Loading Screen Designs
The next set of illustrations that I was set to complete were those of mock loading screens for our games, drawn in a similar style to my conceptual pieces, that would be shown in between game levels. These would, almost similar to the concept art, aim to show the general "feeling" of the game and artistically illustrate what players could expect in the level they are about to play.
My first illustration, similar to my concept pieces, showed a large swathe of microplastic enemies overwhelming a meaty environment. In creating this, I followed largely the same process that I used when creating my previous pieces, beginning with a perspective sketch and drawing the scene atop it, then drawing line art over and filling in block colours before adding shading. In this piece, I tried to push the difference between the foreground, midground and background, and as such converted the piece to grayscale multiple times. This allowed me to see the overarching tonal values of the piece and see where areas of darkness and light lay, allowing me to push contrast and enhance the disparity between these two regions.
When creating the loading screen overlay, I Exported the overlay at the screen resolution that the loading images would be rendered at, allowing for me to copy-and-paste the overlay atop numerous pieces, keeping it consistent. Peer feedback also indicated that my group wanted the designs of the microplastic enemies to be changed to be more consistent with those that have already been modelled: as such, I went back and altered the designs.
When asking my group for feedback on this piece, it was mentioned that there is not a lot of final artwork showing illustrated renditions of our final tower designs, with a particular lack being noted in the Bone and Fungal Spore Towers. As such, I offered to draw another loading screen showcasing the final design of the Bone Tower.
Again, the production process of this illustration followed a similar route to those which I had completed previously. However, in this scene, I attempted using a different type of perspective to show the height and scale of the tower: three-point perspective. With a low horizon line and the tower tapering to the top, an enhanced of scale and height could be achieved. As this loading screen art is focused on the tower itself, such an angle puts greater emphasis on it and pushes it out from the surroundings. I tried to compliment this with stark colour choices (the rest of the environment being red and the tower being white) and shading that showed how the tower sits in the foreground of the scene, with that which is behind it bearing much darker tonal values.
Additionally, I added several small white blood cells emerging from the tower, these being the in-game units which the Bone tower spawns.
On the whole, with this piece I used lighter shading and less detail, with the majority of the darkness in the piece being added to put focus onto the bone tower. I did this as I wanted the piece to not look too gritty or detailed, as I worried that such a style made my artwork stand out too drastically from the tone and target audience of the game. This has been something I have felt I have routinely struggled with across the entire project, as when creating pieces I continuously add detail, feeling that low-detail pieces I have created are of less value or quality than those that are more gritty. I feel such with this piece, believing it to look too smooth and samey across the form of the bone tower and environment; I think it looks somewhat bland. Additionally, I feel that the perspective is slightly askew and could have done with some more experimentation to get right. The glowing form of the bone marrow door is out of true with the rest of the bone tower form, and similarly the white blood cells are in a different perspective alignment to the rest of the scene. On the whole, this is definitely the piece that I am least happy with in the production I have done so far.
Another fact occurred to me after finishing both scenes, that being the scale that I drew them at and how that may be displayed on the devices that we aim to show our game on. These illustrations have a square canvas size that is congruent to those that I used in my concept pieces, and as such would not display correctly at such a resolution: stretching them to fit the resolution would result in warping that would skew the piece unnaturally. As such, they must be scaled down to fit the resolution. When I remembered this, I was - to be honest - quite annoyed with myself for having had such an important aspect of the pieces' composition slip my mind. As such, I went and created mockup loading screens using the appropriate resolutions - one for a monitor at 1280 * 720 pixels and one for a phone screen. I then scaled down the two loading screen illustrations I had made into these canvases and filled in the remaining area with a block black tone. I found that, though perhaps more of the negative space around the illustration could have been utilised, the addition of such negative space was not necessarily a downside, and personally felt that - surprisingly - its addition helped to improve the composition of the pieces, both putting focus on to them and giving a definite border that helped to frame the illustration.
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