Ambient Pressure Buttons

I spent this week making the buttons for all of the menus and maintaining the Scrum Backlog. As I cannot find 400 words to write about the later, I simply will have to try with the former.

The main issue with the buttons has been to find a suitable font, as well as the changes in what exactly the buttons say. After a couple of times rewriting the buttons – changing font, changing actual words – the buttons have finally settled down at a final look.

There were two requirements we placed upon the font we should use: 1, It needs to be readable on the screen, and 2, it needs to be free for comercial use. Mentally I added a third condition, that it would suit the game. For the additional third condition, I only looked for suitable fonts on dafont.coms categories Eroded, Distorted, and Destroy. Among the fonts I found that I thought suited the games ambiance, only one was free for comercial use. As such it was chosen for the buttons.

That I later noticed that it was the font originally used by the group who built the concept of Ambient Pressure was an unexpected but pleasant discovery.

The pick of the font was originally because it reminded me of the first groups font, and the fact it seems to be dissolving – something certain things does when submerged in water, and thus I thought it would suit the underwater ambiance.

As I was making the buttons, I was also tasked with making sure they can change colour once moused over, which, while done simply by changing text colour, had to be visible on all of the possible places for them to be placed on the game screens. Going from black to a very bright blue was an easy pick – partly for it to be obvious, but also partly to keep to water-y colours.

Due to the choice in colours having to be visible, I decided the best placement for them to be on the lower part of the background, with only the two first buttons on the menu above the middle line. This makes them appear far down, so they don’t take over the screen, and gives a lot of empty space on the screen. The buttons were placed at the right side of the screen due to the suggestion of the level designer.

The buttons remains fairly simple, text-only buttons to melt together with the background a bit – though not too much – and blend in with the otherwise simplistic style of it.

Ambient Pressure Screens Background

I spent a 40 minutes an evening looking up ways to create an underwater picture, before settling on a simple method only utilizing six PhotoShop tools.

A blue and black gradient is the biggest part of the background.

I then used white and black to render clouds – after that, I used the filter gallery to turn a plastic wrap filter (settings being Highlight Stregth 12, Detail 9, Smoothness 7) on, followed by adding linear dodge to make it blend in with the background. Free Transform was then used to make it form the water surface. Using a mask to remove the edges, making it more natrual and help it blending in, I then dublicated the layer and used Free Transform to turn the second layer upside down. I proceeded with moving it to the bottom of the background. Changing linear dodge to colour dodge to make it melt into the much darker background, and then I lowered the opacity to about 70%.

After I finished with that I could fix the light, to really get the underwater look and hiding the gradiant, rendering black and white clouds once again, this time without turning on the plastic wrap filter – instead using a Radial Blur (settings being Zoom, Amount 100, best quality), and then adding linear dodge for it to not literally cover the rest of my work. After that it was just the matter of stretching it so it covers the entire scene and using a mask I to make use of a black and white gradiant to stop it from being overpowering.

It took three to four tries to get perfect, instead of small flaws everywhere.

This was to create a background that could give the player a sense of being underwater. It has a very simplistic style, looks pretty good, and is relatively simple to create with decent knowledge of PhotoShop tools.

Worth noting is that using black and blue is not an excellent idea when rendering clouds, the effect doesn’t seem to turn out as good when doing that. You can’t render clouds at a too small surface either, it is better to go big than to go small. And the picture does not look complete without the shadow at the bottom. Don’t forget to use the mask to not leave the light a bit too overpowering, and it really doesn’t work without the light either as it will be obvious the background is just a gradiant.

Further Character Design

This week we did turnaround and character drawings, based on our thumbnails two weeks ago.

I decided to pick the third thumbnail, with elements of one and fourteen, because I felt like the assymetric design and the unusually large shoulder guards blended well with the concept, and would be the most interesting character to design for. With some advice from a friend.

In the end, this character came out…

As for drawing of her in a relaxed stance…

Well, oops

I forgot to update last week. As an apology, you’ll get a double update now.

This is what I made the week I forgot to update, as we learned about two-point perspective at the time.

I had already heard of the tools and practiced with them when I heard of them here, so it was more of a jog of the memory, but it did help in allowing me to see more uses of it, and gave me some much-needed practice drawing in 3D, as I have never quite utilized this knowledge.

That’s it from the forgotten week.

First time I drew thumbnails

It was the first time I drew thumbnails, as well as attempts of designing armor/modern clothing combination. Shoulder armor isn’t all that difficult, even when inexperienced, and it was rather amusing to try making different body types when making the thumbnails.

Update

So, I nearly forgot to update this blog this week. Unfortunatly, it seems like I will keep having difficulties with it.

This week, I have been writing the raport, and been focusing entirely at it. As such, I have very little to add this week that I can actually remember at this very point.

Documentation

So, started writing my project report this week.

I can just say one thing about it, really, and that are that you really need to ducument every single thing, and why you did it, otherwise it comes back to bite you.

Fancy Mansion

As I’m not quite that good, I don’t have any photos, but today my group was to show our paper prototype of a game we’re designing according to the words of ”Fancy pants” and ”Clueless”… To our teacher.

With fog of war, a great storyteller/game master, and a lot of playtesting, our fany pants rich man with a gun got to chase after the burglar in his home, who kept hiding. Our teacher played very diffrently from our group, taking the route of hiding more often than running.

It was rather interesting, in fact.

A shame he didn’t want to read the rules I attempted to polish so it was easy to understand and well-written.

Either way, we ended up being in the top three of the eight games he played today. A great achievement, I’d say.

Oops

I really need to learn to update this more often.

Especially given that this blog might be very important if I pass or fail a course.

And I haven’t updated it for… A month? I’m worse at this than I thought.

The Benefactor

Oh well, look at this. I managed to find the way you upload images.

This is the character known as The Benefactor to me, from the first workshop. As the Art Director, a role picked for me on the behalf of being the only person in the group capable of drawing, I had to design the characters. Among else. This character stuck out for me, partly for playing mission control though the game we made up.

And, again, I leave you.

Have a pleasant evening.