I've never made a complete video before so obviously the first one I make is going to be in Photoshop

I might edit this entry later but.  I updated Bala's website and made out a video of it.  I'm no web designer and this is my first video, but check them out!  I'm pretty proud of what I did!

witchesofbala.com

EDIT: The Bala website sadly no longer exists.  The blog still does!

Here's the video:

Last week of college!

Art's been dry this week.  I've been doing a lot of project manager type things, which is hard to show!  I've been gathering images and renders to get ready to seal the deal on school.  Here are the screenshots I've gathered of Bala.  They show the current progress on the game so far, and how the game looks for final school submission!

Hop on over to the Bala blog for renders of Life Witch I posed for the website and other things!

Baby batty blockade

I've been swamped with going to studios and working on stuff for Prisma, but I've had some time to do some baby tweaks to Bala this week.  I started trying to get out the majority of the place holder art, and most of that is on the HUD.

I started by taking a render of the knife and putting a simpler spell circle (doily) as the background:

Next, I tackled getting in a new mesh for the shield.  I looked up some shield silhouettes online and liked this one:

What I liked about this is that it looks like it has bat ears and bat wings.  At first, I tried to copy this style 100%, and that didn't end up being very interesting, especially because of the size the shield is going to be on the screen.  Instead, I went wild and came up with this: 

You can clearly see the bat silhouette in the shadow, which is great!  Unfortunately, the shield doesn't start out this big in the game.  After getting the shape I wanted, I went into the texture:

The idea here is that the mouth is where the enemy damage goes.  So for example, if an enemy is shooting projectiles, symbolically, it's like the bat is eating the projectiles so they don't hit Life Witch.  It was later suggested to me that I should inset the mouth and give it a bit more depth, but because of the time constraints I'm working under right now, that will have to wait.  I'd really like to explore this more!

With it modeled, I created a HUD icon.  It's my favorite because it's cute:

Here is the HUD icon as well as the shield in the actual game:

I also touched up life bars.  You can see Life Witch's above, which is a standard green life bar set on top of a doily spell circle.  I didn't want the life bar to get lost in the grass, so made the spell circle a nice purple.  Unfortunately, there's still a bit of confusion with the life bar, but solving that problem doesn't seem to be very doable this quarter.

And here's the enemy life bar:

The enemy life bar is now red and has a dark outline.  Now the two types of life bars are very different, so hopefully the confusion between what an enemy is and what isn't is now clear.  Will need more playtesting!

That's all on Bala for now.  I'll have many more updates in the very near future.

Extra: I also tried to do a mesh for the wind HUD icon and....it came out looking like a slinky:

Welp!  Gotta fix it one day, but today is not that day.  The water HUD icon also needs some help...

Even more stickers!

Yesterday, I started doing some thumbnails for Prisma stickers to give out at E3 (Yes!  We're a finalist!).  I did a lot, so I'm going to throw them all in here!  As a note, the magenta outline is where the sticker would be cut.  In some cases, it was nice to have this guide so I could figure out where to put text or toss in the Prisma website.

I tried to play around with single characters as well as groups of characters.  I really like the dynamic between Ray and Fractal, so tried to play up on their buddy-buddy relationship.  Because we want to print these stickers at a smaller size, it was hard to come up with designs with Ignus and other characters because he's so big.  I also secretly like Fractal's design much more, and focused on her quite a bit.

As an added bonus, I did a spontaneous suggestion:

With all of these thumbnails, I showed them all to the team, and they voted on the ones they liked the best.  Below I've compiled an image that includes all of the thumbnails that are numbered for easy reference; the ones in the green circles are the ones people liked:

Since people seemed to like dead Fractal (number 19), I also came up with a dead Ray (number 30).  In the end, I threw the idea out because it was just too silly.

Below are the finalists:

The next step for the stickers is to do some additional roughs and figure out where text is going to go.  I think we decided to have a sticker that says something like "Prisma E3 2014", as well as a sticker without it.  Who knows how many stickers we will show up with.  Millions, hopefully.

Next, I took a couple of these and stuck them on a shirt:

The first shirt design was created specifically for a shirt, and has the cute Fractal!  The other two are altered stickers with Ray as the focus.  As a note, these thumbnails are specifically for composition, and are not final color.  We definitely don't want to wear blinding white shirts!  As much as I like Fractal, I do think Ray needs to be the focus of the shirt.  So far, the third design is the strongest, though I'll have to do a couple more iterations.

That's all for this post.  Final designs next time (hopefully)!

Life Witch seriously needs a real name

While dealing with creating and placing assets, I've been doing another nice Life Witch concept in between.  As she no longer has an official concept art of her latest design, I've been doing just that.  Here's a render I drew over in Photoshop to sort out her new design:

I posted this a while back, but it's nice to post again for reference. 

 From here, I started doing some loose sketches:

I ultimately decided to have her in a sitting pose, though it took a while to determine which sitting pose to go with.  In the end, I went with one where the only prop I would need to use would be the one on her person.

With references ready to go, I did a rough of her:

The idea is to have her sitting on her own scarf, and her scarf offering her tea.  The scarf has changed quite a bit from the original concept in the beginning as it is now almost sentient.

From here, I started doing the final lines, though I'm still unsure if I will render her with lineart (always good for a simple sticker though!):

While I was working, I decided to change the scarf to make it look more like she is sitting on it.  Additionally, I got rid of the tea.  Since the scarves are still undone, I could change my mind and change it back or think of something else completely.

So that's the progress on that so far!  I had a lot of trouble figuring out her legs, and soon after drawing them took a break.  I'm still on break and haven't touched it since.  I hope to have this finished before Thursday! Only time (witch) will tell....  

Quick & Dirty Grass

I'm a grandma with a foggy memory, so I took some step by step screenshots of how I did the grass for Bala.  I learned a lot doing this and hope to make better grass in the future.  For now, this is the final product:

The way Bala's collision is set up, our ground has to be completely flat.  To offset this, we will be placing baby grasses in some places, as shown below (as an example; placement not final):

But this post isn't about baby grasses. 

The first thing I did was to create a patch of grass:

I tried to capture the general shapes, and also made sure not to leave it a solid color.  The tiny amount of detail really does make a difference!

Next, I took this patch of grass and made it a solid color in order to make a brush:

To do this in Photoshop, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset..., name your brush, and click OK.

Ta-da!  Patch of grass brush at your service.

It's important to note that if you want a completely opaque brush, the image you use needs to be black.  If you use different colors or grays, Photoshop is going to translate those things into something that is semi-transparent.  Unless that's what you want, it's something to keep in mind as you work on your brush. 

With my new brush selected, I went to Window > Brush, and played around with some brush settings:

I adjusted Shape Dynamics and Scattering in order to get the desired effect of many patches of grass.  With this, I can create a lot of grass in one brush stroke.  The set up is finally done!  On to the actual texturing.

I started out with a base color, and brushed on some messy grasses:

Whoa, gross!

To blend, I used some watercolor brushes to calm the strength of the grass down:

With the grass calm, I turned it back up by brushing on even more grasses of different shades of green:

Calm it down again with some watercolor brushes:

As you can see there's a bit of back and forth.  Paint on grass, and dull it out with a good blending brush.  Repeat this process until you are satisfied with the result.

Next, I started placing the original detailed patches of grass:

I continued to do this, but after a while started placing patches of grass at 37% opacity to calm them down:

In the game, the above texture looks like such:

A lot better than before!  Because this was for testing, I didn't worry about seams or if it covered the whole ground.  With this test, I decided I needed more patches of grass (A LOT more).  The ground still looked way too flat in terms of color variation.

Many grasses later and making the grass tilable, I arrived at the following result: 

And there you have it, quick and dirty grass.

SCAD Out to Launch was a SUCCESS!

Out to Launch at SCAD Atlanta was held on May 1st, and I'm still recovering from it!  I was so busy, I didn't take pictures of my booth myself, so stole this picture of it from my dad:

I had screenshots from Prisma and a couple of my older projects on the back wall, as well as a Bala promotional image created specifically for the event.  I had meant to get it printed out MUCH bigger, but due to printing complications, couldn't get that done in time.  I also had my personal business card, Bala's business card, my resume, and Life Witch stickers!  The stickers were a huge success and I managed to give out nearly all of them.  On the big screen, I played videos from each of my 3D projects, and on the laptop, was this (which is the same on the backwall): 

I took assets from the tutorial of Bala and mashed them all together to make a scene for Life Witch.  In a previous blog post, I originally wanted to have this scene as a library, but didn't have time to do it.  Instead, I recycled what I had, touched up some textures, and did a forest scene.  The game itself unfortunately did not get to a polished enough state that I was comfortable showing off at an event like this.  The good news is that this image was created instead, and can be used for multiple things.  I even turned it into the Project Bala page's banner:

I'm very pleased with how this image came out!  Now to get the game to look this good....

I also just remembered that I had planned to put in Life Witch's spell book to this forest scene, but didn't have time to model it.  Here are some quick concepts I did to try to figure it out:

I like the concept in the middle the most because I think that's how Life Witch would treat her book.  She'd accidentally claw it, get monster blood on it, stick loose pages in it, and not even care how it looks.  Will it make it into the game before the quarter ends?  Who knows!