My name's Scott Summers, and I worked as the Game Artist and Game Designer, helping to design and animate the enemies, particle effects, and other visuals. I also helped to coordinate and instruct the Sound Design team on what kind of audio effects we needed for the game.
Game Design and Artwork
While I am not the greatest artist by hand, I felt that I excelled a lot more with pixel art, and this game exactly coincided with my skills. I mostly followed suit in how Sam designed Arty initially, and tried to match the visuals of the enemies with what Sam made in his iterations.
One of the trickiest ones to design was with the Demon Skull, formerly known as the "Mage" enemy. Originally, we had planned to make it more of a wizard-like enemy, but it would require an entirely new sprite, followed by new animations for each side. We were short on time by the second quarter, and I didn't want to delay any other sprites or work that needed to be done.
So I took another look at the "Mage" enemy, and realized that's its patterns were quite similar with how the Floating Skull operated as well. I opted that the best route, in order to save time on spriting and animating it, was to take the base of the Floating Skull and redesign it to be a "Demon Skull". I sharpened the chin, changed the jawline, added horns, and gave a recolor to the skull and the fire, completely making a new character. I even added some flames that come out of the eyes in some animations to give it a bit more sinister character.
This issue fell exactly under the concept of "reskinning", and while I did initially feel embarrassed about it, I realized that it saved me ample time to focus on other tasks that needed to be done. I also felt that the changes I made were sufficient enough to make it stand out on its own without feeling like a copy-paste.
Team Organizer
Throughout the project, I had helped Sam in developing his vision for the project by organizing the mechanics and features that he had proposed, and then enforcing the scope and limitations that we would need to account for on the project's size. I helped to create the initial design document, and then made sure that the game's design was being followed by other members.
During the second half of the project, Sam had become less able to lead and direct the team for personal reasons. I noticed that while the other members were very capable of working on their tasks, they were still looking for someone else to assign them new jobs and coordinate them. So I decided, since I had helped Sam previously in designing the game, that I would take the initiative and helped lead in the second half of the project.
I made sure to check in with each member individually and the team collectively when we met in class or outside of it. I listened to what issues or problems any member encountered, asked them what they think can do, if they can work around it, and how much this would affect the rest of the game. I wanted to ensure that the most game breaking issues were addressed first, and then have the minor bugs something to be tinkered with on our free time.
Sound Design Coordinator
We were glad to be supplied a sound design team from our college to help us with the sound effects, since there was not a whole lot of sound designers within our class. While the other guys were focused on developing the game, I decided to opt in and help be the representative for us to the sound design team. However, we also got outside help from one of Sam's friends, going by the online handle "Deej". He was primarily skilled in composing songs of various genres as a hobby.
It was somewhat difficult utilizing these two sources of help, because there was a contrast in style of audio design. While Deej had very complex compositions for the songs within certain levels, the sound design team's songs were not as articulated, but they made very satisfactory sound effects overall. The trick was to critically analyze what songs felt the best together from both sources, and utilize those choices within the final product.
I also noticed that certain sounds seem to fulfill the specifications we asked, but ultimately couldn't fulfill the purpose we needed. So instead of rushing the sound team to make more sounds, I decided to utilize other sound effects that were unused at the moment and implemented them instead.
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