Author: Joshua Young

Understanding Comics Research Lab – Joshua Young

“The trick is to never mistake the message for the messenger”

In Comics, it’s a whole other medium on how to convey a story to their respective audience. The medium is the comic, the message is shown within the comic, and the messenger is the author using the comic, what Mcloud wanted to say is to not confuse the authors words or intentions with what is shown in the comic.

“However much we may try to understand the world of comics around us, a part of that world will always lie in shadow– a mystery”

There is a vast majority of comics that have been released today, there may be a ton of hidden gems that can change your world view or others that have messages you hate. The many types of comics that focus on action like Marvel comics or the comics that are meant for comedic purposes like Garfield or the Sonic the Hedgehog comic. There will always be a shadow of comics for people because it also falls of their perception of what genres they’re interested in.

“Humans are a self-centered race. We see ourselves in everything. We assign identities and emotions where none exist. And we make the world over in our own image.”

Mcloud saying this quote to define how we as people perceive certain things as emotions like emoticons and even two dots and a line to signify a face. By making that connection, it explains the existence of being able to simplify certain expressions into more comprehendible images for viewers. Making images as simple as you can see fit can help bring that benefit of attracting more of an audience because it isn’t overly complicated.

Crawford Chapter 1 Research – Joshua Young

“Those who overrate their own understanding undercut their own potential for learning.”

In game design or in game development, we as both the players and the developers often overrate our skill wen making a game or product. The same goes for the opposite, people often underrate themselves in their in own skills when they create a game, they can be the most skilled programmer but if they don’t think of programming in terms of improving the experience for the player, then it’s hard to say whether that person is a good game programmer. The moral of this quote is that we all have the potential to create something amazing, but we can’t undercut or overrate our abilities, we can just do what is within our skill level to use as a learning experience.

“Games are objectively unreal in that they do not
physically re create the situations they represent, yet they are subjectively real to the player”

When playing games we like, whether it be the story or the gameplay, we get this subjective attachment to it that we feel immersed into the game. Games like Persona 5 makes us immersed with the characters and gameplay but also a game like OMORI can keep us attached to the characters with its storytelling, the situations the game puts us in and that we as developers put our player in must have some sort of hook took keep them playing the whole way through our game.

“the player of a game is encouraged to explore alternatives,
contrapositives, and inversions. The game player is free to explore the causal relationship from many
different angles.”

This quote means how in games it encourages the player to create their own story instead of always being presented the facts like a regular story. Games that do this often has some kind of quest system implemented that can both influence the story and give the player optional content and gameplay to go through for story reasons, an example of a game like these can be OMORI and even the more recently released Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach by having the option to the player to access multiple endings. This is all a choice for the type of game you as the developer are going for, but as a suggestion, if you make a game where your choices should matter, and if it will have one ending no matter the choices, have a good build up in the story ending to make that ending satisfying to the player.

Joshua Young – User Interface Design Lab

Here is my Title Screen art. This is actually a pre made art that I hade for my character for a while. I didn’t expect to use it for a title screen. But this is how it looks without the buttons.

My control screen is a bit basic since it’s a platformer for now. So just the movement controls and item collecting controls work out for now.

Here is my Game Over Screen

Load Button
Start/New game button
Quit Button

Joshua Young – NPC Lab

Here is my NPC, he is an Informant for the player as they play through out the game. There wasn’t much I could think of for an Idle, but I thought that since this person is more poker faced and stone faced, he should be tapping hs foot impatiently waiting for the player.

This is just a basic mouth moving talking animation.

These 5 portraits are the ones for the player and for the NPC. Since the NPC has an intense poker face I left him as is with just a regular talking one. As for the main character I gave them a few expressions going from a neutral expression, to a more confused looking one then a more angry one with his eyes closed.

Published
Categorized as Artist, NPCs

Joshua Young – Obstacles/Enemies Lab

For my obstacle, It will be the road block that will sort of stop the player from moving to a certain area, but also the player will be able to get through it if they jump over it. (Not that much of an obstacle)

The rat will be a common enemy for the player. I thought a rat would be a good first enemy due to the setting being in a poverty central area in the city with trash and garbage. I plan for the rat’s attack to be easily avoidable if the player moves away. The attack will have a decent startup before the attack.

Rewards/ Life Lab – Joshua Young

This is my rewards sprite for my game. It’s a spray can that is located somewhere in the setting of the game. The purpose of this item/reward is for the player to gather enough of these spray cans so they can go spray-paint the city in their color.

These sprites are the players Life. On the character design, the character the player plays as has a couple of patches on their coat. I thought it would be cool to have those patches act as their life. For example, every time you lose a life, the less amount of patches is on the character, and the more patches(lives) as long as it’s above three, the character will have it’s original design. That might be a cool little detail.

Scenery Lab – Joshua Young

Here are all the scenery elements I made. They are all meant to showcase the location my protag is centered in.

Here is how they all look together within the scene. I also circled where they are in red just in case.

Joshua Young – Background Lab

Here is my background for me game. In the future I will probably change how it looks since I had trouble making it wrap or properly loop. But I still like how this turned out.

And here is how it looks in Godot. My main goal for this background was to give this run down city/town in a more poverty part of the city. I also wanted this to take place close to night time too and have the buildings with a bit of graffiti on them.

Character Animation Lab

This is the Idle character animation sheet for my character Robin. Due to how long it is and how small it is, I cannot make it larger than this sadly. It took me a while but I managed to finish the Idle sprite sheet, walk, and Jumping animations for Robin.

You may see double he frames when I made them, I made these animations with the intent that they would be the same as when I forgot put them in Godot, but I was wrong, I only needed to make one of each frame for it to run smoothly.

Though they all look a bit wonky, besides the Idle animation, I took a lot of effort into this, in the possible future I will modify them to be better.

Here is a screenshot of my character in Godot. The collider is off for it but the animations all work in sync. Maybe in the future I’ll scale him up a few sizes.