multitasking is hard

I found some time to give Bala some love this week, though the things I've done are all over the place.

I want to start this blog off right with the most exciting and pretty stuff!  First off is the Bala promotional sticker!

I've sent in her design to Stickermule and approved her design just yesterday, so she's currently being printed!  I wanted to wait on sending her in until after I bought a website for Bala (which is witchesofbala.com) to decide if I wanted to put the website on the sticker or not.  I decided not to put the website on the sticker because I've never liked stickers with their affiliated website on them.  It makes me less likely to use the sticker because of the out of place text.  Additionally, working the text onto her cloak or sock (or somewhere in her design in general) wasn't working out.  So I said screw it!  I want this to be a cute sticker that people will want to use, even if they don't know what she's from!  Anarchy!  And she's huge!  She's 6 inches tall and wants to be seen!

Whew.  Next is the Bala business card, which shares the same illustration as the sticker, but Life Witch is in her natural game colors.

Sweet and simple and to be handed out with the stickers.  These business cards are being done at Moo and will have beautiful rounded corners.

On to game stuff!

We've begun to plan for upgrades, which means that Khoa has been getting the framework ready for that to be possible.  To help him, I did a mock up of the screen where the upgrades would go.  The idea is to have them fit on one screen so the player knows exactly how many are available to them.  The motif we are going for is pages within Life Witch's spell book, so the layout will be something like this:

Khoa has also been working on little cutscene setups where Life Witch can talk to other characters!  In motion!  Regretfully, I do not have any screenshots or footage of that, so maybe Khoa can make a post about it soon!

Another thing I worked on this week is coming up with a battle plan to update textures for the terrain of Bala, which also included coming up with a smaller color palette.

I don't currently know how well this color palette will work, but it's a point of reference that we are starting from.  And in order to more clearly come up with a plan, I took screenshots of the tutorial and blocked out a path that will go through the forest.  Hopefully this path will prevent players from getting lost, and also make the ground much more interesting than a flat color.

Next, I made a document containing the types of textures I'm going to need to make to really bring the floor of the forest to life.

I'm hoping to do 5 different types of textures.  The base texture will be a base color (with a little bit of noise) that will cover the entire forest floor.  In order to break this up, there will also be dirt patches so everything isn't saturated with grass.  In order to make the base texture more interesting, there will be moss patches.  On top of those things, paths or groups of rocks will be placed.  The rock patterns are going to be supernatural in nature so that they look like they were purposefully placed in circles and other such shapes.

Below, I've already begun working on the above plan for testing:

This screenshot shows progress on the cliffs, and how our floor is constructed in tiles.  This screenshot also shows that we can't afford to have small details like the moss everywhere, which is why we are going with a base texture, and moss scattered here and there.  It needs a lot of work, but we are making progress!

One last thing!  Since Khoa has already set up the groundwork for the boss battle with Time Witch (dang that was quick!  Khoa write a post about that too!), I did a formal concept piece/turnaround for Time Witch.  So far, I've only been able to do the front view.

I feel like I need to do something with her face.  Perhaps rounding it out a bit more will help her look more childish.  Anyway, there is her design, and below, here is a comparison to her size relationship to Life Witch:

I am hoping that Hank will have time to model her so we can hand her off to our rigger and animators.  She might see the light of day before long!  But that's all for now!  We aim to bring more and more updates every week...starting probably two weeks from now!