Group Project: Research and Designs
Our assignment for the second semester is to design and create a flying shooter in a group using the Unity game engine. Our game can be either 2D or 3D, but the playable character must fly and shoot as it's primary functions. I decided to team up with Razvan, Joshua and Prem for this assignment.
As a group we brainstormed ideas coming up with new and unique ideas for our game. We all agreed our game should be an arcade style side scroller, as this will be the easiest genre to include the flying and shooting elements into our game. We also agreed to model and create our level design and assets in Maya, as we have little understanding on how the 2d engine in Unity works and we wanted to save time and start our project right away.
I gathered images and created a quick moodboard based on our brainstorming to get a better understanding on how our game should look, feel, play and be included.
We all liked the idea of having five levels with each level having it's own environment and enemy difficulty. We also agreed on having a boss battle at the end on the game to create a true 80's style arcade game. We all took up roles and separated to work on each element of the game and come up with the first set of designs.
I decided to focus on the powerups as what decent arcade shooter doesn't have powerups. I created another moodboard with a variety of classic and modern powerup designs to help get insporation for my own.
I immediately noticed that these designs use simple icons to express what the powerup does, simple and bold colours to help the object stand out and are encased in either a cube or sphere to help make it more appealing for the gamer.
It took this on board and created some initial designs in Photoshop.
I created designs for Lazer, Shield, Multiplier, Boost and Bomb powerups. Learning from the research I created basic icon designs with a simple and bold colour scheme in cubes and spheres. I also added shading using the techniques I learnt in Visual design.
However I still couldn't get a feel for what these designs would look like in 3D. There was only one way I could find out and, so I went into maya and created the assets from these designs.
Lazer
I started by adding my designs to spheres and I immediately noticed how appealing they were. I also remembered the presentation from the last Game encounters lecture on how spheres are more appealing and less aggressive than cubes and focused my designs on spheres.
I also added a light grey highlight around the icons to help them pop out as well as a black outline around the object itself. Both textures are blinn however I turned the refection off on the left sphere to help compare whether our powerups should have a matte finish or a reflective finish.
I continued creating each asset experimenting with the colours, lighting and shading with each one.
Boost
Bomb
Multiplier
Shield
I will show these designs to my group and we'll discuss the pros and cons of each design, what features work and how to improve them.
No comments:
Post a Comment