2016.01.31 Boss 101 Making Art the Smart Way

Welcome back to another Boss 101 Weekly update! Hope your week is proceeding awesomely, ours certainly is!

Making a New Room the Smart Way

As we wrap up the main portions of Boss 101 we are frequently finding little adds we want to make to the game. These can be anything really and most every one of them involves fleshing the game story out in some compelling fashion that YOU the player will like.

One huge problem is simply time. We don’t have the time to make everything from scratch – nor SHOULD we! With a little smart thinking we can not only increase the games narrative but we can create some hige quality art assets using templates we’ve already established. Here’s how:

We needed a transport room for the game cinematics. This is a place where the guys are officially beamed out on their next mission. Think of the transporter room from Star Trek. You know, a place where there is a technician and some sort of beaming device. Well, we already have a giant super collider type thing inside the base to supply power to the various parts as well as other crazy science type things. We also already have both player and boss warp gates. Hmmm, so we need a transporter using our collider tech and the already created gates. Well, we should probably use the existing art as a jumping point right? So here we go. Let’s check out the two main parts:

Sample of Player Gate

Collider Room

Once we have those we mash them together to get the general layout. Like so:

Art composited

Now it’s a matter of creating some art guidelines to make the final pass of the area. This all took about 30 minutes total to get to this point and the end result after this will be a very integrated piece of tech as well as an efficiently made game room.

Sample of noted up art page

It’s all so easy right? HA! Well, of course this all sits on the shoulders of earlier work so it’s a good thing we created easy to use and edit Photoshop files.

Map Room Cleanup

OK – when Joshua setup the map room forever-ago it was one of the first places we ever worked on. He recently added the ability to go back and edit the files quite easily. YES!!! I made one small change from my previous setup. See if you can spot it:

Original Pass

Reworked Pass

Yes folks, the clouds all go in the same direction now. YAY!

OK – that’s a wrap for this week’s update so check back soon for our weekly screenshot later in the week.

As always – LIVE YOUR DREAMS!

-Tim