Hats

This week I finally got into jumping around to different kinds of art. I'm wearing a lot of hats this semester, being the designated 2D artist on the team. I have to take care of in-game UI, menus, concepts, and as many textures as I can handle. I also have to work with pretty much everybody else on the team to make sure the art is up to par and efficient for our pipeline.

For Alex, this week, I did some in-game UI changes. Ever since we switched over to keyboard and mouse controls, we've gotten endless complaints from QA Testers that they couldn't tell what spells they had queued. I scrapped the "book" UI that displayed what secondary spells are chosen and replaced it with something a bit sleeker that displays all spells (including primaries) and which are queued to cast. 

I stole this screenshot from Chris. We also have new spell effects!

The primary spells needed "symbols," as did the two new spells we added this week. In addition to our other secondary spells, we now have:

Snare - Creates a glyph on the ground that traps enemy mages and holds them in place.

Buddy Shield - A channeled spell that mages can cast on their teammates that shields the teammate from damage.

UI always takes a lot longer than I anticipate because I forget how long it takes to save everything out. I have to save out the stationary "background" (the circles), and then all of the symbols out separately. And not only that, but I have to save a "big" version out and a "small" version of each spell. AND there is a fire and ice version of everything.

Let this blog serve as a reminder that saving UI elements out takes forever!!!

Also, to make Alex's life easier, I saved it out in such a way that everything has the same amount of space.

This is the UI all together (in Photoshop). (The checkered pattern represents transparency, by the way.)

This is what I save out for the background asset.

And then this is what one of the spell assets looks like. This way, placement of these assets does not have to be programmed in. When a programmer brings this into game and puts it all together, it automatically fits together. Had I cropped the spell assets, Alex would have needed to position the asset himself, wasting time.

I also had to do a "sample" texture this week, for my fellow artists. Inevitably, I'm not going to be the only one doing textures because of time restraints. The other artists wanted to see what we were going for in terms of textures when the time comes for them to do some. Also, it's just important for all of us to know what we're aiming for.

This is the pillar in Maya. Painted in 3D Coat.

This is the pillar in engine. (Also stolen from Chris. :D)

On Sunday, we celebrated getting the first "finished" asset into the game. (I put finished in quotes because touchups will need to be done.) We all got super excited to see more assets make it into game.

I'm going to be working closely with Erin for menu art, and I started on finalizing some things for the lobby menu today. 

We're going with a Tolkein-style map for the map-selection. Players will be able to scroll over all of the areas and a little blurb with info/lore will pop up, too.

... It's just a matter of figuring out how this uniSWF stuff works and how to save out my buttons. Cropping in Flash is already a pain, but I'm even more unsure how to do it when a button's hover/on state is bigger than its off state*.

So Erin and I are going to meet sometime and go over uniSWF together so we are both on the same page about things. Working with programmers is actually a really important thing that game artists have to learn. Especially with Flash, naming conventions** and consistency are essential. If the artist doesn't know, the programmer's gonna get pissed.

Oh and before I forget, I did some concept work and gave the mages a little makeover last week.

I did these just to get some ideas out for some customization we could do. Do you love Christmas sweater mage? Me too. He wears it because his nana knitted it for him.

Anyways, until next week, readers!

*Hover/On and Off States: A "button" is a certain kind of movieclip that you can make in Flash. Its "off state" is what the button looks like when your cursor is not on it. Its "on state" is when your cursor is over it.

** Naming Conventions: A naming convention is how you literally name something or save it out as. Something common for artists, when we're doing artwork, is to name our first save project_001; our second project_002; etc... This way they save in chronological order and it stays organized. For buttons, it is common to save them out as "BTN_play", "BTN_save", "BTN_quit", etc...