This week I have been doing a lot of iterations and tweaking of our previous art. It seems that when we are creating so much content so rapidly, many times things don't really feel coherent and so I have to go over them again and make sure everything works well together.

We also have a situation where I will have less time to spend on the game than expected and so we had a discussion on how to best solve this. The options were to either cut half of our content card wise or to simplyfy the ingame sprites of the cards to save time and really try our best to squeeze every available second into the project and be able to have all cards in game by the time of GGC.

We decided to go for the second option. After all our game is a collectible card game and one of our key feature is a multitude of cards. It's gonna be hard work but it should be doable. And with those words, I'm back to work!

Here's a pic on the current state of both deck editor and campaign map, all art made by yours truly.

Animation has started

I have spent the week doing animations for the game, or rather trying to do animations. One of the downsides with being in such a small group is that we cannot divide the work between different people and trying to make use of everyones strong sides and since I'm the only artist and I'm hardly an animator it started out looking dark.

However I read up a bit and watched some tutorials and was able to do some basic animations. Then I worked together with Jerry to create some animations for our new little friend, the sturdy skeleton:

The glamorous life of a graphic artist

This week I have been working on the GUI and Deck Editor and it has taken a lot of time and effort. Apart from making frames and borders and buttons and whatnot I also had to find suitable fonts for the game's different menus and info boxes and so on and things like that quickly pile up in terms of hours spent.

When we started the project the game was initially meant to be in 3D, and so our first iterations of the GUI and card layout had a more three dimensional and realistic style. Later on we changed the game to be in 2D with a much more cartoony style so I redesigned some of the elements to fit better with that style and with every major change that work has had to be redone.

I've lost count on what number of iteration our main GUI is at by now, the deadline to have it done and implemented is tonight and there's still some polishing to do.

I'll head straight back to work to get it done.

Here is some of the work I've done this week:

Week two - backgrounds and locations

This week I started with the different backgrounds, locations and icons needed to navigate the world of Little Warlock. When the player enters the world he will see a kingdom where he can visit his home, the shop, the scribe's den or the tower. For the early demo part we will only have the tower enabled and so I've focused on that this week. I also made a second attack location which will take place on a sandy beach.