Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

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 ...