Greenlight

Greenlight is essentially our "stage challenge" this semester. Techincally, we are in pre-production right now, and need to pass greenlight to make it into production. We need to get to a point where our teachers trust us enough to move us into production... But honestly, it doesn't really change much. (We're going to do the work anyway.)

We're presenting our greenlight challenge on Wednesday, and our whole team has some stuff to get done before then. On the art side of things, we needed some (at least) concepts of environment artwork. Marc needs to be sure that we can decide on a direction and get assets churned out. We also need to make sure we're constantly talking to the narrative designer, to make sure we're all telling the same story with our art. We had some problems talking about the animal logos in class this last week, so we needed to sort that out.

Kyle concepted some new logos and his girlfriend mocked them up in Illustrator. 

Kyle wanted to bring that modern day sports theme to what we had come up with. I thought it was a great idea. There were some nitpicky things people pointed out that we went over today, but other than that these were great.

However, some of the designers pointed out that having the animal logos in the level and the fire and ice logos in the GUI would be confusing for players. They wouldn't necessarily draw the connection between the two. While I don't think that would be an issue, or even if it would matter that much if players didn't understand right away, I was fine with scrapping the animal logos altogether. So basically we had to pick between the animal logos or the element logos.

I thought this was kind of silly, so I brought it to the art team again. The good thing about Casey's animal logos is that they have both the animal and the fire and ice symbols. Kyle brought up that actual sports teams have multiple logos they use. The Boston Bruins of the NHL have their "B" logo, circle logo, as well as a bear logo. What we could do is break the logos into pieces if we needed. So sometimes we could just use the snowflake, or sometimes we can just use the stag. As long as the fire symbol above the phoenix's head is the same fire symbol in the GUI, it should be fine.

I also mentioned that, while these coloured versions were awesome, I do like the idea of having simplified versions. So maybe silhouettes? We also made some other nitpicky suggestions to Casey and she fixed them right up for us. 

What we have here are three-toned, two-toned and one-toned versions of our logos. These could be used on jerseys as a customizable option, and in the environments on banners, not to mention the GUI. I think these turned out great and it will be fun to see these in the level and on the characters.

As far as environments go, at this stage I just think it's wise to keep putting out as many concepts as possible. That way we can have a collage of our own work to pick and choose from. The more ideas, the better. And the more angles of the levels, the better.

I drew over Rob's whitebox of the ice map for this. I just wanted to get a feel of what we want to go for. I think the first piece of concept work is always the hardest because it's when you have to make the most decisions on the spot. Afterward, you kind of just already have a feel of what you're going for so you feel a bit more free to just do it.

I also go to working on even more goal concepts, because we were dissatisfied with just having one. 

Kyle suggested floating rocks would be really cool and magicky, and I was like, "Totally." We wanted to play with the geometry a bit too, and see what our possibilities are for embellishment or marking the goals. We want the goals to stand out, because they're pretty much the target for the players. We want the target to be easily identifiable and easy to see. Kyle played around in Maya with primitive shapes too, just for more ideas.

Everything is kind of in the "in progress" stages right now. Kyle and Sibyl are working on rock sets so we can start filling the levels in with not-whitebox art. Kyle has also started working on the goals.

I'm jumping around a lot, so I think I'm going to need to get started again on menu concepts since our programmers are ready for art for that.

I can't wait to see our art as it's being placed in the levels. The levels are interesting and fun to play now, but as we start getting art in, the game will really start to come alive.