As the presentation of our Alpha is approaching, a major part of our time has been spent polishing our game. As the programmers have pulled out all of their hair, trying to get the AI to work accordingly to our vision, we, the more graphic oriented members of our group have had a hard time, finding stuff to do. So I haven’t felt the dreaded “ alpha” rush that so many senior students have warned us about. If this was a scare tactic or anything else, this remains to be seen.
This week, we have summarized all of the criticism we have gotten from our mentors, teachers and our fellow students. One aspect has been that our level design doesn’t fit with the other art of our game. Our characters, the plane that works as the avatar as well as the enemies has a cartoon feeling were as the map has a more realistic design. This specific problem stands as the origin for the challenge that i’ve been trying to tackle this week.
Designing the map, i wanted to make sure that the different parts of the map differs from each other in order to make it more interesting for the player. As well as to mediate the feeling that the player has flown a significant distance. In order to achieve this, i plan to implement mountains, forest and other “ wild nature” elements as well as more common sighted elements as farms and houses. My inspiration is the childhood movie about Nils Holgersson, where he spends the majority of the time on the back of a flying goose looking down on sweden with a birds perspective.
I have been working on designing components for the map. I have drawn numerous amounts of trees, rivers, mountains, houses, farms and more. Ive chosen this approach because its easy to take the different artefacts, manipulate them and implementing them in an aesthetically pleasing manner and can be used in numerous combinations.
Furthermore, an important aspect of designing the map is the application of layers. Everything that moves in a different way from another thing will be in a separate layer. Things that are static, like mountains and houses can be in the same layer but things like trees, that will move because of the wind, will be in a separate layer. This will, if successful, create movement and life in the environment.
eriklevinblogg 
Nice going this last sprint! Your post explains what you have done in an easy to follow way. I really liked that you went out of your way to explain why doing this artifact was necessary as well as to why
The fact that you started out with explaining that you changed some aspects of it due to the feedback you received during your play testing gives a deeper outlook on what you’ve done as well, I particularity like that you have deeply considered the design from the player’s point of view and deeply thought about how they would experience the map.
You don’t mention which software you used… At least not this week but I’m assuming Photoshop.
Looking closely I noticed that some of the lines you have are a bit unstable or you can see where you put the lines together. This could be intentional, but you never mentioned it so I’m going to be forced to assume not. Lineart is a hard and tedious process, luckily on the internet you’re never alone, so there are tools you can utilize. If you’re using PaintTool Sai/Manga Studio/Clipart studio (Possibly Krita?) you can just crank up the stabilizer/smoothing to get smoother lines and if you’re using another software, like Photoshop you can download LazyNezumi which can help you with that.
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