This was the first week we really started working seriously on the game, after choosing the concept last week. We met our Scrum Master on Monday morning and started assigning everyone tasks for this week. My job this week was to create concept art for the game; of the characters, the game in general and such.
The game is about a diver who’s on a mission to find out what’s going on with the underwater life in a specific place, there’s been sightings of mutated fish. The goal is to dive down this sunken ship and collect as much samples as needed to test what’s really going on down there. There will also be angry mutated fish, which you can not kill easily (not by yourself, at least); but tricking them is easily enough when you have access to a flare gun. We modified the concept slighty, both gameplay and story.
I started out with working on the diver, I did a quick sketch traditionally and shared it with the group. They liked the design and we decided to go with that design, except for some small changes. Here’s what I ended up with:
The original design by the other group was modern and sleek, but the group told me they wanted to try it out with one of those old diving helmets. I mixed the modern and the old a bit, to give a different feeling. I also changed the glowstick gun to a flare gun, the group agreed that it would make more sense when the light it brought would only be temporarily so we kept it.
The next thing I started working on was the fish.
The first one is the Sharptooth, the one under it is the Slowfish, the left top one is the Diafol and the last one I decided to call Creeperfish. All the other fishes except the last one, is based on the previous group’s fish. First, I had the idea to have the fish kind of normal-looking at first, until they notice you, and they open their jaws and just surprises the player. I didn’t want them to look too happy, though, so I made them a bit more creepy. I also thought it would be fun if the mutated fish would be colorful, like tropical fish, to give some contrast between their creepy look and their assumed original form.
These fish were also designed at the same time, based on the previous group’s Thundereel and Inkspitter. We decided to have these as extra enemies, which means that if we feel like we have to time: we’ll add them in the game. That’s why they aren’t shaded. Their AI would be more difficult than the other fish and we don’t want to stress the programmers too much.
The last thing I did for this week was an example of the walls and such in the game, which ended up like this:
This is just how I could imagine it looking, the actual tiles in the game would probably look a lot different (all very similar or all the same), to make it easy to code. I’ll probably get to work with 2 or 3 different tiles maximum.
Emma Fredriksson 