Tiles.. so many tiles.

So, after all the planning and research I started work on my tiles. We had set an Art deadline for the 8th of April in which all the Art assets had to be completed. The reason for this was to make Simon and Phil's job easier by giving them more time to get the assets into the game.

Here is the brilliant Gantt Chart that Simon created to show each of the mini deadlines we had set ourselves for the course of the second milestone.



My job was to create floors and walls for each of the four dimensions. The aesthetic look of the dimensions had been discussed at length and finalised so it wasn't too difficult to imagine what the tiles should look like. However, I didn't have a build of the game and the backgrounds hadn't been done so they couldn't be tested as I made them. It was a case of sticking to the colour pallets that we had decided on and hoping that they looked good in-game.

Here are a few examples of the tiles I created for the game.


The pencil acts as a wall in the Sketch/Doodle dimension. This is a wall is created from five tiles.

These tiles act as a platform in the Mechanical dimension. It is a combination of three tiles.

Each wall/floor is comprised of a combination of tiles that are 64 x 64 pixels in size. I had to create three tiles for each wall or floor. A top section, middle section and bottom section for the walls. A left, middle and right section for the floors/platforms.

It took a few weeks but I got my tiles completed before the deadline and I could spend the next few weeks working on my Design work. I was worried about getting it all done in time as I was working full time for three weeks at work due to it being half term. This left me with a lot less time to get everything finished. However, I just made sure to make lots of notes whilst commuting and got most of the text finished before I even started putting the document together. With the tiles completed though, I had a load off my mind and was confident that I would be done before deadline day.

Until next time!

Plans. Important plans.

So, I've been ominously quiet on here since we handed in our work for the first deadline but plenty has happened since then. We got our feedback for our other work and things were positive but not amazing and I feel like we deserved more for the effort we put in. This is what motivated me personally to really put my all into the work for this milestone.

Okay, so it didn't start great. Art. After a small but much appreciated break for a couple of days from anything game related, we all sat down to share out the art work between the team. I offered to make floor and wall tiles for all of the dimensions. I thought that this would best suit my art ability as I'm no good at drawing backgrounds.

We also decided that someone should take full responsibility of each of the three documents that had to be ready for hand-in. As the main designer in the team I took responsibility of the Game Design Document. Simon was left in charge of the Technical Design Document and we left Harry in charge of the Art Bible. We said that if one of the documents wasn't finished by the deadline date then the blame would fall on whoever was in charge of the document. This meant we would have to make sure that any work people were contributing to the document was done on time.

I was fine with all of this but chose to get my art work out of the way early on so that I could focus solely on the GDD. However, I had never written a GDD before so I had to do my research first. The document was required to be 25 pages long, so I drew up a list of possible sections for the document and constructed a list of anything and everything in those sections that we hadn't discussed at enough length. At our next lecture I told the team that we had to have a meeting about it so that everything that had to be in the document would be finalised. I went through my list and we discussed some things that we hadn't even thought about taking on yet. It went really well. We had a lot of loose ends about certain parts of the game, and how they would be developed, but we managed to tie them all up. This gave me everything I needed for the creation of the document which then allowed me create a 25 page plan and start assigning pages to people. I took on the bulk of the document but drafted in Simon, James and Phil to create some pages for it.

However, I knew it'd be best to do my art work first. So I also drew up a list of tiles and sprites I had to create. With all research and planning out of the way I could finally get to work on actually creating the assets and documentation that were assigned to me. I knew communication would be even more crucial for this milestone, but I had no idea how crucial!

More on that to come!