21-25th May Production Dairies

What I created this week: Finished (Almost) The final design of the rogue.

This week has been very, very slow due to some problems I've faced with illustrator and unforeseen circumstances which have haltered my work progress.

After successfully designing all of the characters weapons last week and transferring them over to illustrator, I decided to come back to working on the mage character in Illustrator, and this is where I ran into some issues.

I found that the Layers feature started bugging out. I wasn't able to lock/unlock layers unless i repeatedly clicked and got lucky, and when I clicked to go onto a different layer, it wouldn't go to that layer and just stayed on the same layer. I started having issues with this last week but thought it was probably just a one time thing. I searched the internet for answers and there was hardly anything that was helpful to my problem other than to restart the computer, which I did so and yet it still occurred. I can usually work out what's gone wrong pretty quickly but with this, I'm fairly certain it's some sort of bug/glitch. The reason why this is so frustrating is because I couldn't unlock layers to work more on that layer, and I kept moving around things on layers that I couldn't lock. And not only that, I couldn't switch to different layers.

So I wasn't wasting the little time I had, I decided to just start on the making the Rogue character to see if this problem occurred to every piece in Illustrator or just that specific one. (I had no issues with creating the weapons, it just seemed to be that specific art board). To my surprise, everything was fine and I created the rogue and coloured her in 2 days.

I did run into some problems though. I am not skilled in drawing hands or feet, and I realised this week that is something I need to work on. It seemed no matter how I drew them, they looked bizzare and weird, and drawing the hands and feed I'd say took up the most time. in the end, I resorted to tracing over basic drawings of hands that I found on google, but even that looked weird. I couldn't get the feet to look right and I still think they don't look right, even though my peers were reassuring me that the feet look okay. I think this just comes down to the fact that a lot of the time I don't think my art is good enough. I doubt myself and my skills a lot when I really shouldn't. My drawing skills will improve over time if I just don't give up. So for now, my characters are going to have slightly odd looking hands and feet, but I hope by doing this that maybe my hand and feet drawing will improve.

I also had trouble in changing the outline colour of the character. I think this is my own fault though I can't exactly figure out why, but I think it has something to do with using the paint bucket tool and all the lines merging in the paint bucket tool. I just had to leave the outline colour at blue for now, but I am going to try my hardest to figure out how to change it without messing everything else up. To be more clear, I can change the outline colour, but it also changes the outline colour of the eyes and other things which I don;t want to change the colour of. It seems all my layers have merged unto one, so even if I lock the layer which is meant to have the eyes on, it still changed the colour of them.

Another problem i ran into was when I was using the brush or pencil, I couldn't change the stroke. I couldn't figure out a solution at the time but after researching some solutons at home I am going to follow this advice https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2342966 and switch off the "New art has basic appearance" in the appearance panel. I will be trying that next week and I hope it works.

Here is the final design of The Rogue:

I kept the colour scheme the same as her weapons, blues. This colour scheme is mono-chromatic, forcing viewers to focus on the details.

Some things I want to change are the dark blue colour on the boots as I realise now that it does not match the rest of the colour scheme, the blue is too saturated and stands out, and the boots are not exactly something I want to draw attention to (I learnt that you can make things stand out by making it more saturated in the colour theory research I did, along with colour schemes and how to use them (https://mingamesblog.wixsite.com/mingames/blog/understanding-colour).)

Therefore I am going to make that specific colour on the boots less saturated and probably the same colour as the trousers (Very dark blue), to make them blend in a bit more.

I also want to change the colour of the small circle that joins her hood together, just under her chin. I feel like this colour is too light and saturated and stands out too much, drawing the attention away from the overall character. I will change this to a darker, less saturated colour, but will still make it stand out by adding some sort of engravement to the circle. This way it's still interesting, but doesn't stand out so much.

Overall, I think the rogue looks good and will look even better when I've made the few changes. One thing I'm not so happy about is the shape of the eyes. I wanted them to look more sharp, but I realised it would take me a very long time to start from scratch with the eyes, so I just copied the eyes that I used for the mage and changed the colour of this. Although this saved time, the eyes are not as sharp and cold looking as I want them to be, though I think I may of fixed this with the shape of the eyebrows showing that she is frustrated, and also with her fists being clenched. The frowning eyebrows and the clenched fists are symbolising that she is irritated, cold and sharp. (My study on semiotics helped me with solving this problem https://mingamesblog.wixsite.com/mingames/blog/semiotics-1)

If I has more time, I would spend time on making the eyes perfect, but I don't have that time so copying the eyes from the mage onto each character is the perfect way of saving an hour of time for each character.

Conclusion/small discussion:

There's no denying that I am behind with my work. Unfortunately, this was inevitable considering unforseen events that have happened in life outside college. This has caused me to apply for a 2 week extension, as I feel that I wont be able to finish this project without it. I was suppose to finish all my practical work on the 25th, which has not happened. I know I said previously that if I feel like I'm running out of time that I'll just focus on one character, but if I do that, all my hard work going into designing characters is for nothing. Besides, even if I did put my focus on one character I still wouldn't of been able to get it all done in time. This is no fault of my own as I planned out my time well and mostly stuck to my Gannt Chart. I know that in the real world, asking for extensions on projects is unacceptable, and if I don't get everything done on time I'll likely be fired or it will delay the release of a game (If I am working in the art department in games design that is).

2 weeks from the 5th of June I have, so I am allowing myself until the 16th of June to finish all practical work, and the rest of the time to make sure all my blog posts, proposal, GDD, website and final evaluation are up to scratch.

Considering the pace I've worked at recently, and that the unforeseen events will likely not affect the rest of the time I do have, I believe this is completely doable as long as I don't give up.