I had a look at some existing enemy designs that I will pass on to the concept artist.
I think enemies that have two themes in their design work well as players can interpret the viruses as corrupted data that was once untainted.
This enemy in particular stood out to me personally, as their sleek and sharp design complements their erratic movement.
Kingdom Hearts -Unversed
This is my personal production schedule for the project.
| Week | Area(s) of focus | |
| 1 | Level spawning | |
| 2 | Character movement | |
| 3 | Player shooting | |
| 4 | Enemy spawning | |
| 5 | Score display | |
| 6 | Fill (finish anything overdue) | |
| 7 | Intro sequence | |
| 8 | Pause/death GUI | |
| 9 | Enemy movement paths | |
| 10 | Fill (finish anything overdue) | |
| Week | Area(s) of focus | |
| 1 | Lives, Obstacles, Score multipliers | |
| 2 | GUI (In-game), Enemy actions | |
| 3 | Visual feedback, Different stages | |
| 4 | VFX, Leaderboard/high score system | |
| 5 | Fill (finish anything overdue) | |
| 6 | Sound Design / Animation | |
| 7 | GUI (Pause Menu, Title) / Animation | |
| 8 | Controller Support / Animation | |
| 9 | Cleanup | |
| 10 | Fill (finish anything overdue) | |
Prezi link (WordPress doesn’t support wordpress embedding)
I wanted to envision what our pause and game over menus would look like so I did some research.
I made some quick mockups of the pause and death screens by editing a screenshot of an existing game.
I think pixel style text may be the way to go as it mixes well with our game being blocky and static in a digital world.
It’s important that there isn’t much obscuring the player’s vision on the pause screen because there could always be a threat just behind it. With this in mind I was able to experiment more on the death screen. Since the player is meant to be fighting viruses it makes sense for the game over screen to have some element of corruption within it. Ideas I got here were distorted, glitchy text and a stream of complex data followed by a wait for user input to continue.
I created a moodboard of characters that I personally imagine the main character of the game to look similar to.
I looked at robotic characters that weren’t too bulky as we want our character to not look out of place inside a digital world and also be capable of agile movement. A sleek, streamlined character design would be the most fitting for this vision.
This game is going to be a rework and improvement of our previous game, with more focus on player mechanics and giving the player a sense of purpose.
The massively multiplayer online game ‘CyberQuest’ has been hijacked by viruses, corrupting the game’s files and not allowing player to log in or log out. An admin of CyberQuest uses his private antivirus hardware codenamed ‘Ikarus’, which consists of software and hardware that physically converts the user into digital data to control an antivirus program manually and use it for combat in digital space, allowing them to deal with anomalies in the antivirus process that cannot be dealt with using traditional methods.
The overall theme is digital, but at the same time it is a struggle between the two themes of digital and reality. Since the locations for the in-game game ‘CyberQuest’ are meant to be semi-realistic sci-fi environments, the virus enemies are supposed to contrast and clash with the theme by being erratic digital beings of chaos. We were thinking a black base colour for the viruses with overlaying lines similar to the layout of a motherboard, and to make their movement have elements of unpredictability to them to further symbolise that they are viruses and are an anomaly in the current environment. ‘Glitching’ is a reoccurring design aspect we will consider during the development of the game, as we want the viruses’ presence to have an immediate negative impact on the environments to make them an out-of-place threat. We have a lot of variety in terms of what aspect of the game we incorporate this, for example we will have a certain enemies’ movement path glitch by making them move erratically, another planned use of this effect is to create a visual glitch effect that appears on certain assets at random times.
Story Role: To disrupt the peace in the world and corrupt any stable assets.
Gameplay Role: Target the player and cause distraction and death.
Role: The source of all the viruses in the ‘CyberQuest’ world. Creates viruses from deep inside the game.
Gameplay Role: Destroy the player through attack patterns and spawn viruses
Boma – Animating, Scripting
Malakai – Concept Art,
Mark – 3D modelling
Musa – 3D modelling, Texturing
I decided to take my character concept of Jet further, and I’m working on a prototype build of a game starring him as the main character.
‘Jet’ character concept
I want this game to have a pixel art style so I made a pixel verison of Jet.
3D render with labels:
Work in progress:
Full paintover:
If I were to do this again I would probably do it in another form as well.
This is my model sheet for the weapon. I feel it was a bit plain looking at it from the side, so I may improvise and make the edge thicker when it comes to modelling it. I also included a couple of examples of different weapon forms to put some of the ideas into perspective.
Modelling the blade:
I came up with possible final design concepts for the weapon. I quite like the colour schemes and ideas for 1, 3 and 4 but I’m leaning towards the third design more, which was influenced by the nobody character concept from Kingdom Hearts 2.
I looked at various rocks minerals and metals to get an idea of what materials I should be using for the weapon.
Boma's CGA Sketchbook 