Year 3

Pause screen mockup

Posted on by Boma

I wanted to envision what our pause and game over menus would look like so I did some research.

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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.

Character moodboard

Posted on by Boma

I created a moodboard of characters that I personally imagine the main character of the game to look similar to.

Icarus_Protagonist_moodboard

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.

Ikarus Synopsis

Posted on by Boma

Ikarus mk. II

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.

Backstory

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.

Art Direction

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.

Enemies
Viruses – (3 types)

Story Role: To disrupt the peace in the world and corrupt any stable assets.

Gameplay Role: Target the player and cause distraction and death.

 

Boss – Master Core

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

 

Team

Boma – Animating, Scripting

Malakai – Concept Art,

Mark – 3D modelling

Musa – 3D modelling, Texturing

Design Document