This Post is for the artwork I have made for use in my game project found in 440940 I Intro to Game Engines.
My second assignment for 440940- Intro to game engines is to create a game. I have chosen to do a 2d top down tower defence game and created my assets. I have been told by my lecturer that I should submit the artwork I made for consideration in this course. I would show my assets in a mock screenshot for the game however as the background of the game is sourced I will refrain from doing so.
My game is based in history, and as such uses design cues to imitate the machinery used by the German military in WW2. I decided I would use the free to play game ‘Warthunder’ as my source material; Gaijin Entertainment (2016) Warthunder [Video Game] . This is because the game provided highly detailed models of which I could easily capture a top down view.
The challenge with these designs was trying to make them simplistic enough to work well when shrunk down to a usable size while making them different enough from each other to make a visually appealing image. I used different shades of grey for most of the designs with the exception of one. This was because this tank, the Tiger tank was most famously shown in a light beige colour and as this asset serves as the highest-level enemy, I thought a different visual worked well.
After I had these assets created, I turned my attention to the asset of the Eiffel Tower. The player of my game will be sat looking at this asset throughout the game and so it was vital I made an appealing design which the player would recognise as the Eiffel tower.
The Eiffel tower is not the best choice of building to create a top down view of. There is little definition in the design and as the top of the tower is a simple flag and a spike its very hard to recreate that in a top down view. I thought about trying to make the Arc de Triomphe but felt like while the Arc de Triomphe is associated with France as a country I would say the Eiffel Tower is more closely associated with Paris as a city.
I tried to follow the same art style as I had with the tanks and feel like the end result is nice. If I tried to model the individual struts the design would have been overly complicated and would have looked unappealing. I feel like the design I finished with is complicated enough to look appealing for a long duration of time but not so complicated as to become cluttered. I used the paintbrush tool on various layers to colour the different sections of the design, thus ensuring the colour went to the edges without damaging the box outlines.
Once I had the tower asset completed my attention turned to the turrets the player will be placing. I couldn’t find any suitable references for specific turrets used by the French military and so designed these from scratch.
The challenge with making these designs was keeping them roughly the same size while also showing them as more powerful than the previous. In the game these turrets cost increasing amounts and so I wanted to visually show their improvements from the last. I did this by adding more complexity into the more expensive designs and slightly increasing the size, not enough to damage the mechanics of the game but enough to show that the later artillery design during the war was larger than the ones used going into the war.
The fourth turret (far right) was a little different. A real like anti air turret is a similar shape to the anti-tank artillery I had designed. But I needed this turret to look very different from the rest to help the player quickly see the difference between them. I made this design using a basic square and some very simple curved pen lines to give me the final design.
Reference List:
Gaijin Entertainment (2016) Warthunder [Video Game]. Available online: https://store.steampowered.com/app/236390/War_Thunder/ [Accessed 08/11/2020]
u/alfi7 (2019) [Reddit Post]. Available online: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/c7rdj7/birdseye_view_of_the_eiffel_tower/ [Accessed 08/11/2020]