Monday 10/10 - Production Begins

OK so it's Monday, the official start of production for our Space Invaders sequel game, and this is where the fun begins; although I have to admit that the brainstorming and coming up with ideas was fun. For us artists this is the part where we finally get down to business and start doing what we do best, for the programmers on the other hand this is where their problems start. Thank goodness that when I had to make a choice between art and programming I chose the 'pretty pictures' side.

So today was mainly spent on coming up with ideas for our designs. Creating thumbnails for each asset that needs to be created (from player ships, enemy ships and backgrounds all the way down to things such as the projectiles, both player and enemy, and even designing explosions and satellites which will be moving in the background).

So that was the first part of the day, at least that is what it was dedicated to. The second part (usually after lunch) was spent picking some of our favourite thumbnails and turning them into concepts. Here are some of the concept ideas I came up with, which I would then create a polished version to be used as a playable asset in the game:

Player Ship

For this I decided that I wanted the player ship to be something familiar to the player, so instead of trying to come up with something solely from using thumbnails I decided that I would use the basic shape of a jet fighter, but modify it using parts of thumbnails to make it look more like a 'fighter space jet', which as you can see basically consists of giving it big engines and big-ass guns too. 'HA, TAKE THAT EVIL SPACE INVADER!'


Enemy Ships

For the enemy ships I had a lot more freedom as I would not have to stick to known rules and designs. Here I could really stretch my imagination and come up with some very interesting designs. I designed a couple of ships for this as we are planning to have 3 different types of enemies. These were all created by 'kit-bashing' different thumbnails together to come up with new and interesting ideas. These are a couple of ideas


A few other things were designed, but these are probably the most interesting and I'm sure you get the idea of how this process works now.
It's nice to get this phase out of the way, and hopefully tomorrow I can start modelling (oh yeah I decided that I would create them in 3D and then render them from different views to be used as 2D sprites [a sprite is a 2D image that is always facing the camera/player] )