Merchant Seas

Not only has my life been super crazy (though it's calmed down), but I've also been getting lots of work; It's great! And I really need to update my portfolio. The problem with professional work is that you can't talk about it until the game is released, so I haven't had all that much to say. Anyway, I wanted to try something different here by talking about an entire project at once rather than piecemeal.
On with the important stuff.

Mike Dosey's Merchant Seas

(That's kind of got a ring to it. Mike should be like Sid Meier with his name in front of all the games he makes. It doesn't matter if no one knows who he is -- it looks like people ought to know, so they'll pay attention. Heh!)

Right. So this is a writeup about some work I've done for Mike in the last month or two to show a bit about my thinking and the process of making assets for a game. And to show off my work - and Mike's game - of course.

The game, the job

It's called Merchant Seas, as noted, and is about sailing around in the 15th century and doing trading sort of things. Or at least that's my very simple way of putting it that gets across the feeling that should felt 'at a glance'. Graphics are important because they form a first impression about a game. So my job then is to make the UI looks pretty, paint a picture for the front page to make the game look fun (the equivalent of box art, I suppose), and do some pixel art type ships to extend the existing ship graphics that Mike is using (which you may recognize from a popular set made by Inquisitor aka Richard Janes.).

UI

The game's theme suggests to me a sort of old-time nautical style for the UI with lots of warm wood colors, brass, weathered paper, and serif fonts. At the same time, the rest of the graphics as they exist are pretty light-hearted and colorful, but not too colorful: the shades are somewhat more on the pastel end of things, so I'll try not to make things too dark or too saturated with color. (I do have a tendency toward making darker graphics and using strong colors, so I need to watch myself sometimes when people are going for broader appeal. And the ability to see what's going on without turning the brightness up.)

Mike had prepared a list of UI elements with programmer art versions of everything which were very helpful in illustrating his intentions. I started off those and basically drew a layer over them in Photoshop to give them the look I had in mind.

The way I started these, I gave every element a unique look, like it's own color of wood and arrangement of trim and corner decorations. It's fun to make these little things, but after a few like this, Mike set me right on making sure that the UI had a more unified look, with panels and elements constructed from similar parts. I know it's awfully small, but if you compare the cut up images of the UI in figure #1 with figure #2 you will see how I redid the UI (and also to account for some changes from Mike's side to give him more space to work with).



I'd like to note also that I used brighter highlights of metal, like the bright colored gold, as well as higher contrast with outlines and highlights to show which parts of the UI are interactive and what the player should pay extra attention to.

And by making a sheet of generic graphic parts (extracted from the unique elements I originally made), Mike can build new UI elements at his leisure or make small changes if he needs to. Maybe my original idea in making such sheets was to allow UI graphics to be built programmatically (see my work from November 2007 on my own Isostrat to show how I did this way back then), and though that's not the case in this particular application, it's a useful method to consider in constructing UIs programmatically.



Ships:

Richard Jane's original tileset came with three ships but Mike's design for Merchant Seas requires that players be able to meaningfully upgrade their ships, so he had me make five more ship levels. And, at that, there are three nations (so far) and all of the ships needed a color layer to designate who they belong to. And, can't forget, there was a matter of making a little aura of lights reflecting from the night-time water.

The challenge with the ships here was to match the original style. This was quite intimidating at first, but once I did some intense sprite work for another client (and was therefore too jaded to be fazed by anything), I took a closer look and saw how the ships were drawn, like what Richard was thinking when he made them. And it's not like I haven't spent some time staring at his other tilesets, as well, considering their popularity. Seeing it on that level, it was easy to jump in and draw some variations. (Side views only; They look the best):



All of those sails are a bit of a pain, I must admit, and if you pay really close attention you may see that some of them don't really match between the side-view and the up/down views of the ships -- partly because they didn't really match in the original graphics, but it's not like I can blame the poor guy for just getting them done. This isn't engineering, what matters is the impression they make on the player, and for that, I think it works.

Painting:

I enjoy how Mike indulges me by letting me do paintings for his projects. For as much as I enjoy digital painting, it's really what I actually do and practice the least - so I get more work doing everything else, and end up much better at everything else and with a better portfolio for everything else, and so don't get painting work. But I'll quit whining and get on with it; I really do enjoy all of this and would certainly rather be making game graphics than advertisements or something.

The idea was to have a painting that's adventurous, involves a ship, and, you know, the romance of sailing the seas. I did not intend for it to be combat related as such, or too dangerous-looking -- it should express rollicking adventure above all. And, at that, I based it on combining two paintings I rather like that instantly came to mind: Breughel's Icarus and Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, see here:



The raft is on the right, as I'm sure you can see. Yes, this is putting that Fine Arts degree to good work.

Basically I took the background and lighting from Medusa (but toned it down a bit, because it's rather dark) and the ship from Icarus (Again, lightened it up). Here's the progression of the whole thing, click to see the larger sized image:



Then I used that painting to make a banner for Mike's webpage for the game; Here's an in-Photoshop shot of me extending the top of the painting just a little bit to fix the composition a little:



Then finished up with this:



And that's how it's done. Thanks Mike!