Spring Submission - The Journey thus far (Introductions and Research)



Since Christmas I've been working on another term based submission for my course, much like my winter submission; With the different aspect of working with a group and having a lesser degree of freedom on the type of game we're making as to focus our efforts a bit more.

The lovely people i have been working with are here;




Same as before we got a brief, for the next two months (or more precisely up till 27th of March (also the release date of Bloodborne - yay)) To construct a shoot em up style game. Cleverly this meant character design wouldnt be wasted trying to design characters forever as we were working with a ship and although there is some freedom in how to approach that style of game, there is a lot more focused direction.

I've gotten pretty into shoot em up's, more strangely because of the PS4, i originally had a lot of love for the Touhou Project Games, a Japanese brand of shoot em up's in the subgenre of 'Bullet Hell' games, known for having the entire screen filled with projectiles.


And then i got very into games like Geometry wars and Resogun with the ps4 to name some recent favourites, but it's definitely a genre i enjoy because of it's dedication to gameplay, performance and balance. It's also a genre that has existed since the early days of gaming.

Anyway back on track,

Some general decisions to start us off, 2D or 3D or Sprites for example?  all 3 are nice to use in this sort of scenario, but it's more about our ability to properly make it work and look competent; so after a little bit of thought we decided to for 3D assets from a 2D plane, the 3D assets would cater a little more to what we've been learning for the past few months, and i prompted that showing it from a 2D perspective would give us a little ease and control with how we present the game. 

From the outset we designated ourselves some general roles to cover; Craig was group leader and would work on the enemies of the game, Razvan would work on the Environments of the game, Prem would handle the Player Character of the game and I would Handle the UI and menu side of the game.

I've never been a UI artist, so i was eager to try and do a role that I've never done before and also cover something i felt had under appreciated utility in games, but as with all designing the first thing to do is to construct moodboards and brainstorm about the whole thing.





Here's the mind map i did for the UI itself and a partial mind map i did for some menu designs. The UI stuff was the most important as i wanted to get some idea of the shapes i would use for design ideas as well as as screen real estate that would be available (aka where i can put things on screen) to give me ideas for positioning and reasoning of that. 

We sure do like bars and boxes in video games as most of their designs are based on this style of presentation. Though it is encouraging that many menu's and UI elements are not necessarily complicated (though i have no doubt they were thoroughly developed).

Colour is very important here as elements need to have visibility with the rest of the objects on screen, but also not detract from the main areas of the screen. So this will be something I need to Experiment with.

The menu stuff was slightly less important at this stage due to the focus on getting a design style set up, but i generally liked the minimalistic themes (usually due to limitation) from menu's like megaman.

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