Problems

I'm facing this problem all over an over again: how to make decent-looking graphics? How to make them so glossy and eatable? My goal in this project is to learn to make it so awesome that I can proudly look back and see the progress. I want to learn something important in this project; I want to do a lot of work to make my graphics look good. Any tips and comments are welcomed. So, please, if you have any suggestions how to do make my graphics look better, I'd appreciate to hear your opinion.

Possible mascot for the game.

AppStore is full of really nice-looking games, like Fruit Ninja, Tiny Wings and Diamond Dash. I've played them and love the graphics. Those games, including many others, are going to influence my style a lot in this project.

Our project is going on for the second week and we have come up with a theme. The point in the game is to build 3 or more blocks of the same color. It's almost like tetris but the player drops only one block at a time. So the blocks have a tiny baby dragon trapped inside and the player's goal is to free as many as they can.

Some testing for the pixelz.

Dragon babies are trapped!

There was discussion about the images inside the block. They are too small compared to the amount of details they have and it doesn't look good on the iPhone screen. That's why I tried to take a lot of details off (compare the mascot picture above and the last one here). Also the pose of the character is hard to understand when you see only the small picture. It might not be so clear that it's trapped in there, even if in the bigger image it might be much clearer.
There will be 3-4 different colors and they probably won't be the standard red - yellow - blue - green. We want something a bit different.

My next steps will be iterating the character. I will also think about the background image which will stay darkish/natural colorish. That way it doesn't disturb the playing.

The First Steps

Our team will start working from tomorrow on for real. We will meet hopefully quite often and have split our team in two; design & art and programming. We will of course work as a whole team but dividing into these two will help in the beginning, since the programmers are writing the basic code while I and our designer work on the visuals and mechanics.


I'm quite interested in how the game is going to look like. I have made a few mood boards to support the ideal themes for the game as well as a couple of sketchy backgrounds and color schemes. The theme is not set yet but we are currently working on it. Once it's set, we can start thinking about the icons and all other theme-related stuff. It might be that we still have to come up with several other ideas for the theme.

A quick sketch
 of the possible
background.

The background is going to scroll down once the player makes progress in the game. One round takes 60sec and I thought 3 times screen height is enough. That will be tested later on.

I'm going to emphasize on testing in this project because in my last project there was too less testing. The game has to be fun and easy to understand.

My goals are to make decent-looking graphics and learn to use Illustrator (vectors in amount) well in this project.

At the Beginning

Hey. I'm starting this new blog about a game development project that is supposed to last about 4 months. My role is to be the graphics artist so I'm going to emphasis on that part in the blog as well.


The series of posts will in the end basically describe the process of a mobile game project. I won't reveal the project partner's name and all the specific details unless they want so. I bring this case to the internet because I want to open the mystic process of game development for everyone.

I'm myself still pretty much a noob in this field but I'm highly active and doing a lot to accomplish something awesome.

So. I hope you get some valuable information in here once I've got more to say. Also comments are welcomed, please share if you think how something should've done in your opinion.


Thanks. :)