Sketching Logo Ideas

Before moving over to Photoshop to create the digital logo, it is important to sketch out ideas to create visual templates that can be moved over to a digital format. Sketching out ideas can get lots of ideas out quickly, in a way that is easily digestible. 

The idea I had stems from this pixel art animation I created some months ago. It's a little dude chucking a peach in the air and catching it. One day I referred to it as 'the little peachy juggler', and I thought it sounded quite funny. I want my logo to involve this piece of art, because I think it's a nice piece of original art, one of the ones I am more proud of, and I want my studio name to be some kind of variation of Peach Juggler, because it's quite a random and funny name, and as a result I think it'd be quite memorable and it'd catch people's curiosity. 

Stemming from this idea, I sketched out some of the ways that I could incorporate this art into a logo. The resulting sketches are below.

Developing Ideas For Branding and Logos

As part of our final project, we will be creating a show-reel, complete with our own logo and branding. To get inspiration for logo design, I created this mood board of various video game developer's logos. This board ranges from small indie studios, to AAA publishers.

One of the favourite logos on this board is the Vlambeer logo. Vlambeer is an independent studio based in the Netherlands, with a couple of breakout hits such as Super Crate Box and Nuclear Throne. The studio was founded by two university students, and this logo comes from a drawing that they randomly found in their class one day. To this day they have stayed clear of publishers, and I think that their logo shows that they are proud of their humble beginnings. Vlambeer are flying the flag for the indie scene, and this logo is testament to that. Moreover, the logo's basic but humorous, cartoony style is an apt indicator for the tone and style of Vlambeer games, which are drenched in style and laughs. In terms of the design of this logo, I like the minimalism, I feel that that basic style of logo can add a lot of impact and brand recognition. I'm not a big fan of the colours in this particular instance, I'd like to see some more vibrant colours.

The logo of Dutch indie studio Vlambeer.

Another logo that I like is the Double Fine logo. The logo is super stylised, and has an old school almost western look to it with the bold font, the overall shape of the logo, and the colours too. When this is teamed with the weird two headed cherub, it gives a real sense of oddity to the logo overall, which really follows through the tone of the studio's games. They don't take themselves too seriously, their games are very stylised and humorous, but the logo has a high level of polish just like the games they produce. I feel like there is a juxtaposition in this logo between the old fashioned shapes of the logo and the random nature of having a two headed baby as the subject, however it works together in communicating the tone of the company.

Double Fine's logo brilliantly sums up the style of their games

The Santa Monica Studio logo is quite visually pleasing, but being so basic I question it's ability to be recognisable and have a strong brand identity. Whilst the coloured shape element is nice and works with the text, as a standalone logo I don't think many people could recognise what it is representing, which is a fundamental aspect of logo design and branding. It doesn't communicate anything about the studio's style, about their personality, and it has quite a corporate feel to it. Santa Monica Studio is a Sony first party studio, with their most notable games coming in the form of the God of War series, and as a result they don't have the freedom to develop their own projects like other studios can. You could argue that this lack of personal expression almost comically comes through in their logo, although there really is no excuse to have such a poor and bland logo in a creative field such as video games.

The Santa Monica Studio logo is bland and lifeless

Rough Draft of Character Art

I created this quick draft of what my main character could look like using PiskelApp.com. I think as a concept drawing it looks okay, but if I have the time I'd like to tidy it up at a later date.

Concepting Level Design

Before I can start creating artwork, I need to first create rough sketches of environments that I want in my game. This can serve as a kind of list of things that I need to create.

Production Schedule For Project Three

Here is a link to my production schedule for project three. The production schedule details each task that I am going to be carrying out each day of production. Working alone, I have got a lot of work to get through, and as it is still early in the project's life cycle, I have kept the tasks quite broad, as to not go too specific. The reasoning behind this is partly because I don't yet have a good idea of just what this project will involve, as it's the first time I have done anything like this, but also because I want to give myself flexibility to move from task to task as and when I need to. For example, if I have a brainwave for a certain aspect then I want to be able to move onto that while the iron is still hot, and conversely if I am stuck at a point that I am wasting time on, being able to move to other areas will mean that production doesn't have to come to a halt.

I have also given myself a wide berth in terms of deadlines, as to not leave myself short on time for any particular aspect. Hopefully this means that I won't be working under too much pressure, and will result in me finishing ahead of time for some tasks, leaving time where I can polish up other elements on my project.

Facial Expression Reference Material Research

 For more reference material on how to draw facial expressions, I looked for some different images that I could come back to when producing some of my character portraits. This first image I think is very interesting, as it looks at using a very cartoony style. This style has some draw backs in terms of not having a huge amount of detail to add nuance, but equally I think that this may be the greatest strength of this style as well, as the artist is allowed to over-exaggerate with expressions, and using these broad strokes makes the emotions clear to the reader in an instant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4za5eEmkcCM

These two images are much more detailed than the previous one, and I think they will hold a lot of value for me when it comes to creating my portraits. They have a lot of different elements to pick up on for different emotions, and also the combinations of emotions to create further ones is something I can use to add depth to my characters.

Drawing Facial Expressions

Today we looked at drawing different facial expressions and how to achieve a variety of emotions through the subtle changes in shapes and lines.

The first six drawings are basic emotions such as happy and sad. By changing features on the face such as the angle of the mouth, the height and angle on the eyebrows, the size of the eyes, and also whether or not there are any wrinkles where the face has scrunched up, we can clearly identify the different emotions that each face is representing. For example, the eyebrows on the 'anger' and 'disgust' faces are very similar, but the wide mouth and the wide eyed look on the 'anger' face clearly distinguish it from the scrunched and angular look of the 'disgust' face.

The next four drawings (the ones with numbers underneath) are mixes of emotions. For example, the face labelled '3+5' is a mix of 'surprise' and 'fear'. Using this combination of different facial features allows us to create a depth of emotion in our characters, and give a completely different feeling to the viewer.

Using these techniques will be important going forward into the next project, where I will be creating a graphic narrative. My project is going to be 2D with a side scroller perspective, however during conversations I am going to utilise character portraits to add more emotional context to the characters as they develop.

Developing Story Ideas

I've been trying to get an initial overview sorted as early as possible, so that I can keep a clear vision of what I want to create. I have decided upon a plot synopsis.

Doug is a cow. He lives in a field located directly behind a little burger joint in the backwoods of rural America, who pride themselves on sourcing fresh beef mere yards away from the counter. When Doug's number is up, and the sadistic burger flipper comes for him, Doug fights back, killing the owner. In a panicked effort to get rid of the body, Doug disguises himself as the owner, and puts the still warm corpse through the meat grinder. However, before he can escape, he is roped into cooking up some human burgers for some hungry customers. The burgers are a hit, and by the end of the day he is all sold out of his human burgers.

When closing up for the night, Doug ponders his next move. Will people find out his secret? Will people come back for more of his special burgers? How will he get more meat if they do?Whilst sweeping, a lone trucker knocks on the window asking for a bite to eat, and Doug is presented with an opportunity. "In for a penny...".

I am keeping it brief for the time being, as I want to focus on this sequence. I think it has a lot of opportunity for tension, suspense, laughs and some key moments where the player can direct the action. Rather than enhance the scope, I would rather maintain a narrow, focused vision at least for the time being. 

Graphic Narrative Research

For the graphic narrative project, one of my first tasks was to get some inspiration by researching into existing games that use graphic narrative techniques. The first game I chose was The Walking Dead, by Telltale Games. This game could be best described as an interactive film, where players watch the action unfold in front of them and are prompted into action at specific moments to influence the story, usually in the form of dialogue choices and mutually exclusive action choices. What this makes for is a very well paced story, whilst still allowing the player to feel like they're moving things forward with their actions.

Dialogue choices in The Walking Dead offer some engagement for the player

The Walking Dead, and other games by Telltale, have been criticised for presenting the player with the illusion of choice, where the player's actions may seem to have impact on what unfolds, but in reality the diverging paths converge in the same points later down the line, and ultimately don't have the huge repercussions on the ending that is intimated. This seems like bad practice, and once the cat is out of the bag for these games it generally blows up in their face. However, the reality of developers creating vasts swathes of content that many players may never see results in a lot of potentially wasted work. For the purposes of my project, I have to side with Telltale on this, and as a result I won't be entertaining the idea of branching paths of dialogue for fear that it would waste time that I don't have.

The second game that I chose to research for graphic narrative was The Secret of Monkey Island by LucasArts. A classic 2D adventure game, this game may not be a typical graphic narrative, however it has some elements that I would like to incorporate into my project. The environments in the game are very meticulously created, and are littered with lots of little details that add character to the locations, contributing to world-building. In my project, I would like to focus on creating a small number of 'sets', and have them be rich in details that contribute to the world, as I feel this is more realistic goal in the amount of production time I have, than to create lots of different settings for the game.

The Secret of Monkey Island has environments that are bursting with world building details

The main criticism of The Secret of Monkey Island, and similar games such as Sam and Max, is the use of 'moon-logic' in their puzzles. The game's puzzles are usually solved by using one item on another, choosing from your inventory and the environment around you, in order to complete the puzzle. The problem is that these puzzles are often not logical in their solutions, hence the term 'moon-logic', where the solution is completely nonsensical. Having these puzzles results in the player becoming frustrated, fumbling over ideas of how to move forward, and it slows the pace of the game down to a crawl, ruining the momentum of the story.

The frustrating puzzles of Monkey Island have been eradicated due to the new style of adventure game such as The Walking Dead, and this does result in much better pacing. However, some argue that The Walking Dead takes too much control away from the player, and is teetering on the edge of not even being a game. I personally favour TWD's style, and I think for the purposes of my project I will lean that way.

Generating Ideas for Project 3

Project 3 will be based around creating a graphic narrative. Graphic narratives are a very popular form of media, best known in formats such as graphic novels, comic books, comic strips etc. The initial phase of this project is the ideas phase, where I will be researching existing examples of the medium and mixing these with my own ideas, to formulate a basis of what I will create for this project.

I am interested in creating a web based project, in a classic comic book style using panels, speech bubbles and big artwork. I think that hosting my project on a website speaks to my web design skill set, and offers my content out to a wide audience in a familiar format. One such website that sticks out as something similar to what I aim to create is The Wormworld Saga, a digital graphic novel by Daniel Lieske.

The basis for the story is a modern take on Sweeney Todd, whereby a burger van owner goes on a murder spree to supply his meat. I think that this represents a lot of opportunity for some interesting characters, and for some dark comedic elements to seep into the writing. The art style is going to be pixel art based, and I am going to use some of the spatial storytelling techniques from the last project when designing my environments.