Group Project: Pixel Art

During my 2nd group project our team decided that we were going to do pixel art for our game on "The Road". I personally had never done pixel art before, but was keen on learning different techniques and how its done, so first I started where we always do... Research!

I checked out a few very simple tutorials to get me started, first creating basic shapes like squares as pixel art in photoshop:

But even after learning simple techniques, I knew there was more to Pixel art than that, all of the detail of pixel art came from shading or "Dithering", that was next on the list of things to learn!

I checked out simple Dithering tutorials to add to the Boxes I'd made and learnt some more simple techniques:

Dithering took some getting used to, but added a whole new element to the Pixel art itself, it was great learning and I was excited to try some of the Techniques on my Art Tasks assigned through my Group Project Sprint Work.

Here are a few examples of different Pixel Art Styles ive made through my Group Project:

Bibliography

V, Mall. (2014). How to start with pixel art. Available: http://vanmall.deviantart.com/art/How-to-start-with-pixel-art-121520884. Last accessed 13/03/2015.

R, Adi. (2011). Dithering Tutorial. Available: http://kitted.deviantart.com/art/DITHERING-TUTORIAL-Basics-69747353. Last accessed 13/03/2015.

Design Document Part 2

After doing my rules I decided to start working on my board design and playing pieces for my design document, for this I first spent a few hours doing research and just image searching things which i thought were cool, colors I liked, pictures and textures that felt "Egyptian".

After a while I had plenty to work with, and started thinking about how I wanted my board to be portrayed and what feeling I wanted it to give off.

I made a color palette for my board and pieces of various colors id gathered from images I liked and started creating my first iteration of my board.

Some of the colors worked but it didnt feel as "Egyptian" as i would of liked, so I added a few different layers and filters. After a few iterations it was started to give the right feel i wanted to portray.

I made a few more minor alterations and after a few hours I was happy with my board, next was my game-pieces.

I started thinking about what best fit for Ancient Egyptian pieces and I had a few ideas. I started modelling a few different things and played around with different designs and how they fit/worked with the board.

After some working I made something I was happy with, it fit the board well and seemed to work well with the game mechanics.

I'll post some pictures of my Board and Game-Piece designs soon.

David Parlett - Race Games Lecture

Today we had David Parlett visit the University to give Computer games design students a lecture on Race games.

David noted that there are only 2 types of real board games, Race games and War games. He proceeded to ask us questions about our opinions on various board games and if they would be defined as a race game or not, including cribbage and chess.

After a interesting discussion, David went on to talk about some ancient games, some that we had covered in previous lectures like Senet, but also introduced to some other ancient games I hadnt seen before including Patolli from Aztec, and Nyout from Korea.

After a lunch break we came back and were told we would be split into groups to make our own race games. David told us to keep in mind a few questions we should be asking ourselves about our games, These were

• What is your mechanism?
• Will your board be Linear?
• How do players interact?
• What is your goal? How do you win?
• Whats it all about (if anything)

Me and mark teamed up and came up with a 2 person race game where players would race around a track but can only move until the hit a wall or obsticle, and players may only move in a straight line.

We came up with a few different board designs and began iterating our mechanics and design until we came up with something we were fairly happy with.

We presented our game to Eddie and David and the response was fairly good! I think with more time me and mark could fine tune the game we came up with into something really great. 

Me and mark decided we are going to carry on with the game in our spare time! I will update the blog with more information as we do.

I have attached a picture of the rough board we came up with in the lecture to give you a better idea of what it looked like.

Senet Design Document part 1

For our second critcal game studies assignment Eddie asked us to make a Design Document on the Ancient game we chose and iterated for our first assignment.

Things the assignment must include are:

• A paragraph on the game scenario
• Board Design
• Game-piece Design
• An Asset List
• A couple of paragraphs each on game design and gameplay
• A rule set for the player (full but brief rules, in an appendix)

After receiving the brief i started thinking about research and things i wanted to include within my Design Document, I revisited some reading materials from the VLE and came across a few interesting and helpful pages.

The first page i looked at was Catus Marketing. They are a Toy and Game inventor who wrote a very helpful guideline for writing rules for games.

After reading their guidelines it got me thinking about the layout I wanted for my design document and the things I wanted it to include, I started splitting up my page into different headings of important area's I wanted to cover including Object of the game, preparation for playing, how to play, order of play, movement, how scoring work, how to win and lots more!

I found i had so much to talk about but now had the problem of keeping my sentances and rules short and simple so the player doesnt lose intrest.

I'll blog again when ive worked some more on other parts of my design document, like board design and game-pieces.

Jayme