Wk10 Maze Modeling Concept Phase

 For my Textures I decided to make them all square shapes, because that's the way my maze is designed. For the walls, I did 3 variations: standard brick, alien blood (in the spirit of Area 51), and door. For my floors I have standard and cracked tile version and I have my plain wooden ceiling as well.

Wk09 Maze Design Final Phase

I feel like my end result came out quite nicely. The halls have an extremely abstract look to them, which is exactly what I was going for. I added shadows along the bottom and tops of the walls, and a bit of a shadow fade to the right turn. The I added a black dust/shadow to and I gave the ceiling water marks.

Wk09 Maze Design Concept Phase

 The idea for this maze is to be confusing, not only in the layout of the maze, but the actual design of the maze as well. I wanted to make the story behind this maze have to do with the very beginning of the game. When Zosimos is escaping Area 51. I wanted to make it so he was "trapped" within the building, but it would look nothing like what anyone would envision Area 51 to look like. The floors would be made out of fine stone tile, the walls made by fine stone bricks on their sides and the ceiling out of dark wooden planks. The hallways should feel like an outdoorsy type look along with a hospital feel to it. The exit door will be the only thing that really stands out because of the bright yellow which represents caution.

Wk08 Building/Structure Final Phase

This was an incredibly long process. I have well over 10 hours put into it doing the individual pixels. I tried to blend in the molten lava with different shades of red and the lava spurting out of the top with orange and yellow. Overall I thought it came out very nicely.

Wk08 Building/Structure Concept Phase

I thought a lot about the different structures that would be in Touch and one that I thought would be unique to explore would be that of a volcano. I haven't decided where exactly I want the game to take place, but I know that one of Zoe's powers involves lava and where do you get lava? A volcano! I looked through multiple images until I found something I liked and ultimately ended up with this. The viewer can clearly see the traces of molten lava sliding down to the base of the volcano along with a fiery explosion coming out of the top. The other aspect I liked about this image was how close it was to the ground (or at least it looks that way). This could be one of many lava pits located throughout a level and it also looks like it'd be fun to experiment with the lighting of it.

Wk07 Game Prop Final Phase

I think that the final Mailbox came out pretty great. Surprisingly, the shadow/highlight work looked well without checkering it for the key area and smaller lines along the square figure. over all I thought the finished product cam out really nicely.

Wk07 Game Prop Concept Phase

Although my game is not set to be in pixel art because it has a heavy focus on texture (which isn't portrayed too well when it's pixelated), I chose to do a mailbox because I thought it would be a cool type of metal that my character would be able to experiment with in the game. I looked at a bunch of different mail boxes, but many were side photos that didn't show the drop box and front aspects of the mail box. I thought this image would be fun to pixelate and had a good selection of colors from the mood board that I could manipulate easily to cast some nice shadows and show a bit of sunlight.

Wk06 Logo Design Final Phase

Click: Logo First Attempt

I had a lot of difficulty making this logo. Instead of using a hand graphic that I found online, I decided to model my own hand for the logo. This proved to be particularly annoying because I did not have a good camera that could capture a decent image of my hand. It would always either come out too dark or with an intense glare. I ended up having to put a skin texture behind the image of my hand and use the darken feature to make my hand look more like a hand rather than a ghost. I tried creating a tree branch in illustrator but it proved to be a lot more challenging than I expected. I couldn't get certain lines to bend or match up in the ways I wanted to so I dropped illustrator and took an image of a black branch from online. Instead of using this image however, I recreated my own outline of it and took off some of the branch parts to make it my own. I then put on a tree bark texture to the branch. I intersected the pointer finger with the branch to form the T-shape and I used the same text type I used for my original title screen because I liked it so much. I then added in an animation affect to turn the finger into the wood.

Click: Logo Final

After talking to our Professor, I decided against this Logo. There was no way for me to incorporate it into my title screen, so instead I took a new approach. I made a somewhat intro to the game's title screen. I incorporated the branch from the previous logo attempt and it made things look a lot nicer.

Wk06 Logo Design Concept Phase

I started off my research searching random game logos and titles in Google. One of the ones that happened to pop up was Plants vs. Zombies one of my favorite XBLA games. Now the text used for this title is way too cartoonish to be anything like my game, but what I really loved about the title was the symbolism of the text. The word "Plants" is colored in green with little leaves sticking out at each end and is placed above some grass. The word "Zombies" is colored in a dull grey with rugged texture beneath the grass. The plants are the good guys in this game and the text seems to be triumphing over the zombie text in the title. The other thing is that plants are often associated with being above ground while zombies come from beneath the ground.

I decided to go through the collection of games I brought with me to college next, and I picked out two games that caught my eye: Halo 4 and Dead Space.  With Halo 4 I wanted to go back to the roots of the original Halo and looked up what the tile/logo looked like. I really liked the text which had this halo affect on it (which was one of the things I used in my title screen) The logo which is Halo's signature "O" with the dot in the middle which represents the halo rings in the game. You can see one of the rings sketched out behind the text as well. I liked this because it took an aspect of the game and brought it to the title.

Dead Space was my favorite game I got to look at. The text had a halo affect on it along with corrosion and holes to make the text look as though it was "dead". In the background there's a picture of a severed hand floating away in the stars

Symbolism, in-game aspects and proper representation of the text are all factors I wanted to bring to my logo, so I kept these in mind while doing sketching for my logo.

I tried to vary the logo designs for each one of my thumbnails. My favorites are 1, 5, and 7. 5 doesn't look very clean as a thumbnail but in my head it was the original design idea I had in mind. I chose to use my first thumbnail for my sketch because I wanted to see how it would look if I made it bigger. It feel like it came out looking quite nicely and it fits the criteria I was looking to portray.

Wk05 Title Screen Final Phase

 Click: Touch Title Screen Animation Final

In this animation, I really wanted to slow down the morphing process of the hand and touch up some of the graphics so the background looked nicer and the materials the hand was changing into looked more realistic. For the background, I added a light blue Gaussian Blur to the title and the area around the palm of the hand. I threw out the old metal texture and went with something new that looked fresh off a construction vehicle. The diamond and rock textures I had to lower the opacity and play with the colors a bit to get the design of the hand to be more distinct. In the old graphic, the diamond and rock textures completely overpowered those of the hand.