Art Build Journal

ART/MODELING STRUGGLES:

    At the beginning of this mini-sprint, I had the idea to model my map in Blender as a reference for the background drawings in Sugar Craze. I was excited to get back into Blender and use it again, so I took the first draft of my map and edited it. I wasn't thinking about scale or how everything would fit when I initially drew out the map, so now that I was refining it, my earlier overlooked details became huge problems later.

The first redesign after the initial concept art

    However, when I started modeling, the idea of building my map in Minecraft struck me. With how things are scaled in Minecraft, I have a better grasp of how my characters fit into space, and I wouldn't need to do as much modeling work. So, I switched gears and adjusted the style of my map to pixel art.

The initial plan for my Minecraft build

    Everything was going great at first. I remade my project in Twine, got the passages to switch colors with tags (with some difficulty), and started working on the enemy encounter scenes. But when I started to build everything out in Minecraft, there was a glaring problem. The map was too big. Everything turned out way bigger than I intended, and I didn't even plan the furniture on my map. I needed to adjust everything or start over again, but this time, in Blender. Thinking I had time, I switched back to Blender and continued with my previous model. After getting the outline of the factory, I did not like how it was turning out and I switched once again (and for the last time) to Minecraft.

Sugar Craze Map in Blender

You know what they say. When at first you don't succeed, try, try again!

    Now that I had a better idea of what I wanted, I resized my map to be a little smaller and added furniture plans for the rooms. Using my first map as a reference of what the rooms were, I got to work and finalized my map's design.

Final Map design that includes furniture/floor plans

    Once I finished it, I started building! It took a long time to get everything right, but once I had the walls down, decorating was a piece of cake. I can also plan out where I want bodies to lay by having my Minecraft character die and stay as a corpse in the place I want a body to be. Once I have everything in order, I'll take multiple screenshots of the scenes I want, and reference them while I sketch out the pictures for the game in Procreate. Adding the art into my game would help a lot with the exploration part of my core loop, the horror in my game, having visual cues for danger, and including a lot of visual gags for comedy.

One of the offices in the Gummy Section

Screenshot example for a scene

An example of how I can plan bodies using my Minecraft character.

Horror Example: One of the hallways in the hard candy section (unlit)

CHANGES:

    At the moment, I haven't changed anything content-wise from the prototype. However, I'm considering expanding the main cast from Heath and Kat to add three more characters to fit the classic slasher stereotypes. That idea is still on the back burner, however. Other than that, I'm experimenting on Twine to see how I can format the choices presented to players and what I can do with buttons. I liked how my prototype looked on Google Slides, and I want to emulate that in my Twine game.