Design work

It's been too long since my last post! I've been busy, but not as busy as I could have been. I'm still yet to set up any of my gameplay or game in Unity and have spent the last month doing spritework and designwork. I've also been working on polishing my gameplay and story as I can without actually laying it down in game, but I know that's just a stalling tactic. I really just need to fire up Unity and start...

But there's so many things to worry about. What if my systems aren't up to scratch and I end up having to re-write massive chunks of my content later one? What if my map design tile layout is catastrophically small and I have to start from scratch? Alas, these questions are great at stopping me from diving in. I know in my heart though that the only thing I can do is just do it. I will face big challenges no doubt, but they will in all probability be completely unknown until they happen and will not be the imaginary ones I've agonised over.

Enough with the excuses, let's get down to what I've actually done. First up, I started work on the industrial zone sprites. I left these a bit later because I had many ideas of ways I could do this area of the map. The industrial zone is between the wilderness and the Union, and is meant to allow the player to see firsthand what the Union has to do. From a gameplay perspective, the area is dangerous and hard to navigate, providing a challenge to traverse. 

So, my initial thoughts were to make it mostly brown and black like a wasteland. But I also had a strong inclination to make it white instead. This sounds odd at first, but in 2018 I saw a movie called "Vinterbrødre" from Denmark. The movie is set around an industrial estate where everything is coated in a gritty white powder. I thought it was a fascinating visual twist on the normal grimy brown/black industrial look and strongly considered using it in my game's industrial sprites.

A still from Vinterbrødre showing the white/blue industrial look

(retrieved from No Film School and attributed to KimStim)

In the end, I decided to not go this way. I decided it was too confusing with my pixelart to try this, considering it's very hard to tell the white powder apart from snow - and I didn't really want to have some guy lick it and go "it's silt!" to try to explain to the player what was going on. I also decided a brown toned industrial area suits my yellowish colour pallet best.

I did try using the same desaturated sky-blue colour from Vinterbrødre for my industrial building sprites, however. I'm not sure the colour matches the rest of my art style in the area though, and I might have to go back and recolour them later. Anyway, I should show what I have now:

Tada!

It's a start. The new cliff sprites took me an entire weekend, believe it or not. I ended up having a really hard time balancing the detail with the tiling and perspective. I'm pretty happy with the result - but I will have to redo the tiling on the front facing long cliff faces. That's some pretty rough tiling...

A big thing I learnt from the above sprites is that I'm going to have to make a lot of special junk pile and building/girder/scaffolding sprites. There's just not enough variation or density with the sprites I've come up with so far. We can help the effect a little though by adding some filters:

Wow, now that looks grim doesn't it? I have four filter layers applied here in this mockup, and I'd like them all to be in the game in the end. Firstly, there's a layer of fractal noise - clouds. The clouds I imagine would slowly move across the screen, perhaps even slowly changing shape as they move. The clouds help to break up repetitive tiling and add depth and contrast to the scene. After the clouds comes a layer of fine dust - white particles that drift around in the industrial zone to remind you the air is full of grit. After that comes a colour filter, a dark brown/orange colour that dampens everything and makes it all look gross.

The industrial zone will only be visible through filters like this. The filters help make it look very different to the clean areas of the map without requiring me to make another entire set of sprites for the terrain, trees, etc. I'm all for using programmatic and graphical solutions to ease my art workload.

The final filter above is one I intend to apply to the game at all times, a yellow tinge designed to make the game resemble film from the 1960s.

Above is without the filter, below is with

I've been designing my sprites from the start with this filter in mind and adjusting my pallet as need be. I'm a big fan of warm hues and I like the nostalgic look the filter gives. 

That's all I have for my spritework. I'm going to continue with the industrial zone sprites for a bit longer I think, and that'll leave only the unincorporated and Arcadian sprites left to start. I still have sprites I need to redo/add for the Union and natural areas, but those are lower priority now that I have those spritesets mostly figured out in terms of tone and layout. 

Here's some additional news; I may have a new name for the game. I've considered a few things many of which are too embarrassing to write down here but one of which was "Cockaigne & Arcadia". At the moment, the name I have is "Bentham's Lighthouse". This is mainly a reference to Utilitarianism, using the metaphor of a lighthouse being the guiding light of a person's morals. It is also an oblique reference to the panopticon, hinting at the sinister side to the political directions my factions take in the name of ethics. I drew some sketches for logo concepts using a vector editor. This is my first time working with vectors (outside of editing SVGs as text) and I think the results are promising. 

The above are my first batch of concepts. I was experimenting with representing a lighthouse and text placement. I think overall they ended up looking like fine logos for restaurants or companies maybe, but none of them really evoked anything relevant to my game. I did some mockups putting the logos on screenshots of my game, and they always looked out of place.

This is my second batch of logo concepts. I'm much happier with the feel of these logos, which contain my representation of Fresnel lenses. They pop a lot more and are very memorable. I tried using some more "retro" tech-y fonts to try to evoke the art style of my game, but I'm not entirely convinced I achieved that. Oh well. Onwards and upwards! 


Finally, here's some more music I've been listening to to help inspire me to get the feeling of the game right in the natural/industrial areas: