by Annie | Sep 7, 2010 | Game Design, Illustration Station
Who doesn’t love platform games? From Donkey Kong and Mario to Frogger and Doodle Jump, anyone can find a platformer to love. Over the past week, I’ve been refining an idea for a single screen platformer. Here’s the result: Combining the basic skills of color mixing with the challenges of spatial perception, Split Personalities is a single screen puzzle platform game in which players guide two characters through various colored platforms, turning the characters into the primary colors (red, yellow, or blue) necessary to form each level’s target secondary color (green, orange, or purple). The two characters occupy opposing sides of a split screen, moving simultaneously through different platforms. Not every platform is present on both sides of the screen, however, so as long as one character lands on a platform, the other character will occupy the same physical space on its side, even in the absence of the same platform. Each time a character lands on a platform, it absorbs that platform’s color. In order to complete each level, characters must arrive at the target door suited in the primary colors necessary to create the door’s secondary color. In this case, the target door is purple, so one character must be blue and the other red when arriving at the door. In addition, evil paint monsters will jump around, changing the colors of various platforms. Players will race against time, earning bonus points for faster level completion. No playable version yet; just a high level concept....
by Annie | Aug 23, 2010 | Illustration Station
Some ideas just have a way of sticking in your head after conception. Heading into a weekend of storyboarding, all I could think about were the balloon animals from my visual target project. The result: Bodybuilders. Balloon animals everywhere have been counting down to this moment. Tonight, Helium Stadium is packed to the brim, as it is host to the bodybuilding event of the Balloon Animal Olympics. Two contestants, one from the U.S. and one from Canada, will compete for the honor of world’s best balloon animal bodybuilder. Contestants will have 30 seconds to contort themselves into any form, and three judges will vote for the winner. Below are the panels from the storyboard....
by Annie | Aug 19, 2010 | Game Design, Illustration Station
Have you ever wanted to shoot balloon animals? Well, in my latest game idea, that’s exactly what you get to do! Balloon animals have gotten loose, and you must shoot as many as you can before time runs out so they don’t take over the city. Take a...
by Annie | Aug 9, 2010 | Game Design, Illustration Station
Believe it or not, it’s been raining here all weekend, and it’s still coming down. Summer rain in Vancouver is rare, so this is quite an aberration. However, I barely had time to notice. I was indoors all weekend, and I had planned it that way. There seems to be no end to the amount of projects I have on my plate, from simple drawings to complex level designs, and everything in between. Thus, my weekend was spent staring at the many windows open on my computer screen, glancing over occasionally to see the rain falling outside the real windows. Most of my projects are currently rough drafts in progress, but here’s one of the smaller projects, a health bar for an in-game interface. Of course, this isn’t a traditional health bar that shows the main character’s health. Instead, it shows the status of the environment, say, for a game in which you have to stay cold. You’ll have to create your own game idea to go along with...
by Annie | Aug 4, 2010 | Illustration Station
People are hard. Hard to read and hard to draw. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had trouble drawing people. One minor line askew, and everything goes awry. In our storyboarding class, we got a quick 101 on figure drawing, which instantly demystified the whole process. Drawing people is just like simple sculpture. Start with a basic frame, then build arms, legs, muscles, and clothes on top. I still need tons of practice, but here’s a quick peek into my sketchbook from the few figures I sketched this...
by Annie | Jul 30, 2010 | Illustration Station
The best part of life is without a doubt the people who are there with you along the journey. And that’s definitely true for my experience thus far at VFS. Every class at VFS is given a number, based on the iteration of that program. Our class is Game Design 18, or GD18. Immediately, we took to the brand, creating a Facebook page to share experiences and inside jokes. We haven’t ordered any GD18 t-shirts just yet, but I’m sure we’ll be designing those shortly. This tight-knit group of like-minded individuals was definitely on my mind as I brainstormed ideas for my 2-point vehicle design assignment. The result: Dumb and Dumber meets...
