Environment Development and Test

I made a level out of those initial four pieces, it's functional but needs a lot more variety. However I have not been able to play test it so I'm just focusing on the look for now.

I expanded the range of pieces and updated the level.

For putting these assets into Unity I imported the sprite and made a 2D polygon collider, which I then simplified because the automatically generated ones followed the contours of the sprite and were too complicated, then I made each piece into a prefab so that they were easier to work with. It looks better but the pieces don't fit together very well and the style is inconsistent with the other assets I've made. So I remade them and rebuilt the level, again.

I think this looks a lot more cohesive and the painting method I used was a lot quicker and easier to replicate. Putting these in was a lot faster as well, because I just edited the prefabs I already had instead of starting from scratch.

This is the layout after I play-tested and adjusted it to fit the constraints of the player's jump and glide abilities, and the lack of vertical camera movement. It's missing most of the traps/obstacles but still seems fun to play and I received positive peer feedback so I think I'm onto the right track with this. Now I need to make more of the assets so that we can get those extra traps and obstacles in game.

Breaking the Bridge

The game consists of many traps, one of which being a broken bridge which breaks after a certain amount of time of the player being on it. This was a pretty simple coroutine mechanic. It works effectively and it is timed well enough to give the player a chance to stand on it and recognize that it would break. We added two of these in game, one with just a platform beneath, but the second has traps underneath, testing the players mentality to remember the mechanics of our game.

Score

This is a simple set of scripts that give the effect of score to the player. It adds a sense of completion to the game, other wise it would just be a race to the finish, which we didn't want from the game, we wanted the player to feel compelled to collect all the eggs and as many coins as they can. Although, we found the coins to be a useless score, and a few testers of the game found it to be too difficult. Rather than re shape the game to make it easier, I decided to make it so when you hit 250 coins, it automatically takes it out of your "bank" and adds a life, I originally set it to 100 coins for 1 life, but I found that players were finishing the game with extreme amounts of life points.

 

 

Environment Items

For the art style of Dragon Run, objects are done mostly in flat hard brush which is then sculpted into the desired shape. Line work is used only for details and uses usually a darker colour to the one previously used. I felt using blue for shading preserved some vibrancy and melded well with the lighting on the rest of the object. The trees were designed to occupy the mountain regions with small patches of lush grass accompanying them. 

In particular it gave a more three dimensional effect to rocks. 

Additionally, i also designed a snow level in the case that we were able to add a third level to the game with enough time. It used a similar style of rock formation to the mountains with an added icy aesthetic. 

A scale comparison between the character and the environment using an animation sprite by Yazmin. The sprite was colored and shaded to incorporate it into the scene, 

Dragon animations

Map UI

This was something that I hadn't planned on doing, but after playing around one night on unity, I discovered I could create a cool looking progress bar type UI for the player. At first, I had it show the entire map, all obstacles, collectables and traps. But the group saw it as a little to big and messy, I too felt it looked a bit crowded, but I did not want to get rid of it entirely. I decided to create just a simple version, with a dragon icon and a nest to symbolize the player and the end zone. The group found it to be a lot better, and it didn't reveal the map, giving the player a little bit of surprise when exploring. To do, it took a little experimenting as I couldn't find any online help so I was left to myself. I found out that adding an additional camera that was far back, and setting it to only see 2 objects, the nest and the head, I then created 2 giant objects, as seen in the bottom image, that greatly out scale the rest of the map. I used a similar code that is used on the camera, and attached it to the dragon head. This let it follow the player, and gave me complete control over what the player can and cant see. I set the main game camera to not be able to see these layers. Giving the effect that a map ui is on screen when in reality it is just a camera showing 2 unseen objects that follow the layer.

Background Elements

I started work on the environment assets to use in game, first I painted the mountains, grass and foreground on different layers so that I can export them separately.

Then I colour corrected the image to better match Luther's concept art. Some of this could do with further adjustment but overall I'm happy with the painting style I've established here.

After working out the the painting style I started on the individual props, the top two here are tests to work out how I was was going to approach the trees, the bottom six are the final assets. I really like how these turned out, although I might need to go back and edit them if they don't match the rest of the level.

This is just the trees with a soft light layer applied to fade them into the background, so that the same assets can be used on the different layers of the game environment.

For these rocks, broken walls and platforms I used the same workflow that I used for the trees. I think they look nicely painted but in hindsight they don't match the level as much as they could and I may need to edit them. However I have all the original files so that shouldn't be a problem.

After talking to a tutor earlier and receiving feedback we realised it would be easier to work with a modular set of level pieces. So I took that initial style test and split it into pieces, which I polished up a little, it's likely that I will need to make more of these but I'll use this for now to set up a level in Unity to see how it looks first.

So far this is a really fun project to work on, it's been interesting to work in a more angular style than normal because of the need to match Luther's concept work and it's a good opportunity to further practice my painting skills.

Environment

I started doing some environment samples in order to formulate a firm art style to proceed with. A style in particular i wanted to go for was that of Rayman Legends. Primarily this was due to its vibrant color pallet and other worldly look of its environments which i felt would be beneficial, particularly when creating an otherwise mythical world. 

This was the first test at establishing our art style but was ultimately rejected. The brush work was considered too soft and would prove problematic in distinguishing features on an object. Additionally it was not as aesthetically vibrant or pleasing. 

Instead a more hard brush, defined style was chosen with dark shades of colour being used in lifework to detail features. 

I mostly wanted to avoid outlines altogether and instead used darker shades of color to detail inside of objects and parts of the environment. Shading was usually done through either a darker blue or bright yellow, to avoid losing some of the vibrancy of the environment. 

This was a proposed design for the mountain regions which would combine a type of forest setting with plateaus and cliffs. It was designed as a friendly environment to begin the game and learn basics on. 

Concept Art: Dragon

Initial sketches of the dragon protagonist to be featured in game.

For a time we toyed with what the age of the dragon would be, Whether it would be a child or full grown adult. Ultimately we ended up settling for an adolescent. This was primarily due to the fact that we wanted to have dragon eggs be collectible. and it seemed a better idea to have an older dragon as it would make more sense plot wise. 

A number of sketches of possible designs.

Followed by rough digital paintings.

And a chosen design out of the selection.

Final render of the proposed design.