I Was Wrong!

It turns out presentations were not this week. They're the week after Thanksgiving.

Also, no teams were guaranteed a spot to present because no teams made it into Stage 4 (as far as I know). However, the teams that proved they were ready were given permission by their teachers to present.

Guess which team is presenting! This ooone! :)

We did challenge Stage 4 on Tuesday with a system-complete and bug-free game. Alex forgot to turn the sound on for the presentation so the teachers put us down for having little audio. But right after class he got the rest of the sounds in and sent a video off to our teachers. We still don't know if we passed though.

12 teams total are presenting. If I had to guess, I'd say half are going to be able to go through to next semester. Wish us luck, everybody...

Other news: Shadowpuppet Studios talked in front of 300 families on a game-major-specific open house for Champlain. Then we had our game up in the game labs. Tons and tons of people saw it, and a lot of people played. We got a lot of praise for all of our hard work. I think we may have convinced some parents that this major is not a waste of time, and it does not mean their kid is going to sit around playing games all day (unless they want to fail out). 

Most importantly to me, I got a lot of compliments on the art. Specifically the UI and the "Borderlands" style of the game. I was so excited! 

So what have I been up to the past couple of weeks? I've mostly been finishing up UI assets, which includes the menu screen. I also finished up the first draft of the Art Bible.

The only new UI in the game I did was a "spellbook" to remind the player what spells they selected.

The menu screen went through a couple of iterations. The first one I sketched out just had a Fire and Ice mage in battle. I thought, "That doesn't really show that it's a sport." 

Went it comes down to it, I want the art to emphasize a few things: 
1.) This is a sport...
2.) It's a high school league...
3.) Made up of mages...
4.) Who are Fire and Ice...  

So I took all of that and came up with the final product you see. I put the ball in the very front, so right away you know it's a sport. The next thing I hope the player notices is that these are mages -- not only from their outfits, but because they're casting spells. Next, I hope they realize that they're, specifically, Fire and Ice mages -- from their outfits and the spells they're casting.

Unfortunately, I didn't know how to capture the high school aspect in the menu screen. The only thing I could think of was to make the UI elements parchment paper, which is what they would write on as students. It doesn't really come through, though, so I may have to rethink it.

I thought of a spellbook to emphasize that the mages are still learning.

As for the Art Bible, this is what it ended up looking like:

I know that this is impossible to read, but you don't need to read it.

I'm pretty happy with it, but it may be too wordy. Some teachers really emphasize to use pictures -- not words -- to explain ourselves. But I find that pictures just can't explain everything. I hopefully provided enough images and words so that a new artist would understand what we're going for.

Now that it's all done, it's Friday, and I'm going home tomorrow morning to get some rest and homecooked meals.

Happy Thanksgiving!