Stratford Steps
Stratford Steps was a game concept created for Game Dev In A Day, a weekend long workshop hosted by the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus. In teams of ten or less, the goal was to create a game focused around Stratford, as well as mental health, wellbeing or fitness.
Game Concept
A statue of Shakespeare in Stratford was pushed over and broken. The ghost of Shakespeare arose from its pieces and turned everyone in the city into swans. It is the main characters mission to travel through the town and save the citizens by feeding them healthy foods, turning them back into humans.
My Role
I was tasked with creating the character sprites for the main character, the citizens and their swan counterparts. My designs were simple and focused heavily on consistency and friendliness. We wanted to target our game to a general audience and after getting feedback from event mentors and user testing, these were my final designs.
Design Process
I first started by drawing sketches on paper. I find that my designs are more fluid and organic by drawing things out first. After discussing with other members in my team and creating multiple iterations, I had a final sketch that was ready to go digital. I then scanned my image, put it into Adobe Illustrator and started tracing out and finalizing my design. Once the first character was created, the focus of each new character was how they differed from the others. By assigning specific characteristics to each sprite (Police hat, mayor sash, star), they came to life while maintaining a familiarity.
Challenges
Because we had a limited time to create our game, there was a large division in design work between the team members. There were designers focused specifically on backgrounds and user experience pieces. A challenge we all faced was creating designs that could come together unified.
Another challenge I encountered was making sure that the characters stood out from the settings so that users could fully understand visually how their input was effecting the game.