Building Alliances Week 3

 Moodboards and style research

This week we are looking into different art styles and inspiration for the colour schemes that we will be using in the art for our game. This will require looking at existing games and seeing how they managed to create an atmosphere for their game using different colour schemes, shapes and art styles.

To start off my moodboards, I have decided to do some primary research into Stray (BlueTwelve studio, 2022).The main reason I wanted to look at this game was for the main danger in the game called zurks, as the areas that they inhabit are covered in flesh like structures, which could help with inspiration for the environments that we need to design for our game. 

The flesh structures found within Stray are very unsettling, which might not work for some of the early on levels in the game, but as the microplastics and fungi progress in the body, the art style could change depending on how bad the situation is. We have already as a group discussed that as the game progresses, the colours used in the levels will probably start to become more and more foreign for the human body as we start to mix in green and purples into the flesh.

For other moodboards, I want to look at how the levels could be structured, for this I will be looking at pre-existing tower defence games and seeing how they deal with both tower placement and how the enemies travel across the map.

The next game I looked at was Club Penguin's system defender. While only being a mini game in Club Penguin, system defender is a good example of a simple tower defence game as there are only three towers, three types of enemies, and the paths are simple. The main thing I like about the way the levels are structures in System defender is the limited positions available for building towers. This forces you to play in a more strategic way as you have to place the right kinds of towers in the right places, otherwise you'll end up letting enemies leak through to the end. Another thing I like about the way system defender is made is at the bottom of the screen, you're able to see which types of enemies are coming next as indicated by colour coded shapes.


The third and final game that I will be looking at for my moodboards is Bloons Tower Defense (NinjaKiwi, 2007-2018). The main reason I wanted to look at the Bloons Tower Defense (BTD) franchise, is because of their wide age range in the playerbase. The artstyle that they have used in the game is very welcoming for a huge age range, this is more the sort of style that we will be going for with our game as it is meant to be accessible for young and older people alike, as it's meant to be a somewhat educational resource on the dangers of microplastics and how they can end up effecting the human body in negative ways. The main difference between how our game will work in comparison to the way BTD games work is there will only be a certain amount of enemies you have to take out before moving onto the next stage where as BTD is about endurance, and you have to last as many rounds as possible. This is the main reason why we're going with the idea of a limited amount of tower placements rather than being able to place towers pretty much anywhere.

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