When 16, err 30, ain't enough...

I feel right at home y'all, sitting right at home all,

Kelly green with envy while I'm jelly beans descending

Into the palm of a child, looks up at mama and smile

With such a devilish grin, like "where the hell have you been?”

She yelling that selling’s a sin, well so is telling young men

That selling is a sin, if you don’t offer new ways to win

A dolphin gon shake his fin, regardless if he gets in

Or out of water, most important thing for him is to swim

And Flipper didn’t hold his nose, so why shall I hold my tongue?

Once again it is I, David Houston, back once more with another entry into the blog-o-sphere! SO I hope everybody is out there taking care of themselves as the weather and the academic calendar turns cold! 9 weeks down, one to go kiddies. I know it’s tough and everybody is tired, but you got to keep going and do what you do best! We’re all artist, and we’ve all succeeded before in tight spots (mark of the SCAD student!), so there’s no reason to think you won’t again! I know, I know, here goes Dave with that rah-rah stuff again. But what can I say, I’m a positive guy so I try to share that energy with everybody. Keep working hard everyone.  

As usual, team Bala has been in the lab tough cooking up all kinds of tasty game morsels for the end of the quarter playable, and things are looking pretty good. Me? I’m still carrying out the status quo for concepts and I’ve got a few snippets to share with everybody this evening! I’ve been working on the children some more.

Now, in case anyone forgot from last time, we basically established that there are two sets of kids; generic brats and bullet brats. Narratively speaking, children are servants to the boss witch of the area, DW (dream witch) collects the little candy muncher to lure said Boss out.  Generics are plain, look pretty much the same and are to be collected by Dreamy Witch. Bullet children have a unique look and supply DW with new bullets. Last week, I went into showing off the wind child, this week I have the shield kid and the generic kid. Lest start with the generic child first.

Not much to really say about this little dude, he’s generic! That’s kind of the definition of the word…you know…basic *shrug*. Now, there is a challenge that is in common with all the children, and that is establishing a dynamic behavior. We decided as a group that they probably shouldn’t just be sitting there on the stage like yard posts. So I’ve been trying to come up with actions that make the children readily identifiable. I also want them to make sense, after all, why would a child just be sitting in the middle of nowhere? In the case of generic kid I gave him a ball that he’s tossing around. So I guess that what generic kids are doing is playing. (Now that I think about it, that makes DW seem really creepy being how she snatches kids while they are out playing…yeah…-_-;) 

 

The shield child is seen doing a handstand on the turtle shell for three reasons. One is the group decided on a shell as the symbol for our shield power up. We didn’t want to simply give the child some type of shield since we figured that would be too typical. Also since it kind of manifest itself on DW as a magic circle, ward type thingy we didn’t want it to be so 1 to 1 and give the child the same thing. Two, symbolically a handstand is a display of strength. Since turtle shells are looked at as structurally powerful objects, I thought it was fitting if the master of the shield was also strong too. And finally, I just thought it looked cool! I placed runes on the shield to still make it appear as a magical item. I gave her matching earrings that are in the vein of her power( much like I did with wind child). It’s a theme I think I will use on all of the unique children. I also tried to make her appear mildly tomboyish, seeing as how she represents a tough and pushy type power (at least that’s how I see shields!).

On a side note, I’ve managed over 30 general concepts to this point! I say general because those are the ones that I have drawn in some capacity or another via rough sketches to fully fleshed out concept designs. I’m pretty proud of that considering we’ve only really been working on this project officially for around 7 weeks. I’m pretty excited about it, and I only hope I can keep working hard and carry my weight! Well onward people, see you next time!