Level UP

I recently spent some time oogling the Life Witch stickers I did illustrations for and took some pictures.  By this point, these pictures have made their way onto Twitter, the Facebook page, and the Bala blog.  Tumblr is the next stop after this!  I'm very happy with how these have turned out and want to share them with the world!

Take a look!

Bala's business card and promotional sticker as well as my own personal business card.  It seems like purples are my favorite, I guess!  But because I've been swamped with creating content for games, I didn't have much time to spend on getting these things designed with time to spare for printing, which is why these things are so simple.  My personal business card ended up reminding me of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (a very good read).  Additionally, I would ordinarily sell myself as an Environment Artist, but instead chose "game artist" because of the audience these cards are reaching out to.  These were printed specifically for an event called Out to Launch, where industry professionals from all fields come together to look at student work.  Game artist, though less specific, I feel is a friendlier title than Environment Artist for those that are unfamiliar with the terminology.  I'd like to reach out to as many people as I can and get them to understand what I do relatively quickly!

Bonus picture!

I also spent some time this week revising Life Witch's design.  I got the news that it would benefit us to change her design relatively recently (and after all this stuff was printed - which is ok!!), so haven't had that much time to do anything with her besides a draw-over.

I took a frontal render of her without her cloak on (the main element that needed to be eliminated) and drew directly on top of it to find a solution to her design.  I started by changing the type of scarf, which was initially designed to be hidden under the cloak and to showcase the scar on her neck.  Without those limitations, I covered up her neck with a thick bind, and made her scarf danglies much more menacing.  All three tendrils are of varying sizes, a giant one to her left, and two smaller ones to her right.  Because she was buried and left for dead, I also thought it appropriate to rough up her clothes a bit.  She herself will also be a bit dirty, but that was harder to capture with this set up, so left out.

There are still two big decisions that need to be made in terms of her design and those things are:

1) Should those giant hands be left alone as a scarf, or emerging from within her from her back?

2) Should her hands be bound by the pink bow, or left to be free?

I'll have to sit down with the team to answer these questions so we can finalize her design.  Despite the pain of changing her design at this point in the project, I do like her new look.  She is much more interesting and has a much better silhouette.      

That's all for now!  Next post should definitely have some updates on the game itself...hopefully.      

    

Prisma has blasted off into space. Goodbye Prisma. Hello Bala.

Work on Prisma has finally wrapped up and settled down.  Time to give it a rest and turn attention back to Bala.

I'm still beat up from Prisma abuse, so for this week so far, I've been working on Bala paperwork, such as setting up the SVN, doing Kickstarter research, and writing dialogue scripts for the characters.  I WILL be doing some texture work as well, so stay tuned for the next blog post!  I also got the Bala stickers in the mail!  I'll take a picture of those very soon.

For now, I'd like to leave you with our Prisma video.  It's narrated by a super cute girl named Fractal who is helping out a girl named Ray.  The video showcases gameplay and explains it all along the way.  Watch til the end for a surprise!

prisma prisma prisma

Production has been a little slow this week because I've been trying to get Bala stickers ready for printing, as well as business cards for Bala and myself before an event in May that I will need these things for.  Those have finally been taken care of and sent off to the printers, so now I have to wait for those beautiful things to come flying back to me.  You can check out the baby updates on Bala on the main Bala blog, over here.

This week, we've been meeting regularly with our professor to get as much feedback on Prisma as possible. We really want to win this thing!!  The first thing I addressed was the skyboxes.  Originally the skybox had a brush of the moon that looked like a photograph, and not enough stars.  Here's the new skybox:

I manipulated photos of the moon (or some kind of object in space, I'm not actually sure) by overlaying them with different colors using a watercolor brush for blending.  I also tried to make the color palette of the skybox more cohesive with the objects in the environment.  So far, it looks much better with the new skyboxes alone!  The above image is a screenshot of the neutral dimension, and below is a shot of the blue dimension:

Not shown in these screenshots are twinkling stars we have added.  They look great and really invoke the feeling of a shining night sky!

Additionally within these shots, I have redone the textures of the cliff pieces we use in these levels.  Here is a before and after of the texture:

This texture was originally done by someone else who didn't quite have the time to finish it.  I reworked it by manipulating other cliff textures we had that were finished and making the rocks match up with those.  As previously mentioned, you can see these textures at work in the screenshots above.

The last major thing I did this week is make a boring cave somewhat interesting.  I've already received feedback and need to alter the texture to be less clean and more primitive, but here is the new cave texture:

The cave paintings change as the player switches between dimensions.  In the top, the people are being grabbed by hands, while in the bottom, I guess they're dancing.  Based on feedback, I need to get rid of the dancing feeling.  It needs to be more mysterious, like aliens and UFOs, but not aliens and UFOs.  I don't know if I have time to completely change the painting, but we will see.  

That's all this week!  Next week, work on Prisma should be coming to a halt as we resubmit our project to be voted on.  Maybe next time there will be a video of gameplay.  Until then!  Bye  

Being social is hard

This past week I've been working on promotional material for Bala.  This quarter, we really need to step up our social media game and advertise the game like heck, so I've been creating business card thumbnails, sticker sketches, and scouting the internet for a good hosting service for the website.  I've also been doing thumbnails for posters and promotional banners, and coming up with battle plans for sites like twitter, facebook, and tumblr.  At the bottom, I'll provide links for all of those things!  We've had URLs and pages since the very beginning of the project, but are just now revving up to use these outlets.

Here's a collection of the different business cards I've come up with so far.  Fonts and colors are tentative; this first set of thumbnails is to pinpoint composition and ideas.

Feedback has been all over the place, as different people like different designs, so I think I'm going to print up 2 different designs using the beautiful rounded corner business cards at Moo.  The designs I'm fairly certain I am going with are the vertical compositions, so the thumbnails in the bottom row.  The next step is to do tighter thumbnails, and then the final art.  Hope to show that off next week!

As a relatively close tie-in to the business cards, I've been working on a banner that features similar artwork as the business cards.

I've also come up with a couple different sticker designs, and only like one so far, but here they all are!

This is supposed to be Life Witch resting on a book titled Bala, with many more stacked books around her.  The magenta outline is where the sticker would be cut.

A rounded sticker idea.

Life Witch with project website outlining her arm.  I tried playing around with the logo on her poncho thing, but it didn't look like it would work out.  I'll have to play around more in the final illustration.  But so far, this is my favorite sticker idea, because it seems like a design that people would actually want to stick onto something.  Heck, I would! And I'm super picky about stickers, so I probably wouldn't want to use the first two designs I came up with.  That said, I hope to do a couple more ideas before actually deciding.

For posters/promotional art, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of portraits for the witches of Bala.  

First up is Life Witch about to eat a fairy in a throne chair in the middle of the woods.  Her throne chair is flanked by bloodied roses, and a suspended cage with more fairy snacks.  In this portrait, she will not be wearing her iconic mask and scarf; instead, they will be sloppily hanging from her chair.

Pictured above is Time Witch sitting alone atop her clock tower.  Her eyes are averted from the painter/camera and she looks pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Cake Witch is standing reminiscent to a queen despite her tattered clothes.  She is surrounded by her cake monsters, who share similar eyes to her own.

The compositions of these portraits need a little work and refinement, but that's the general idea.

For funsies, I also started setting up a scene for Life Witch to look like a creepy lifeless doll.  In the end, I hope to have some of the objects animated, so that there are levitating books, and the dangling stars twirl a bit.

The original plan was to write 'BALA' on the face of the book like this:

BUT! It might be more interesting (and much more readable) to do something like this:

So just having 3D letters in the environment.  I'll have to mess around with the environment a little bit to make it even more beautiful.

And what will this be used for?  Who knows.  Maybe a Title Screen where you press Start, which will then take you to the interactive menu, or for the back of my personal business cards.  Maybe a banner!  The possibilities are endless (within reason).

Bonus!  I've started doing a promo art piece for Prisma as well.  If it comes out nicely, I might print it as a sticker along with the Bala one.

Here's the sketch, and here's a bit of refinement below:

That's all for now!  If I manage my time well, I hope to have a couple of these things completed by next week.  Stay tuned!

Oh!  And here are all those links I talked about at the top:

Bala facebook page
Tumblr blog
Twitter

Website coming soon!