The Milestones for our Capstone Project: The Protagonist

In our Capstone project our team had to come up with a main character that will be used throughout our two semesters of game development. Our first main character consisted of originally being an older male that had athletic ability. But after some discussion we decided that the main character will be female.

Image above was created using Adobe Illustrator CC using a mix of “pen” and “color fill” tools. After fleshing out what our female character will look like in-game, next we had to come up for what would be the “art-style” of the game, such as whether the main character should be either with borderlines or without borderlines as illustrated above. Border function was possible due to creating the entire sprite using the pen tool which creates borders for both the outline and shape fill for the design. We decided to go with the borderlined design due to the character sprites I had to design were going to be small, and to compensate for smaller visibility we went with borderlines around the character.

Laying The Foundation

For our capstone project our development started by creating sketches for what our game would be like. Our Programmer (also producer of the project) created a programming skeleton for the game, which is the overall mechanics of the game. Our designer came up with sketches of background stages in the game. Our music producer was coming up with some samples for us to hear. Our concept artist was coming up with what our protagonist should look like. For me, since my role of the team was the “Sprite Artist,” I had to come up with animated board sketches to how our main character should move around the world.

        

Illustrated above are a few of the movement sketches that I came up with to help illustrate how the character should move in the world, such as running, jumping, and climbing within the stage.

Individual Work

Back in 2011, during the earlier learning of gaming development I have designed individual game projects of my own. The goal of the project was to program, design, and produce sounds and music of your own without using outside sources. Here is a screenshot example of earlier work I have created. In the game you control a spaceship that must make it to the end of the level while trying to get pass all of the obstacles and enemies that block your path. You control the spaceship with the arrows, while the space-key is used to shoot. I have even implemented the ability for players to hold down the space-bar to charge for a more powerful shot.

Regardless of designing all of the aspects of creating games, my real focus in a job is a graphics designer.