PRODUCTION - WEEK THREE
Monday 18th - Sunday 24th of March
For week three, I will aim to create a mood board on the menus for the game. I will start by getting a base list of games from Google Forms. This will be my use of the Google forms as they were to gather info and references. I will create a format using some points from Google Forms.
First, I will look at the game's main menus to get a look at examples. I will look at the similar and non-similar games' main menus to get a good grasp. I will do this for the pause menu, in-game menu, and game mode menus. From the in-game UI, I aim to get a look at how these games handle certain game modes with their UI.
I will create a mood board for the colours of each game and one for all the effects I am making. From the colour mood boards, I hope to get a grasp of colours that I can use. For the effects, I will use examples from games on the effects and real-life effects.
Moodboard - Research:
Here is the page containing the research on the menus and UI, taking into account all the planning:
Inspiration - Reflection:
For the inspiration and research, the main aim I attempted was to get a list of games both similar and not. For this goal where I aimed to get a good list of games, I managed to use my Google forms to gather a great list of games to look at. I got a few games in each type I was looking for, with a slightly increased amount of non-similar games compared to similar games. I got a total of 17 games for this list, and I am happy with this amount. Furthermore, I would have liked to have more similar games, so the images aligned better with the menus I wanted.
The next goal was to create an initial format for the mood boards. For the mood board format, looking back I made a slightly messy format and had to change it eventually. The newer format is a definitively better format overall and next time I will use it as a reference. Down below you can see an example of the final look I made and the old look. I think the main reason behind the old one looking bad was the lack of space. This made it hard to use because I struggled to get all my images into the old format. This was massively improved in the new layout as it added a ton more space.
OLD:
New:
UI - Reflection:
For the UI, the main goal for each one was to get a compilation of each image of that style and understand the features and look of each one. I feel I did this well, as I made a mood board for each menu for the selection of games. I compiled an image of the menus and talked about the main features and some that were not mentioned before. This leads me to be able to understand what is needed when I make my own. This will lead to a better final product overall as this information will be added when creating it.
The aim was to analyse the features, which I did well and took time on each one. For the colour mood boards, I dissected the overall colours in each image and talked about the points. I made sure to look at the similar games and non-similar and looked at the indicator colours. From this I not only got and covered the points, I also decided on a colour scheme I enjoyed. This will help our game stand out in the UI department and give it an identity outside of the layout. Doing this helped me get an understanding of works with each other and how to use them well.
Effects - Reflection:
Looking back, I am happy with my work on making mood boards for effects, but I feel I could have added more. For this, I added a few examples of grenades and flash-bang explosions from games and real life. As I said before, I am happy with the results and reached my aim, but I wanted to get a few more examples to use in later work. So if I could have done this again, I would have looked at more examples from games and maybe even looked at shows and movies. This did not take away from the final work, as I did get a complete mood board.
I think I could have got more examples of the flash bang in particular as it was outweighed by the grenade. This would have led to a better plan, although looking back, the flash bang effect in the game looks better compared to the grenade. But I did manage to find a video on flash bang explosions which made up for this an amount. I also researched bullet holes, but these did not appear in the final game. Knowing this if I could go back, I would have spent the time researching these and put it into the grenade and flash-bang instead as they did make it in.