Final Project

Well, I made it through to the final year of university, and to the final major project of said year. Thus begins the slow trudge towards what will no doubt be immeasurable success and universal appraisal. First though I need to make the damn thing.

 Since I'm going at this project solo I decided to make it a 2D Platformer, It's a good genre for soloists and much simpler to design than a 3D project. I'm going to be drawing all my assets instead of modelling them so I made a choice early on not to draw any in detail and instead make them all block colors. It's a lot more time efficient, plus I really like the storybook(ish) effect of it all. 

Character Concept (Slightly Shaded)

Character concept (Plain Color)

Boss Concept

 How much detail I should add to an image is something I'm still debating. Slightly shaded drawings like the balloon would be look good if was used to say, give the impression of something illuminated, such as moonlight etc.. on the other hand though that effect could be easily achieved in unity without having to carefully shade my assets. While I don't think I'm going to include details like eyes for my protagonist, I'm strongly considering keeping those details for the Boss character. One reason being that if everything is ultimately just a plain color, then having a character with lines and eyes will elevate it in importance, and the other reason that this character needs to be clearly visual if something to be avoided.      
  

1st Concept

What assets might look like if not silhouettes

Night Trees

Night Ruins

  

 The first experiment wasn't quite what I was looking for, the colors clash with each other too much, so i figured it would be best if the colors reflect the time of day. If it was midday then the colors would be bright, if it was night then they would be darker etc. The few drawings of foreground/terrain set at night worked better in my eyes due to the color pallet being a lot more consistent in this regard. It also lead me to m final concept below which was sort of a mash up of all the drawings above.      

My goal as of right now is to make 3 levels, one at dusk, one at night and one at daybreak. I probably wont be able to make all three of them but it's a start. The trees looked pretty good as silhouettes so I've decided the majority of the game will take place in a forested area, along with the decaying ruins of once great civilization to add some variety.

 I haven't thought of a name yet so for now I'm calling it something kinda pretentious like..

Final Concept