Day of the Piñata Week 4

A new year, a ned course, a new project.

Game development is our new course and we are developing a game, from concept to finished product over a ten weeks time. We are in our fourth week in developing “the Day of the Piñata”. The concept for the game is to play a Piñata who got possessed by a vengeful spirit on the day of the dead in mexico. The Piñata want revenge for all of the poor piñatas who get masaccred just because of their sweet insides. So the mission of the players is to play the Piñata and wreck the festival and save a Piñata in the end of the level.

My job in this project is so far mostly on the player character, the Piñata. In the game the Piñata can gather candy, and depending on how much candy it has it have different sizes. There are three of those. Small, medium, and large. To get smaller the player can shoot candy as projectiles. I worked on all three this week, but I’m only going to talk about the small one for now.

We had many different ideas for the Piñata, and here are some of them.

Nr 1 and 2 was the first idéas when following the original concept idea of a rather cute Piñata. Round shapes and not much detail. Yet each size didn’t speak much of its abilities. Like, the bigger you get the bigger objects you can destroy. You get more dangerous, that should have a visual difference.  Also the idéa of the game was going to be a bit darker than the original concept. How we were going to animate the Piñata was the reason of the take of nr 3 and 4. Piñatas are made of paper, hence they would not be able to move their limbs much, or they would rip. Thats why we I cut the Piñata in half and added folds, like with a accordion or paper lantern. It would make the Piñata able to move in a realistic way related to its material.

My favorite of these was nr 3, yet it was too extreme and not the feeling I wanted for the small Piñata. The smallest one was going to be the most “friendly” and normal, and then the bigger it gets the more extreme it gets. So it was made into nr 4. Its accordion spine much smaller and shorter that also makes the Piñata look emptier, since this is the form of the Piñata with the least candy.

When the design was done I made the lineart in photoshop, pretty thick to make the Piñata easier to distinguish from the background. Then colored and shaded. The colors was hard to decide. We ended up with purple, pink and green as the contrast color. The idea is that the color will change slightly by each size, getting darker. Green was decided because of its positive association. Like stop light. Green means go. That’s why the next size will have a yellow contrast color, while the purple and pink will be darker. To keep the sense that it is the same Piñata getting bigger I decided to keep two of the colors, just darkening them for each size, but having a contrast color that changes. It leaves enough trace of the previous size within the colors.

So that is the small Piñata I did this week! There is two more and animations going to be made!

See you next week!