When my friend started developing the servers for this game he knew he wanted this game to have the same sort of feel as Agar.io and Slither.io. What we wanted to add was a faster play style and a more social game. Agar and Slither are fun but it's really hard to play with friends. At the start of this unit my plan was simple, to create a series of short animations that would later go into a youtube channel. The animations were meant to be very basic in making it possible for me and my partner to create a large number of them by the end of the unit. However immediately after starting on the first animation I knew that it wasn’t what I had envisions, the animating process took too long to perfect and even then the final product looked sloppy. After about a month into the unit I had close to 0 drive to come to class to work on it, it wasn’t something I was proud to put my name on. A few months prior to the unit a friend and I started working on a game (still yet to have a name), the game was simple and meant to be very casual for anyone to jump in and out of, all browser based of course. During the beginning of it my friend had the intention of teaching me how to code and create a server, by the time the structure of the game had been completed our innovator unit had begun. Juggling the two projects I decided to put the game on hold and pointed my attention towards my innovator project. As I mentioned earlier about a month into the unit I was pretty much done, not even close to “done” with the work, I was just “done” with working on it. I just wanted to be working on something I was proud of, so the next week I would come to class and just do art for my friends game, and I realized that I was really enjoying it. I was creating things I was proud of and I realized, that’s what the innovator unit is about, exploring, making mistakes, uncovering new passions, and that’s when I came to Mr. Flo first to ask about it. One of the main reasons that I wanted to pursue this instead of my animations is because I knew it was different, I knew no one else was going to create a fully playable game, whereas I could name a few people making animations that honestly looked really really good compared to mine. In the end I knew that working on my animations would have made the rest of the unit hell and the game was something I would be proud to show to my peers.

It’s hard to say what I’ll take from this unit, because in some sense I did back away from a challenge. I could have pushed myself through the last month and a half to stick with animations, but I didn’t. Of course from a different viewpoint I can say that I was able to recognize issues and take control of them, I knew my partner was not on track and I knew I was slowly following off track too and that’s part of why we found it necessary to switch. This whole project has been a roller coaster for me with a lot of ups and downs, but after it all I can say I came out on top and I came out proud. One of the coolest parts of this unit that I can say “innovated” my own education was being able to create the rubric. This idea seemed so simple when first introduced, but after hours of working on it, it became apparent it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. You always think you know what you want, and for me being able to choose how I was graded seemed to be exactly what I wanted, that is until it actually happened. I have always been a person who follows the rules, guidelines are what keep me going and keep me on track, but the second I am given freedom I often get lost. But by the end of this unit I can say I know exactly where I am. Looking back on this project there are somethings that I will never forget and for me the largest one is simply pursuing what you enjoy. With college deadlines and my innovator deadline being so close to one another this month has been full of making decisions and as strange as it is, making the move to switch my project helped me understand that there are options, and more importantly that I need to use those options. In the end happiness is what trumps all, and working on something that makes me want to come to class reminds me that my future and where I end up is entirely in my hands.

When we started to make this game my friend told me "we need a huge eyeball that just f***** you up", and that's where it all began. When I starting working on this I kept trying to figure out how it would shoot its projectiles, and then I realized "what do eyeballs do?" Well they blink, at first we experimented with just 2 frames (one closed and one opened) but the animation eneded up looking very choppy. In the end I was able to create a total of four frames that could loop each time it fired. Creating this object was very different for me, because I am used to using lots of shading with the gradient tool to make it blend together, but for the art style we wanted the shading was completely different. In the end I was very please how this came out.

Of all the things I worked on, although this may seem the simplest, it took wayyyyy too long. I knew we wanted to use a spaceship as the main sprite, and it needed to be something with very distiguishable parts including: the hull, wings, thrusters and cannons. The reason for this is because as the game progresses we want to have a loot system that translates to upgrades for your ship, bigger thrusters-more speed, larger cannons-more damage, and so on. So that meant it couldn't be some UFO looking object. In total I think I created about 15 different unique designs, and probably 5 more for each unique concept that was just moving around the pieces.

How we came up with this art really had no guidlines, we obviously had a style we wanted to maintain, but aside from that it was up to me to come up with ideas for enemies. I knew this game was going to be very abstract so I figured, why not make a flashing leprachaun. The frames for this enemy have not been completed yet, however in order to incoporate it into the game with some type of effect I put over a low opacity mask of different color so it would have a flashing effect as it fired.