Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

Following on from my research i started making a poster for the games credits. Basing it around superhero posters i made sure to start drawing characters in exaggerated poses that conveyed movement/weight in their form. I created 3 characters for the purpose of this poster, a computer man - clad with boxing gloves and his underpants, represents the programmer of the team, and the general need for sleep  that our team needs within game development. second an art man, with paintbrush hair and oil based skin. Finally a designer, dressed elegantly and armed with paintbrushes. after working out a rough i went to a second layer to refine this further. at this point i got a little carried away from my last screenshot, but simply i finished the second later and started painting elements of the poster as an overlay, getting in important details like the boxing gloves and paint brush hair. since the posters of the era weren't one for complicated fonts, i used somethi...

Nearing the finale of the project and still so much work to be done, such is game development. When talking about final certain elements for the game we had early talked about a poster of some sort which would have ourselves on for some sort of credits. Though the idea wasn’t expanded upon for the early stage of the project we were in (at the time) Coming back to it my project manager wanted some sort of interesting way to convey our roles within the game making progress, but also to contextualise it within the main menu screen. After bouncing ideas back and forth I managed to get both members of the team excited for the idea of a ‘superhero/TV show’ poster, the kind that I myself had as a kid growing up. This would be both a diagetic item in the room, but also a neat way to display our names within the game. Being an imagined poster within an already fictional world in turn gave me a lot of leverage with design, since its criteria was not something “a child could make up”...

After completing some concepts for the magical defences, James said we needed a texture to cover the effect of them firing at the enemies, a bit of back and forth discussion and i suggested through a quick sketch (below) making a paper lightning effect, a drawing of a lightning bolt on paper backing, which would both adhere to our aesthetic and to the need for a powerful effect. This task was a bit of a quick one since we knew what we wanted from early on so it didnt require a lot of research, just a couple refreshers on what lightning in real life looks like if you snapshot it. i drew the paper effect as opposed to using a real texture to back the lightning drawing to keep the hand drawn touch there. I find the blue on white combination quite striking.

One of the bigger task, and a lot of explanations to talk you through the page of concepts i made for our magical defences. To outline, while concepting defences we wanted more whimsical aspects to the game, and something that could work as long range defences. James asked me to work on defences with 'magic' being the keyword. This started (like many great things do) with some sketchbook doodles. I'd been given the great idea of james of utilising bathroom light switches and fixtures as unique shapes to utilise. which spawned several crystal like shapes for magical defences, the idea that these crystals would then shoot magic at the monsters. Thinking forward for unique shapes that i could think of in the household was chess pieces, i thought it would be interesting to make use of floating orbs and the unique designs of chess pieces, this would in turn also make it easy to establish upgrades, as pieces would just ascend in power. More ideas came in smaller ...

Since our game makes heavy use of currency, both as a resource but also as a visual item on the game board i thought i'd concept a more interesting looking coin, or at the very least a more aesthetic one for the setting of the game. I started by doodling some assorted odds and ends that could be interesting as currency or attainable for a kid, things like buttons and stickers are extremely common to get a hold of at most ages after all. the first major concept was a coin shaped like a knights helmet, since the player is playing as the humans it would make sense to have a human looking coin right? on the other hand its kind of boring looking. A better stroke of genius on my next concepts, given that one of the monsters "the sneak" is a sucker for treasure, i made a coin in her image, additionally the colour scheme is meant to evoke the similarities to a chocolate coin, something i thought would be doubly interesting and valuable for a kid due to ...

Quick and simple post - while we may already have cannon models for levels 1 and 2, James was having a hard time coming up with a level 3 design. Basically this is my element as a concept artist. The objective was to think about a mix of practicability and interesting, it had to look like the cannon got powerful. My ideas ranged from a spiralling cannon, a revolving turret, a giant shielded cannon and so forth. Strangely enough the one that most caught on with james with the additional barrel and scope on a turret. on reflection this was because my thought process was how do you make a gun seem more impressive, "you make it longer or give it a scope" a kind of childish notion, especially on a cannon of all things, but it appears that this line of thinking was spot on for the occassion.

As part of both feedback and the progression of the game, I've started concepting upgrades for units, way of altering units already in the game, but with distinct differences so that they can be both tougher units for the players to watch out for, but also some visual variety. These were alot of fun to do, as the specifics of what i could change were left up to me (to convince my team that it was pure genius) i started off with small and cute changes; First thought was some sort of hat or helmet and what a child could use for them, so i came up with the thimble helmet. Its helmet shaped and looks fancy enough that a child would put it on a small toy or the like. To expand on the hat idea i also took some more traditional helmet designs, with a standard soldier helmet, which is perched sideways on the grunt due to the shape of the head not matching up. The second helmet is a more vikings themed helmet, the horns giving a more intimidating feel to the silly looking grunt des...

Continuing from my last post, i'm applying my rudimentary knowledge of tower defence map design, to concept some stages for our game to use (most likely in the future). (Tip) the blue spots (yellow in the last two) are all possible build spots. The top left is the revised design that James made following the feedback, with three lanes into the forest for the enemies to come down, and a wide open field to place lots of places to put defences. additionally instead of being placed at the top and bottom of the board respectively, the castle and forest are placed on the corners, putting more space on the screen and providing a more interesting board dynamic. Second on the left, we discussed the idea of further levels progressing into the forest, with the idea that the humans were pushing into the monsters territory. For this i established the castle as the main goal to protect, with a stark contrast between the human areas and the forest. Additionally inside the forest is a v...

Late start to the second academic term, the year started in January yet I've been delayed due to crunch time on my dissertation and the aftermath of it's hand in, but as of now i am of Hiatus and working towards my group project again. Following up on the project presentation at the end of last term i realised i need to do some research into level design for tower defence levels, not only to further my understanding for the genre, but also James tasked me with concepting additional level design, potentially for other stages that we could add to the game. Particularly because the intent is to apply for the incubator project (a internal prospect for uni students to offer them facilities to work on a project for a year) so we also need to be thinking of the long term prospects of the project should it keep going. So first things first I've decided to deconstruct some map design in other tower defence games a bit, just to get a feel for how they work the environment...