Apr 6

Here at MYO we’ve been doing quite a bit of soul searching these past few days. The subject of our contemplation is the design of the main interface graphics for our game, which we’ve decided to call Weather the Weather. The problem is that the design of the powerbars and the timer needs to be consistent throughout the 4 seasons, but the colorscheme of the 4 is so drastically different that coming up with a solution has been, well, challenging. The other issue is the shape of the graphics – it needs to fit out handmade feel, but at the same time not interfere with the graphics already on the screen, or we end up with something that looks very very clogged.

Below are a few variations Linzi’s eyes have been bleeding over:

picture-2-1

picture-4-1-1

picture-6-1

picture-7-1

picture-14-1

picture-15-1

picture-2-1-1

picture-3-1

picture-4-2

picture-7-1-1

picture-6-1-1

picture-5-1-1

picture-8-1

picture-2-2

picture-3-2

powermeters_v2

Apr 4
Balls!
icon1 ira | icon2 Uncategorized | icon4 04 4th, 2009| icon3No Comments »

Andrea made these sweet balls to break the blocks with (which we have yet to make). The more we played with them, the more we realized how awesomely cool it would be to add a bit of animation to them. Andrea created the frame by frame animations and then used a script she found online to output the frames to a sprite sheet. You can check out the results below!

Summer:

rock

Winter:winter

Fall:

spring

Spring:

water

Apr 1

While everyone else is busy with everything else, I’ve been keeping busy in Cinema4D making paddles for the different seasons. For each season, the paddle had to be in keeping with the type of ball that it would be used to control. Since the ball in winter is going to be extremely hot, hot handlers and a wrought iron bar is what you’ll be playing with. For spring it’s a long, and for fall they’re mittens, since it’s getting colder and the ball is icy!

We would like to add some subtle animations to these, but the preliminary models looks like this:

picture-4-1

picture-1-1

picture-5-1

Mar 31

Since our landscape for Summer changed pretty significantly since our original idea of lush vegitation, we had to rework the character that we had planned to go with that season. Here are Andy’s new sketches:

summer_char_v06

summer_char_v07

beetlechar_render_01

beetlechar_render_01p

Spring guy:

plantman_body_earlyrender

picture-73

picture-74

Winter guy:

winterrender_01

Mar 31
Final Landscapes!
icon1 linzi | icon2 Design | icon4 03 31st, 2009| icon33 Comments »
Final Landscapes!

Final Landscapes!

The landscapes are finalized and cut-up by the design team and already put in the game by our lovely developer, Mike. Rock on Team MYO.

Mar 30
Landscapes v2
icon1 linzi | icon2 Design | icon4 03 30th, 2009| icon3No Comments »
Weather the Weather Landscapes v2

Weather the Weather Landscapes v2

After the first round of landscapes we noticed that we had some problems with conflicting styles.  Althought they were all beautiful on their own, they didn’t stand well together – especially as a panorama (which is how they will be seen in the game).  We sat down together for 10 hours and knocked these awesome pictures out.  Shown above, they go from complete to needs the most work.  I absolutely love Winter & Spring.  Spring is done except it needs to be prepared for paralaxing.  Summer is still having some issues – it’s largest one being that it looks super illustrated while the others just hint at it.  Fall is getting there… I like the ground & the sky, but the tree placement needs work and it needs the fun element found in the others.

When we did these we found a really interesting way of making sure that the style is cohesive.  We set up each season on a computer and ever half-hour/hour we switch between computers.  Therefore if you’re stuck on how something should work, you leave it for the next person who may know.  Spring is a beautiful combination of the 4 of us really working together.  Our group is awesome!

Mar 28

Notes from Adam:
“you already know what I’m going to say”

They’re all beautiful in their own right, but they don’t go together. Summer, Fall, and Spring go together more, but Winter is good because of it’s simplicity. Summer, Fall, and Spring are complicated and dark. Winter is the Christmas movie with Rudolph. Separately, “I can see Summer and Winter working together” because their both lighter in palette. Likes the painted volcano in Summer, but doesn’t like the side cliffs – the water is too complicated and get rid of the lava in the foreground. Fall is death all around, rough edges, landscape is rough, & doesn’t need the frame created by the trees in the foreground. Spring is at more of a downward perspective than the others, you look at a specific point that is not a main thing, and needs more fake elements. In the end, we should be able to put them in a panorama together and not notice a change in style.

Andy mentions he likes Winter.
Adam makes suggestions:

Make it simple & easy for yourselves. Background should have limited colors: 3 & not be the main focus. One way to do that: re-skin Winter for every other season. In addition, there should be a painted background in the back of all the landscapes. Therefore, Winter needs a painted element w/ the sky (like mountains). Summer: softer beach sand, rolling hills become ocean waves, triangle trees become umbrellas, palm trees or _______. Fall: change the rolling hills into Fall colors, get rid of the trees in the foreground, use triangle trees and turn them red, orange, and yellow, put leaves on the ground. Spring: change rolling hill to green, move them around to create the river of water down the center, put lots of green triangle trees, add flowers. Keep the light luminosity.

So that’s where we stand… bring coffee, and lots of love as we crank out these adjusted landscapes & timers, power bars, paddles, and balls.

Mar 25

We’ve taken a bit of a hiatus to photoshop the landscapes. Since there are 4 of us designers, we decided to each take on a season. Here they are as they were completed.

Linzi’s Winter:

winter2

Andy’s Spring:

spring_v13a

Andrea’s Summer:

summer2

and Ira’s Fall:

fall2

Next Thursday we meet with Adam to go over these designs and hopefully get some feedback. Yay!

Mar 15

In order to create the background landscapes for the seasons of the game, we went shopping. AC Moore sufferend an invasion by Team MYO early on, followed by Joan’s Fabrics, and several other craft shops. Our main targets were fabrics to drape into the landscapes, but lukily I had a cabinet-full of random fabric scraps I got dirt cheap in WalMart clearance bins over the years. Sometimes it really does pay to be a packrat. Other than the fabrics we made sure to pick up lots of fake moss, flowers, papers of various textures and qualities, glue, paints, playdoh, etc, etc, etc, basically whatever we thought could be any sort of useful in hand-crafting these scenes. We even visited one of the board-gaming stores in the area to see if we could use some of the materials they use to build their sets for WarHammer for our project. That was an experience all on its own, and I highly recommend it if you have never been to one of these stores.

After hauling all of our loot into an art room back at RIT and spreading it evenly between over all the surfaces we could find, we began the crafting process. Crayola Model Magic quickly became snowmen, snow blocks, snow caps for the trees (made out of green folded construction paper), and even an igloo. An entire roll of twine and wire went into making an epicly warped tree trunk with a single branch. Andrea painted some beautiful fall covers on paper and used a leafshaped hole-punch to meticulously cut out hundreds of leaves.

snowman

igloo

trees

fallstuff

While all of this was happening, Andy was busy with scanner, scanning in fabrics, paper textures, and basically creating textures out of anything and everything he could find. He is our 3D guy, that’s why. Meanwhile, Linzi had set up two cameras and with the help of the rest of the group began draping fabrics over the boards we prepared for each season so that we could shoot the actual landscapes.

falla

fallb

summera

spring

Mar 10

Some time last quarter we decided that the style we would like to go with for our game is a hand-crafted, stop-motion kind of feel. This is partly why the storyline brainstorming was so important to us – if we were going to actually physically make the landscapes, we needed to know for sure what we needed to have, to make sure we don’t need to recreate any photo sessions later on.

Here is what our finalized storylines ended up looking like:

Fall

Overall Goal: Freeze the tree spirit – preserve him for the future.

Blocks: leaves and fruit (change different colors and then die) on a tree

Goal in Blocks: 40 yr tree spirit, that has three kids that never call.

Controllers: string between mittens (flap when they go up and down)

Ball: frozen ball

Seasonal element: leaves and wind

Landscape: Stream running back into the horizon. Trees on each side with branches intertwining overhead to create an arch. Leaves, orange, yellow, brown – warm earthy colors.

http://www.goldenwoodstudio.com/uploads/images/Fairy/FF115_Fall%20Fairy.jpg
http://www.lightscapephoto.com/images/LongCanyonSlotTreeFallTN2.jpg
Time of Day: sunset

Winter

Overall Goal: To release a spring creature trapped in the ice blocks and facilitate transition to spring.

Blocks: ice blocks

Goal in Blocks: old tree spirit from Fall (bursts into flames and transforms into Fairies when goes into spring)

Controllers: heated metal rod – gets redder and hotter and starts’ shooting off fire sparks

Ball: fiery red thing that trailing bits of awesome

Seasonal element: snowing and stuff is covered in snow

Landscape: Hilly and covered with snow and evergreens. A high blue sky with clouds, large trees in the background covered pines bg (in the foreground oak etc), snowmen strewn about.

Time of Day: ambiguous

Spring

Overall Goal: When you go into spring, the young fairies explode out of old tree spirit. The main fairy (old tree spirit transformed) starts the transition and fairies plant everything. The main fairy becomes the goal (locked in a rock?) and the original fairies join him when they’re done. Break the center goal that will transform into the sun for summer.

Blocks: flowers and seeds with fairies in them when you break them

Goal in Blocks: the fairies that transform into the sun

Controllers: vines, ivy, twig – twig that grows more ivy as you gain power

Ball: glowing watery ball

Seasonal element: rain

Landscape: A lush forest. Lots of green and blues with gold light and deep soft brown earth. Moss covering everything such as logs and rocks. Trickling stream. Vines hanging from the ivy covered tree trunks with colorful flowers.

Time of Day: little bit after just rising (sun) / haze

Summer

Overall Goal: Cool down summer. “Teenager” angry sun beating rays onto the earth – summer phase, when you break blocks they turn into clouds to cool off summer.

Blocks: blobs of water

Goal in Blocks: hit the sun to cool him down into a tree spirit

Controllers: lava plasma liquid rod

Ball: lava rock

Seasonal element: sun rays, volcano shoots fiery rocks out – and keeps getting worse throughout game

Landscape: Flat beach with water lapping against the sand, cliffs/volcano in the distance on the sides. Houses & signs of life other than creatures. Turtles :3 Little bit of the beach in the foreground, characters in shallow water, volcano in the background.

Time of Day: noon! 11 to 2 range

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