Make Haste, You’ve Got Games to Make! (SB2)
Week two begins and the crunch to create our Mario World 1–1 clone is on the rise. After the last week of being introduced to the basics of Studio 1 everything seemed rather overwhelming with the prospect of having to create a full working level within a week. But after being told it was the famed Mario World 1–1 and all assets had to be original to a certain standard it was even more overwhelming. Luckily for me, after the first week of planning and pitch developing I came to a certain understanding of I was to do.
Planning out everything made the process a whole lot easier to comprehend. After the first week of developing the pitch (which I ultimately ended up doing on Windows Movie Maker) I had come to a conclusion that I would design the level with the idea of having everything in a parchment-story-esque aesthetic while still maintaining all of the content and mechanics of the original level. As I stated in my pitch I would have everything as a story board that had seemingly just been etched out for the player to play on.
After that week had ended and I unfortunately missed out on having my pitch/thoughts critically evaluated by my collegues I was left to create the level without any external though which severely impacted how it could turn out. So despite all of the misfortune by not having a pitch ready in time, I still prevailed and sought external help from those around me that had the time, such as my flatmates and close friends. Their feedback was valuable and I learned that with my limited artistic skills and ever-shortening crunch time I had to come up with a new means to depict Rembrandt’s style in a Mario-esque style that was time efficient and clean.
After giving it all much more thought and coming across a copy of Photoshop for my laptop, I decided I would use pixel art instead of drawing everything in an etched style. Pixel art is quick, easy, and simple to self teach (which is exactly what I did). But this alone was not enough, the style needed to be reminiscent of Rembrandt’s still, so I did more research into Rembrandt’s artworks outside of his landscapes and discovered he painted and etched an incredible amount of portraits. That alone was enough to spark my idea of ‘A Portrayal of Portraits 1–1’. Yes, the level is exactly how the title sounds, everything is in a portrait, literally everything. So to efficiently utilize this I downloaded a picture of a portrait and one of every asset in the level and set out to re-texture and portrait them all.
Unfortunately in game the picture frame is a tad difficult to see making it much of a design flaw, but given my time restraints I didn’t have time to go through pixel by pixel to fix it so I left it as it is. I should note that in some larger sprites it is more easily recognizable like the castle or the pipes.
The game itself is completely in 2.5D, meaning the mechanics and dynamics all play in 2D but the visuals are noticeably in 3D, I chose this as I wanted the background to look farther away and to ‘draw’ a brownish smudge where ever the player would go so it would look like the player is painting from a distance as they play. Unfortunately with one week left and many mechanics and aesthetics to implement I feel this will be an over-scope.
