Joe's Backgrounds

    I was asked recently to help improve the artwork for a classmate's game which is going to be sold as an iPhone app. which is to be released in a week or two as it's an easter themed game. Below is the background that I was given to work over

 Here are the backgrounds that I produced earlier, there are three different versions; day, evening and night. These I think are going to be used as different levels:

[ Click images to enlarge ]

Animal Frenzy: Reward System

    After our weekly meeting today we decided that our game was lacking some form of reward system. Before today players would simply place animals in the right place with an infinite amount of attempts to do so until they progressed to the next level. However to introduce a difficulty curve we've iterated the mechanic so that players now only have a set amount of attempts to get the right animals. Players who pick the right animals with few or no incorrect answers will be rewarded with medals, which is the reward system we have decided to introduce. We haven't quite decided whether the medals gained during each level will be cumulated and averaged out at the very end of the game to give a final gold, silver or bronze medal or whether players will aim simply to acquire the best medals they can.

    Either way we needed medals, so we came up with the idea of animal themed medals. A platinum Eagle, gold Lion, silver Elephant and bronze Blob Fish, however the Blob Fish may be changed to just an ordinary fish. So here are the medals I've bashed out this evening for this purpose.

[ Click image to enlarge ]

...A continuation from the medals, I then created boxes for the medals to sit in so that they could popup on the screen when earned:

British Museum Trip

    I went to the British Museum today to see for myself the Game of Ur, which we have looked at a few times since the beginning of the year. I also took some time to look about at other parts of the museum whilst I was there.
    The first thing I thought was quite remarkable was the condition of the actual playing board. Considering it's getting on for almost 5000 years old, the detail that remained was in really good nick, as well as the counters. I know parts have been restored however it's amazing how even parts of it managed to survive for so long. I also found out that part of the board was used for fortune telling, which is an interesting fact, knowing that the Sumerians were using boards used for gaming to also read into the future, which also reveals something about their culture as superstitious beings.

    I didn't spend too long in the Mesopotamia area, I spent most of my time looking at the sculptures and high relief wall sections in the Parthenon zone. I thought it was pretty cool the amount of effort the Greeks put into depicting simple stories through these various pieces of relief that would have once decorated the walls of the Parthenon and other buildings. There were a series of relief pieces that were positioned around the exhibition space in chronological order depicting a fight between a man and a centaur. Each one looking like a different frame from an animation you might see nowadays. It occurred to me that this was alot of work to just portray a simple story, which is a great contrast to how easy it is to tell a story through visual media today.

    That's all really I have to report from the day! I spent about three hours there in total but somehow I've managed to condense it down into a few short paragraphs. I spent a while drawing some of the sculptures, I'll put the images below. In conclusion I think it was a worthwhile trip, I can now say I've seen the Royal Game of Ur first hand and apart from that it was quite nice to be about in London again for the day.

[Click images to enlarge]