What you, doing? Zoom Out

Well firstly Colour... after much deliberating we decided to keep a more simplistic style. I felt that the patterned images of the landscape would be to complicated.. when navigating the game space. So I reduced it to just three colours Ivory, Turquoise and Dark Grey I also cleaned up the quality of line. Conincedently i have been informed that the colours are fashionable at the moment.... so their you go.... The image bellow shows the colours.



Another issue we had was both the lack of depth and scale in the image. With only the main character to compare with the worm like characters the images had no real sense of scale and depth.. I originally drafted up a couple of quick sketches to give More of a depth to the image I thought by placing creatures/objects at the base of the worm creatures it would give a sense of scale.....



The implementation of smaller creatures that were still part of the landscape did'nt quite have the imapct I was looking for.

The image bellow was loosely base around the idea's of the nervous system and brain synapses.....



This quick sketch was born of a small doubt about the artistic style. I was slightly concerned about the flow of the land scape and objects within it. Things had become slightly less mechanical in there simitry..... thankfully we've decided not to revert back to our earlier art styles...



I futher experimented with the creatures within the fore ground but whilst still being within a landscape....





Another random thought and use of scale....




After much thought I decided that we need crreatures that were seperate for the landscape to give true sense of scale... I explained this iain ot iain and asked him to draw up some simple creatures.....I loved the creature design but something was still missing. I asked him to place to the creatures in the fore ground on a relativly flat level of there own..



I liked the the way the image worked I found the flatness of the fore ground more appealing than the back ground... I believe this is partly due to the curvy nature of our prevous screen mock ups.... We decided that alot more flat landscape would need to be drawn to contrast that of the curvy ones.

The image bellow is a simple mock up that iain and I created to be modeled and textured in maya.



The image bellow is a render from the mockup image in maya. The modeling and texturing in maya was a relatively simple process I used a combination of flash ,illustrator and photoshop to texture the landscape.



After numerous animation texts we've decided that using maya would only complicate the process of animating the landscape and the character. Maya would have only proved more uselfull if the camera angle etc.... were to change.

We then started to develope ideas for the level charcter motives and the opening sequence.

The image below is the opening title screen, we decided that we wanted it to seelessly integrated into the game. the split in the repressents the camera's flow to the next screen.




(appologies if this explaination is a little vague... it's kind of hard to articulate my point without actions and sound effects... maybe in the next post)
The seacumber like creature in the top left of the screen would be randomly shooting balls into the the chracters head bellow these balls would then flie out of the characters stomach and across the screen... mean while the little creatures on the right would be idely waiting for you.....

Upon pressing play your character would be shot out of the seacucumber and out of the character and across the screen.... the little creature would geat excited and chasing your character...... the next screen shows your character flying through the level and the worm creatures eating the balls but not your charcter.... and so the game begins...

We've developed the iadea's of the little creatures.... you are there food... and the balls are the worm like creatures food... the little creatures will almost constantly be folloing you on the level bellow or above but do not have the ability to jump up to you level. Every so often your levels will merge and so begins a frantic rantic chase sequence untill your safe again.....

The image bellow is an example of a chase seguence where by your on thier foreground layer....


The images bellow are random character developement based around the little creatures chasing you... we still have yet to decided about the implementation of their agression... i believe it depends of your first encounter with the little creatures.





Here are some more random images of the main charcter designs........




We still need to develope the main charcters design.... is anyone getting a sense of day jai vou?.. im generally really at where the game at this stage..... over and out...... ps just developed some new sequence idea's whilst wrtitng this but unforunatly i must get back to Christmas shopping.. now to leave the internet cafe.....

Over and out codey