While I did not spend much time doing any technical work on Buzz Whizz: Bees this weekend, I did spend several hours going through some of the original concept art and prototypes for the idea. The goal was to ensure that we haven't lost any of the passion for the game or miss any fun or useful ideas that we came up with during the original phase of designing the game. I'm happy to say that, while the game has some different design elements than what we originally considered, the art, design, and objectives have remained consistent.
The image below was the first concept art we ever designed for the game. This was all created by hand out of tissue paper, twine, and a few other materials, We then photographed it and cleaned it up a bit.
Here, you can see Cable cleaning up the edges.
Over time, we started drawing out concepts for how the environment should look as we started digitizing it via Photoshop and bringing those elements into Unity. The series of images below show off some of the early drawings that we did to talk about the design.
We had a few digital color prototypes to demonstrate what these environments would look like with textures applied to them. For those who aren't familiar with our game, our goal is to create an educational adventure game for kids that has a craft-like appearance. These initial digital prototypes allowed us to confirm our theory that this would look interesting.
The past 4 weeks has seen significant progress towards pulling together the first level. This has brought us to the point shown below - which is a screenshot pulled from the game just a couple of weeks ago.
Our first playable character, the American Bumble Bee, has also seen considerable progress towards over the past 6 months. She has gone from a series of sketches with sharp lines and edges to a round little bee with a personality.
The images below show two of the initial drawings that we did to explore how we would like to visualize the first character.
Again, this gave way to a digital, color rendering which was meant to demonstrate the combination of digital outline and physical texture.
The current result is our wonderful little bee with the slightly large head and lots of personality.
While we will see a few changes to the bee over the next couple of weeks, this is basically how she is going to look when the game is finally released. The head will be smaller, we will add an extra set of wings, and we will make the antennae longer. We will also have a few changes in the environment over the next few weeks, but I'll save that for another post.
Thanks to everyone for reading!
Coy
