3/19/23 blog post 3

During the past three weeks, I have been primarily working on the boss demon, which will be the final boss in the game. The idea of the final boss was a demon that lived inside of the player’s amulet, and cursed them. The boss demon would be mostly static, with it overlooking the player from the background as the player fought the demon’s heart. Since the player would primarily focus on fighting the demon heart, I made the heart’s design quite detailed so that it could stand on its own. The demon would also be able to telegraph attacks from the background, so I separated parts such as the head, arms, body, and eyes for animations.

During the initial stages of drafting the design, I knew that we wanted a huge demon boss monster that looked menacing even from the background - so I thought that a big skeleton with demon/monster horns would be fitting. I made it resemble a huge skeleton, as I thought it would fit the theme of the “heart” being the enemy that the player fought. I thought that this way, the “heart” could be still visible when it floated up to the demon monster when rejoined the boss for the final attack of the boss. It could possibly still be visible from the outside, with the heart rejoining the boss and being visible through its ribcage. I also thought that the fiery background and green, smokey aura of the boss monster would fit with the theme of the player and the cursed pirate.

I also referred to the style guide, defining the lineart to be more bold and thicker on the outer edges. I tried to make the details visible from a distance so that a clear silhouette could be seen as well. During the department meetings, we talked about how to implement the attacks through animations, and I was able to separate the parts from each other for both the heart and monster so that this could be done. For example, I separated the background from the boss monster, and the smokey aura of the demon heart from the actual heart so that the smoke could be animated and the heart could almost look as if it was floating during some animations.

I drafted designs for both the heart and the boss demon during the first week, and worked on finalizing the designs and separating the parts from each other for animations and implementation into the game for the second and third week.

For the next week, the entire art team is focusing on finishing all the art assets that will go into the game - I am almost done with both the boss monster and the demon heart, and I am interested in helping with the implementation of the boss monster and heart as well as the animations. During the first week, I was also able to finalize the designs of the thrusting and lunging enemy as well as see how the enemy animations would play out in game. The art lead helped me out a lot with the finalization and recreating the concept to fit the theme better! I still feel like I’m learning a lot from everyonoe each week - for example, the playtests and even reporting bugs have helped me learn more about the entire process of creating a video game from scratch.

Sketching and drafting concepts (6 hours)

Converting concepts to sprite images, working on cutting parts to prepare for rigging/animating (6 hours - 4 hours for lining and coloring boss demon and boss demon heart, and 2 hours working on cutting up each part to prepare for rigging)

Department/squad meetings and discussion (6 hours)