The complete history of "Life Witch"

I noticed I don't have a master post anywhere of the sweat and tears that went into Life Witch for Project Bala last year, so I figured I could remedy that.  Plus, I still rather enjoy her design, and I think her conceptual journey is pretty fun.

Life Witch started out as, well, not a witch at all.  She was for some reason an angry looking girl in a profane sweater:

In essence, a random doodle born out of boredom.  In a distant corner of my mind, I drew inspiration from the scarf from Stretch Panic, though I've never played it.  But, I've always liked the idea of a sentient scarf.  This doodle was quickly abandoned until a few months later around the beginning of my senior year at SCAD.  To better realize the potential of the scarf, I explored a messenger type character with an animal-like mask:

 The idea was to create a somewhat creepy character hidden behind a mask, arms tied behind their back, and a scarf that would therefore act as their arms.  The more hidden her actual arms were, the better.  I didn't have much time to explore many character designs and thought this was a good enough start, so used this design for my Senior Studio project pitch:

This quick illustration got the reaction I wanted, so I continued to explore the design further.  Shorts turned into a bewitching dress, and the cat tail turned into a giant bow.  Before I knew it, she had gone from a messenger to a witch:

I tried to carefully think how exactly the different layers of her clothing would work.  The most important thing was to hide her actual arms.  The giant bow in the back helps to disguise them, and the poncho completes the transformation.  The scarf also features a gradient to make the scarf wrapped around her neck and the scarf acting as her hands seem unrelated, an attempt to further the illusion.  I tried not to worry about style at this stage, and more so focused on her outfit's functionality.  Once I was happy with it, I tried to render her in the style I wanted:

At this point, I decided to remove the mask from her face and instead wear it atop her head, simply because I ended up liking her face.  A weak reasoning perhaps, but a decision that was made nonetheless.  Her character went from creepy, to creepy cute, and cute is always a good thing.  I also decided to lose the scarf wrapping around her neck and decided to go with a scarf wrapping style that drapes closer to the body.  Might as well show off her beautiful neck scar, right?  With a style I was generally happy with, I then went on to creating a turnaround for our character artist (Hank), which required several different iterations (which I've combined into a GIF):

Eventually she was modeled:

And rigged:

And she lived a happy life.  A short, sweet, life.  Until one day, several months after her completion, our professor in charge of our Senior Studio class said that she had a weak silhouette.  We must have had bigger fires to put out with our project that he didn't notice Life Witch for a while (heck, we didn't even notice).  At first, we were like:

But he was right.  Because of the angle of the game, her details were pretty hard to make out:

She unfortunately looked like a walking sack.  There was no way around it at this point, her poncho needed to be removed, the one thing I thought was integral to making her mysterious and hiding her real arms.  Because of how many other things we needed to do, I had to come up with a quick fix solution that would not take away from other parts of production.  I decided to take a render of the current model and alter her from there:

Thankfully, our character artist modeled her actual arms the first time, in case we ever needed them free.  So I deleted the poncho geometry, revealed her arms, and took her scarf to the next level.  Our professor was much happier with this design, and she looked better in game as well: 

Still a little hard to make out, but better.  For a senior project completed in 9 months, and considering all the other problems we ran into and overcame, I think she came out quite well.  Like I said in the beginning, I'm extremely proud of how she turned out, her design, and overall quality.  Here she is fully textured and posed:

And below is her official turnaround from our character artist himself:

Well, that's the end of her journey for now!  It's refreshing to look back and see how far she's come.  I'm hopeful that she will be revived in a future project one day, maybe even Bala itself.  Until then, I'm working on environment stuff for Prisma.  I have some character projects on the side, one of which I should be able to reveal very soon.  Until then, rest in pieces Life Witch!!

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)!

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!

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!

A Bala Break

It's the end of the first week of the quarter and I've had to direct my full attention on another project called Prisma.  In other words, no Bala progress this week!  On Prisma, we had to hit a very quick deadline, so I've been helping them with their environment art.  Here are a couple screenshots:

Some of the textures need work, and we still need to hone in on a more defined color palette, but we've made incredible progress!  I'll probably make another post about this project in the near future.  We haven't given up on Bala, but Bala progress has been really slow because of the focus on Prisma.  Bala will get more love soon, I promise!