house I decided to include a mansion as the first plan.  My plan is to have the items as the second plan behind the house, enlarged to make them very noticeable. I want them to seem like they’re ‘above’ the house as in more powerful than the player.

First sketch – an outline of the mansion with a darker plain background so I can see the outlines more clearly as lighter background would’ve distracted me. Used a simple pen tool.

Here I’ve added some of the characters that have been modelled including the toilet roll and a spatula, I’ve also added a lamp. All have big, friendly looking eyes and raised eyebrows. I’ve used a separate layer and a pen tool.

Next I added colour to the house, I followed the outline on a new layer. To colour the whole in I used several shades of brown and a watercolour brush as that’s my favourite. Once I finished colouring the outlines in, I made that layer invisible and made the coloured corners cleaner to make it look less of a mess. I’ve also added the scientist character in one of the windows which I want to make appear like a shadow therefore it won’t be detailed.

I will attempt to add the scientist character onto the whole as well. He has a darker skin tone so I’m afraid that he might blend in with the house however The light clothing and crazy strawberry hair cut will for sure help avoiding the blend.

Although he is one of the main character’s, he doesn’t really match the whole so after some thought I decided not to add him in. It was a good idea but after some thought it just wasn’t in my idea of the whole.

Here I’ve already coloured in the objects- I used a water colour brush in the highest opacity. I feel like I could’ve used a different brush for this as some of the colours mixed in together and I had to go over a few times but overall it still remains my favourite brush. I still need to go over the whole and clean up the lines to make it appear neater.

Here I’ve cleaned up the lines a little more using the same coloured water colour brush as the item I was on, from there I have added the LEVEL writing which was hand written. I used the same colour as the background to make the house seem hollow. Next I drew a chemical bottle in the left side corner, I copied and pasted it three times- two to put next to the one on the left but resized and one to put next to the energy bar. The energy bar was created using a line tool and a watercolour brush with the same colour that was used to show the liquid in the bottle.

Here I’ve started adding some shadows that aren’t really accurate however it gave the items more depth. I have used an airbrush for that.

More shadows have been added using the airbrush tool and a low opacity ( 10% ).

With doing so I came to the conclusion that I won’t be adding more onto it and leave it as it is before I over do the whole thing and make it look worse. From this step I can say that this is the final UI for the game, it shows a level screen along with an energy bar and a chemical level on the bottom left side.

The whole was created using similar brushes and sizes, the only time I’d make the brush bigger is if I was adding shadows which were done with an airbrush and a 10% opacity as I didn’t want the color to be powerful. Throughout the two brushes I switched from an to were water color and airbrush as I’m most happy with these two.

The fact I had outlines first had helped me a lot as I had a guide to follow throughout and by creating different layers I could always delete something or add to the whole without getting rid of the progress.  I wish I used more layers than I have done as it would’ve allowed even more control during the making, next time I will definitely do so. Overall I put a lot of work into that UI piece and I believe it is a big improvement from my previous work and helped me with learning new skills while using a graphics tablet and a special drawing software.

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Controller Layout Research

Before attempting to design our own controller layouts, we have chosen to do some research on already existing button layouts and controls. The first one I have chosen is for the Xbox controller.

The first thing that sticks out is that all lines are straight which shows some professionalism to the layout and the control information is evenly spread out in order to make the controls easy to read. This can be done both effectively or ineffectively which would damage the sales and reputation of the game if the controls weren’t marked out properly.

The design used for the controller in the design is simple and is outlined with white in order to make the text and design easy enough to see. This is a good method of showing controls as some people might mistake the place of certain buttons in the control layout if the colors don’t stand out on each other.

This is relatively complex control system so for the second design I have chosen to look at both a control layout that is related to our unit and simpler than the first layout.

This is the generic layout for the switch controllers, I have chosen this one to look at as it will be helpful when planning out the controller layout for our game as the intended console our game is going to be on is the Nintendo switch so having reference for the original control buttons is useful. This design shows straight lines that connect to text that is black to show up well on the white background and are neatly laid out.

This, just like the first design, is an effective way to layout the button mapping of the controller however due to all the little parts on the switch controllers, it might be a little more confusing than the Xbox remote as those buttons are a lot larger.

 

Controller Layout

 

When designing the controller layout, we all had specific game examples in mind in which we wanted to use for inspiration. More known 3D platformers such as Super Mario, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog came up upon many other controller examples. Some things were obvious when designing the layout, the joy stick on the left joy con would be an essential pick for controlling the character, with the joy stick on the right joy con would allow for seamless camera movement. The B button would allow the character to jump in the air, similar to many other know platformers and the A button would allow the player to interact with any object that would allow interaction. These buttons are commonly mapped this way throughout the genre, as it is something that is generally considered to be the correct way and most simple way to play platform games.

Some of the more unique button mapping consist of the Y button being used to increase the speed of the character you would be playing as, more commonly known as a sprint button. The ZR and the ZL buttons would allow the player to activate the characters unique special move, in which every character has their own. The X, L and R buttons finally, are all mapped to switch the character the player is playing as during gameplay.

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Minute sheet

 

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

As a team, we struggled to work together, mainly because we all have different personalities and art preferences. We all want to include our ideas and struggle to communicate them with the rest of the group, we should have communicated a lot better, though we tried our best our communication skills led to misunderstandings of the main game ideas especially when speaking about the story. Though emotions were high 90% of the time for what we accomplished we should be happy as a group that we did what we did, as we all when out our comfort zone and we all created something we wouldn’t have normally, having this as the project before FMP really helped us know what we can actually accomplish when we get our heads down and actually work.

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Evaluations

CHRIS:

For this unit, we were tasked to be within a group of five, this idea I felt positive about as it would allow different people to be able to focus on different aspects of the work, allowing for faster progress and a better unit as a whole. Although the final results didn’t go as smoothly as they could have, both the research and the design aspects were made a lot easier due to the fact of having multiple people working on making ideas at the same time. Our group also had different people who specialized in different aspects which allowed everyone to have a task to focus on and streamlined the entire units progress. that can allow for the best output of work.

First, when looking back at my work, I chose to check on the research aspects firsts. In my opinion, although it took a while to get some of the details for the visual research, I believe that overall it wasn’t that bad compared to past unit’s research. The biggest issue I had come up with while working on some of the research was a lack of information sources that forced me into using Wikipedia a lot more than I had intended to as the website is known for being unreliable. I had focused more on the actual designs and colours used rather than just looking roughly at the pictures I had chosen to talk about, this allowed me to go into a bit more detail than I usually would have been able to for my research. Other than that, the other thing that I’m not fond of with my research would be the amount of content I wrote about for the character and scenery design research. I feel I could have included more if I had gone into a bit more detail and in future units I will focus more on this point.

In terms of what ideas, I chose to research, I believe I did a good job of picking them based upon the specification of the unit and its requirements of focusing on games for kids and designs that are brightly colored. These decisions made for an easier time moving on from them to the concept art and designing processes later on in the unit. The designs I chose to look at also showed me how most of the picture was made non-complicated and easy to look at in order to capture the younger kids’ eyes without giving them too many issues in recognizing certain aspects of the designs, knowing this gave me a big advantage for the rest of the unit.

After looking at the research, next up was checking how the design process went. First up were the rough designs for the concept art, for this I believe that I did a decent job at making a layout for the characters that would be designed and colored in detail during the actual concept art which allowed the final process of making the concept easier in the end. When making the concept art, in my opinion, I did a good job and I believe that the designs were quite suitable for the actual specification and game we chose to go with. Looking at the characters themselves, they were well made, had the correct body proportions and the correct colors for their designs which made them stand out quite nicely on the plain white background I chose to go with for the concepts. In terms of making my own characters, there is visible improvement compared to previous design works and I had also learned quite a lot from this. The main thing that I had difficulty with during this process was coming up with a pose and making the clothes fit the pose of the character when designing the concepts, I had figured this issue out in the end by designing them based upon a random body design found from one of my own drawings.

After this I moved on to making the models of the characters. I had worked on the head of the characters as well as designing the clothing aspects to them. This was slightly difficult to start as when modelling the heads, I had run into an issue of where I had no orthographic reference to make a modeled head and I was unable to use a previously modeled design in order to replace the head of the characters in this unit. In the end to counter this issue I used and sphere and adjusted the proportions in order to make a rough head design before then moving on to the fine details of the model. After this there was no major issue with making the head other than the time it took to do all the small manual adjustments. After finishing the head, I passed it to someone else who placed in onto the body that was made and gave it back to me so that I could model the clothing using poly draw. During this stage, most of the designing went pretty well however when adding the turbo-smooth modifier the clothing went inside the body so I had to do a lot of manual small adjustments to fix it. In the end the design ended up looking really good and I am proud of the final product.

Conclusion

When looking at the project as a whole, although there were quite a few issues with both team coordination and within the designs, the overall product was good and I am happy with the results achieved. To point out any changes I would make next time specifically would be different however in general, I would try to add a bit more detail into describing the character and scenery concept art, as well as making more rough designs for both of the humanoid characters in order to give multiple options for the team to choose between for the final piece as they were to specific with the designs I made. I have made significant improvement in my ability to make characters of my own as well as my ability using the 3DSmax program, in specific making details on objects as well as using the poly draw feature. Looking back, although my time wasn’t spent most effectively, it wasn’t ineffective either, there were a few things that I could have worked on earlier or faster but for the most part I believe it wasn’t that bad. Compared to previous work, I feel that I wasn’t as rushed for time thus allowing me to make a higher quality final product than I could before while keeping my ability to stay calm.

JESSICA:

My secondary research was aimed towards the narrative behind video games, I should have researched three games, however doing only two allowed me more time to further research into the characters of the games, it allowed me to add way more detail when researching. I would say I was bias when choosing Undertale, I knew the characters and already had a good understanding of the story, because of this I believe Undertale’s analysis was higher quality compared to Super Paper Mario, since I was unfamiliar with the story and characters. From my secondary research I learnt that there is so much more to a character even the most basic of characters.

I had placed Flowey imagery within the story; “flower generator” and Flowey was also the reason why I chose yellow for the color of the button on the device, a homage towards Undertale. Nauka and Rika, their names are both Science in Polish and Japanese. I chose these names because they are unique, I wanted unusual names similar to Frisk. Though I didn’t develop the characters personality, due to the lack of time, I imagine Spatchy the Spatula’s personality is similar to Sans from Undertale, lighthearted and the comic relief within the story. Carla mentioned that Nauka and Rika reminded her of Rick and Morty then allowed the rest of the group to realize the similarities of the characters.

Conclusion

I think the story would grab the players attention, straight away from the starting screen, I imagine the opening scene of a retro TV would grab the players attention, the opening of a game sets the players up for the rest of the game. I believe that this is a simple game and a fun one at that! I think it could be completed within 5 hours since the story is a simple one and it could be told at a good pace. I think it’s a unique story and one that Nintendo would like. It’s child friendly and has no violence.

SEAN:

I was cautiously optimistic going into this unit, due to the fact that it was going to consist of us all working a one big group of 5. I was intrigued by the idea of this and wanted to see how it was going to work out. The group part of the project meant that we could split the work load up into chunks, as well as make crucial decisions as a team. Some parts of the units certain people are better at then others, meaning every person in the group has a task in which they were comfortable in completing to the best of their ability.

We started the unit with a small group gathering, in which we discussed weekly meeting, and what they would generally consist of. The minutes sheet would allow us all to keep track of what happened in every meeting in a neat and professional manner. Once were introduced to how a casual meeting was to be recorded, we moved onto what we were required to achieve throughout the unit by reading through the brief. We read through it each individually in order to gather an understanding of what we all felt we would be comfortable with completing on the brief, we then discussed the manner with each other and assigned the parts each of us would play during the project accordingly. Once everyone had their jobs, we began coming up with multiple ideas of key features that our project would consist of, things such as our company name and many key ideas were created during this meeting. In terms of game ideas, we all made multiple ones in which we intended to discuss each one in order to determine the best possible base idea in which we wanted our other game elements to be build off of, story, game play, characters etc. The one idea we all fixated on at first was the concept of a game in which the player was required to save their sister by dodging enemies and collecting sweets as a collectible. This idea came with a full story example, character designs and item information. We decided to explore this idea further as well as looking into one of the other idea, one that consisted of the player taking control of a regular household item, with the basing objective to escape the household. This idea also included multiple difficulty levels, many different characters to choose from as well as a base objective for the player to aim towards during game play. The only problem that we identified when looking through this idea was just the pure simplicity of the idea we had, it would be quite difficult to make a story around this game due to the fact that the game play felt like it didn’t require a story. To overcome this problem, we felt it may have been a good experiment to combine the two game ideas we had originally in order to make something new.

This idea worked relatively well as both ideas had good individual qualities, but different qualities. This allowed us to merge the idea and story of one idea with the intuitive game play of the other idea, this opened up a lot more options and opportunities for us going forward, once we had developed the idea further we were then able to create more of the elements seamlessly. The story, controls, characters and game play could now be majorly fleshed out throughout the coming weeks, which was good since we were struggling to come up with any real material when going with one idea over the other.  part of Jess’ work was to create an new story to base the game off of. She initially struggled to do so due to the lack of complete understanding within the group. Because of this, we had to rethink the way out game would be played, in order for it to match the story that was written. In the end, we all knew the basics of the game, which was a good thing since all of the members of our team were all up to date with where we were in terms of the games idea. Once we had more of a story, we were able to then start discussing smaller details such as controller layouts, character design, 3D modelling and any additional research that is required to get a better understanding of the work. We wanted to base the control on the switch joy cons when they are in the joy con grip accessory, which obviously meant we intended to release the game on the Nintendo Switch. We came to this conclusion due to the fact that we saw on the brie that the game was required to be a family-friendly Nintendo game, so in turn, we released it on Nintendo’s latest console.

When designing the controller layout, we all had specific game examples in mind in which we wanted to use for inspiration, we all had our own games in mind in which all had similar controls, which was good due to the fact that we all had a similar understanding of how a 3D platform game should be played. More known 3D platformers such as Super Mario, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog came up upon many other controller examples. Some things were obvious when designing the layout, the joy stick on the left joy con would be an essential pick for controlling the character, with the joy stick on the right joy con would allow for seamless camera movement. The B button would allow the character to jump in the air, similar to many other know platformers and the A button would allow the player to interact with any object that would allow interaction. These buttons are commonly mapped this way throughout the genre, as it is something that is generally considered to be the correct way and most simple way to play platform games.

Some of the more unique button mapping consist of the Y button being used to increase the speed of the character you would be playing as, more commonly known as a sprint button. The ZR and the ZL buttons would allow the player to activate the characters unique special move, in which every character has their own. The X, L and R buttons finally, are all mapped to switch the character the player is playing as during game play.

I then thought it would be a helpful idea to look into real life house plans, this would allow for inspiration when designing the multiple different levels in game. Once I looked at some, I was inspired by the format and the way they were all drawn, and tried to replicate that design in my own similar level design for the game.

In terms of my research, I started by looking into Nintendo as a whole company, their history, what they are known for, what they do, how they do it etc. I knew this would be helpful due to the fact that we needed a better understanding of the common factors in which are all present in some of the more known Nintendo first party titles. I then went into the design section, analyzing two of Nintendo’s most popular characters and how they have adapted to hardware and software change over the last 20-30 years or so, this gave me a better understanding of the journey in terms of design that these characters have been through throughout their history.

Going into the modelling phase of the brief, I was intrigued by the task that I was required to complete. Making multiple different household items in 3DSMax was something I had never even attempted before hand, so I was interested as to how it was going to turn out. I wanted to base the modeled versions on the multiple different designs that were created for the project. These designs served as a baseline for how we all wanted the character to look like initially, and they helped to guide me while i modeled the characters. I started by making a spatula, This process was relatively simple due to the fact that I was made of just a single shape. The eyes and facial features were all based upon a more cartoon-ish tone with large oval eyes and a basic designed mouth. This facial design was used throughout, for all other characters. Making the others was a relatively similar process, apart from the toilet roll character. This character included a western style hat, a hat that I initially struggled to create, in the end I managed to do so by creating a simple plain object and molding it into more of a hat shape. This process was enlightening as to how to use certain features in 3DSMax in multiple different ways. This will definitely be useful information to take into my FMP due to the fact that my knowledge has been broadened in that particular program.

Making the human characters was a repeatable process. What I mean by this is we have made human models previously multiple times, my earlier knowledge of modelling humans was extremely useful as you can imagine because I was able to create the model as well as rig and skin it without any real issue. The head of the human was created in a different file, meaning it was going to be imported and attached to the model before it was rigged and skinned. Once the model was finished, I handed the role of Poly Draw to any member of our team, this was because I was unaware of how to use the tool to the best of its ability, and we needed the work to be done to an impeccable standard.

When we were creating the younger child, the process was identical to the one stated previously apart from the head. Making the head was a picky and difficult process since we needed it to look like a child, as a posed to it looking like a short man. After a lot of work, we were where we needed to be in terms of the design of the child, which spread a lot of optimism among the group.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think overall this project was a very interesting a different type, which provided us all with task and problems that we have never previously had to deal with. The team work part of the unit while coming with its pros also had its fair share of cons in which we had to work thought to get to the end. Working in a group took the pressure off of us individually, which was a major positive when working through the unit. This also meant that the work was done to a great standard since there was less of it and everyone was doing a part of the brief in which they were comfortable in doing. In terms of cons, working as a group sometimes felt a bit overcrowded. What I mean by this is that everyone was doing their own work and we didn’t really follow each others progress in a simple and effective manor.

To finish, this unit provided me with a bit of a challenge in terms of the more practical work, working with 3DSMax in order to create the characters for the game contained a small challenge at times as well as making the human characters, which is consistently a problem for me when working in 3DSMax. The research was interesting and informative, and it was extremely effective in helping me to understand the more complex parts of the brief such as the artist research as well as the visual art analysis. If I was to repeat this unit, I think I would like to put more time into the level design aspect of my tasks. This felt a little light in the design department, and I would create multiple other more varied versions of the levels, this would create more variety and have a branched out version of our originally designed level concepts.

 

CARLA:

I started this project quite optimistically and was looking forward to working as a group with the rest of my class. The first meeting we had was my first experience in a industry-like setting and I’m glad that I garnered the new experience. I volunteered as the minute taker which, as well as a grueling and aching experience, was a new experience to me and helped me to practice writing by hand which is something I hardly do nowadays. On the first meeting we read through the brief together and started splitting the work. I believe that everyone was happy with the jobs they were given as Jessica and I lead the project and gave everyone jobs we thought fitted their skills.

I got to work right away on my splash screen research as I had always wondered what the loading screens before video games were called and was interested to find that not only games but apps, software and even just video game consoles have splash screens to introduce the recipient. I started to look at games I was playing and I quite liked the splash screen for Pokemon GO so I decided to recreate it using Adobe After Effects. It could have been a much better recreation and as I mentioned before I should have chosen a different font for the text as it doesn’t stand out and is almost unreadable, but I do like the effect I added to the image to increase the vibrancy so overall I am glad with how it came out. I then went onto animate the Nintendo Switch loading screen using Adobe Animate because I wanted a refresher and knew I would need to use the software later on in the project for the final splash screen. I opted for a hand-drawn and childish style to fit with the theme of the game we were going to be creating, and I was very satisfied with how the final animation looks and felt that it was a faithful redesigning of the original Nintendo Switch loading screen.

Other research I conducted was some primary research where I took pictures of games I played when I was little that I felt fit the brief and spoke about them. I looked at elements of the game that made them memorable but unfortunately I was not able to reflect my research on the final pieces.

Next, I began to work on the audience analysis. It was difficult to analyse such a broad audience without a concrete game idea so I decided to use the mental reference of Pokemon as it fit our brief almost perfectly. I also made a list of child-friendly genres and games and thought about the audiences of these games, but also kept in mind that we would be making a new IP and that the audience would solely be newcomers to the game, rather than people returning to a sequel, prequel or spin-off. I decided that the primary audience would be young kids and the secondary audience would be parents of young kids because they would be the main buyers of the game. It was difficult because the circumstances of our brief were quite specific and it probably would have been better to decide on the game idea before starting the audience analysis, but I decided to go ahead and get the audience analysis done before most of my other work because I knew it would take the longest, and I’m glad I made this decision because I feel it helped me understand the brief and our audience further. I believe our final idea and the end products are all suitable for our audience, especially due to me completing the analysis early.

As some experimental work, I went out on a limb and decided to model some of the characters with modelling clay. I did this because I know that a lot of development teams for games and films usually have a physical representation, especially for animated or cartoony things, so that the team can refer back to the models or in the case of movable figures can test how the model will move. Obviously I did not know how to apply the ability of movement to the things I modelled but it was good practice for me and I might be able to learn that skill in the future. Additionally, I feel that making the models bought our group close together as everyone got a turn playing with the clay, even if only my models were used for our project.

Designing the logo was a joint effort between me and Jessica. We knew that we wanted to include the humuhumunukunukuapua’a in the design or for it to be the logo, so I began work on the rough designs with that in mind. I wanted to keep the logo simple but while also being eyecatching, so I made the lines quite thick for the final design and adding vibrancy to the colour pallete. I felt that that wasn’t enough, so I added a little background which was the sand. The logo is essentially just a fish gasping for air on the beach. But the logo came out quite well, so next is the splash screen. As mentioned before, the splash screen is the seperated layers of the logo animated. It was very easy to make given my previously knowledge of Adobe Animate so I had no issues when working on it. I’m glad with the outcome even though there are improvements that can be made, but for an amateur I think it’s perfect for the project.

Conclusion

This was definitely one of my favourite units of the course, and I’m very sad that it’s my last. I feel as a group we did the best we could, and coincidentally our best is also near perfect for the brief we were given. I don’t think there should be anything that we did differently, but I think I should have tried to link my primary research better to the project as it feels slightly out of place. Overall my experience on the project was great and I’m glad that I now have the knowledge of working in a team setting as well as the knowledge of splash screens and my enhanced knowledge of Adobe After Effects.

KLAUDIA:

My research has started off with looking into already existing images and artists. My visual analysis presented an image that suited the audience we were looking at for our game- kids. The image was a perfect reflection of what kids like to see in an image- loads of colours, cute characters and sparkles.  It has helped with understanding the continuous pattern that is used throughout the kids games industry. From the image I was able to pick up on how inaccurate some of the things present on it are e.g. shadows not being realistic. That is often done in these kind of images as children don’t necessarily worry about accuracy.

From there I went onto researching an artist whose art fits the criteria chosen by the brief- child friendly. I researched Aki Kondo whose a creator of the well known bear ‘ Rilakkuma’. Her creation has not been as successful as we would have thought from the beginning, it took some time until Rilakkuma has gained his fame. This shows that hard work pays off even if it isn’t instant.

The character itself has been used in a lot of merchandise including games for children. Its cute characteristics have managed to gain their interest and that was worth remembering  when we came up with our own game – big eyes and no expression surely do have popularity in that field.

I wish I have added more onto the visual and artist research as that would’ve allowed a bigger field of understanding when it comes to children aimed images. I’m happy with the stuff that I included as it was still helpful throughout the UI design process but more detail would’ve allowed a better understanding which doesn’t mean that the understanding wasn’t existent- it was but there’s always plenty of room for improvement.

Next, I have looked at the meaning of UI’s which in simple word stands for User interface- interaction between a player and the game in our case. I look at different types of UI’s like maps, worlds, levels and additional pop up messages. That has showed me that the UI’s can come in any form and I’m not limited to creating a map of the game.

From the research I gathered the fact that UI’s are a part of artistic work as they need to be designed and completed by an artist however the more technical stuff is left for the game creator as they’re the ones who know the game itself the very best.

That’s where cooperation comes in and an example of team work within the industry, one person doesn’t always end up doing everything themselves. As this project is created by a team, it’s only right we shared our roles just like creators in real life do.

Further research into UI’s showed me more ways in which UI’s can be represented like character generators. Previous to this research I wasn’t really aware of any UI’s including of what falls into them e.g. the mentioned character generators. This shows the diversity of UI’s and how anything throughout the game that allows interaction can fall into them.

Researching UI’s have helped me with understanding their concept and what they’re used for, seeing their diversity and how they can be interpreted as well as how clear they can be in order to use them in a kids game. If I were to redo the research I would have definitely included more examples from a bigger variety of games to see if the pattern followed remains the same.

Equally important was looking into a game, I have chosen a game that can be played on Nintendo as that’s who we’re ‘working’ for. The idea was to look into a game and see how the design is spread throughout it. From looking at how things were designed I was able to see how a younger audience can be approached and ‘caught’ into the game. Its colours, shapes used and characters were obviously the most eye catching things throughout it. I learnt that there is no sharp edges used which makes it clear that the game is child friendly. Learning that has helped me later on during the design process as I’ve applied the no sharp edges technique onto the UI level screen.To make the research even better I could’ve looked at more than one game and compared them to the rest.

From there I have looked at maps/world designs that are used in children’s games.Before coming up with my own UI, I wanted to be more familiar with these two as they were my main interest when it came to the design process I had to do later on. From the research I was able to see the continuous pattern of similarities such as how simple worlds/maps are made and how easily accessible they are by the user. Most of these are also 2D which made it clear for me – I wanted our UI to be 2D as that allows less confusion for the players.This additional UI analysis has helped my knowledge on how a UI could look like which was then later on applied on the final UI design I created.

If I could improve that simple analysis, I would’ve expanded on it and added a wider range of UI options that I could look into like level screens, pop ups etc.

Once done with that ,I have  created some experimental work for the UI work which included a start screen and a level screen. I’ve done those as I wanted to experiment with it and see how it comes out. At that point we weren’t aware of our game choice yet therefore the sweets start screen doesn’t match the item game idea.

These screens aren’t really detailed as they’re only rough work however the experimental part has helped me with developing some unknown skills while using Photoshop or similar drawing programmes.

I have then added a little ‘world map’ research to see how those can be created. At first my plan was to create a world map for the UI’s however as I later discovered, I didn’t wanna do it anymore.

Continuing from there, I have created some sketches of what objects would or could be shown on the screen during game play such as chemical bottles and energy bars. To go with this, I have added a colour testing screen to show how I ended up with the final colour of the liquid used inside the bottles and the energy bar.

If I wanted to make that experimental work better, I could’ve added more shapes of the bottles, more objects to choose from as well as a more wide colour scheme. Luckily the short colour testing was enough to help me chose the right colour.

I obtained the final design by creating a rough sketch using Photoshop+ graphic tablet and different tools from it. The outline was created using a very fine pen brush in the highest opacity so that it would be much easier to see it while I filled the whole in with colour.

I usually don’t colour any of my work in therefore this was a challenging experience for me as I had to pick the rights colours and shadow colours to go with it. To colour everything in I have used a water colour brush in the highest opacity which allowed some blending as the colours went on top of each other- they mixed in as water colours do. Working on the colouring has been a long process for me as I wanted all the lines to be clean or at least appear as neat as possible. I’m not the best at keeping my work neat therefore that was definitely the most challenging stage. As I was creating smaller pieces for the UI such as the energy bar, I had to be very zoomed in which resulted on these not being as detailed as the screen was too zoomed in and the brush didn’t have as much precision. If I was do redo that I would have done it a lot bigger and then just took the whole and made it smaller to fit the usual energy bar size that appears on the screen.

With the objects I had the most fun, I followed the modelled objects as a guide in order to make them fit the game. Colouring them in once again was difficult for me as I had to work with more than two colours which is my usual style of work so that definitely did take me out of my comfort zone. I had to reach for the eraser tool quite a lot while at it. To end of the colouring I have shaded everything in with an airbrush on a low opacity and went behind layers to add the shadows. That was definitely the easiest part.

My favourite bit was adding the ‘level’ writing onto the screen. I have reached onto the background colour to make the house seem hollow as I drew the letters on top. I have taken my time with them in order to make sure they were clean and readable and to be honest I am happy with how they ended up looking and wouldn’t really change much about them.

Overall I am happy with how the final design came out, it is simple as the brief implied and it is definitely readable and understandable to fit the younger audience. It is my first time creating something that looks like an UI for a game therefore I’m proud of how I interpreted the work. I am not the best at the drawing portion of the research but I managed to give it my best and create something that looks at least like a rough design for an actual real life game UI. While creating it I was able to improve my digital art knowledge and skills.

I believe that it fits the criteria quite well, it could’ve been improved by more experimental work before getting to the final one and more accuracy to details however as we may know kids don’t pay much attention to details.

All images used were created by me or found on various websites- all Harvard Referenced.Starting with visual/artist research, followed by images of different UI’s and ending on the final UI design which I created.These have been helpful as I had a visual example of how UI’s are represented and used in games, that has allowed my understanding of the subject to grow and has definitely made it easier for me to progress with the final work.

Images that were most useful were the visual analysis ones and the UI’s ones as they allowed me to see how things are represented in kids games e.g. how colours and objects appear and attract attention and how easily laid out UI’s would be more successful for a kids game.

What I could’ve added was some more experimental images such as digital and traditional media including watercolour swatches ( as that’s what brush I mostly used in the drawings ) and more experimental work with the objects that could’ve been used for the energy bar.

Conclusion

To conclude the whole research I’ll start from the very beginning of it. I’m happy with the research I’ve done as it was helpful and actually useful later on in the project.It may have needed more adjustments such as more detailed research on certain areas however what I already done managed to help me obtain the idea of UI’s. What stopped me from doing more research is being scared that I wouldn’t have had as much time on the artistic part of the project as well known as the final piece which had to be up to standards or at least I attempted to make it appear like so.

Most of the research is secondary as I’ve about it online however I manged to squeeze in some primary research such as experimental work on the UI screen and different colours that could be used in the energy bar and the chemical bottles. I wish I had done more primary research such as playing certain games myself and noticing how the UI’s are used.

The secondary research has been very useful for me as I based all my knowledge of UI’s off of it. It allowed me to look into these more in depth and see how they’re used throughout kids games. As I’ve included a lot of images from different games, I had to remember to Harvard Reference all, which I have done in alphabetical order at the end of this post.

The experimental work I have done for the UI’s – the two posters included a start screen and a level screen, has been probably the most fun bit about the whole research part. I have used Photoshop and Medibang Pro to get these done. As I didn’t really know the game idea at first I just went along with the rough ideas and created something that was just clearly a part of the experimental process to allow me to improve my skills with digital drawing and get more comfortable with it. With that synthesis I was able to get that comfort-ability within the digital art area and move onto the final design which was the biggest challenge. I wish I have done more experimental work before moving onto the final UI screen.

Then the final design came in and I was sure of what I wanted it to look like from the beginning since I knew the concept of the item game. A big mansion with household items surrounding it- including toilet roll which can be a bit controversial but that’s what attracts children, right?

As I was working on Photoshop and MediBang Pro, I was getting to know them better which allowed a more professional outcome. My work quality is definitely not at its best or peak yet however with projects like that I am able to get to know these two better and experiment with things outside of my comfort zone such as using a wider range of colours and shadows. Overall I am happy with the outcome and from there I can only move on wards as I learn more and more about different techniques each day.

To conclude this whole research, I can count it as successful and can say that I’ve done my best to contribute to the team project we’ve created. The final results from me aren’t the most professional nor best quality however it’s the fact that I tried my best that matters and from here I can only improve and learn from my mistakes.

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Game Credits

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