Chapter 6: Drawing the Line

"What's the use in having a game that you can't see?"

More and more these days, there's a lot to be said about the graphics on display in a game. Granted, most games these days are fully 3D rendered, but we feel Football Underworld is a tribute and almost a throwback to the world of 2.5D graphics.

As mentioned in the first chapter our graphics guru Gozza recently left the team, but I caught up with him recently for a chat about the graphics he's created for us over the years and the process of taking an idea and turning into a visual reality. Just a heads up - there may be a couple technical words in this post, but of course I'll try and keep it as simple and well-explained as possible.

In the early days, Gozza was directly given a couple tasks for the following week (such as a pages or certain big graphics which were required for the current development branch) in our weekly meeting and would fix all outstanding issues from the current week's tasks on the fly. The latter part was really cool for the rest of the team to see - firstly because it showed us just how quickly he worked (which, for me at least, was rather inspiring) and secondly because it meant that the pipeline of graphics tasks didn't back up. But even the best designers can only handle so many designs at once and with the development of Football Underworld scaling upwards rather rapidly, Gozza got Ant involved to be his task manager. Graphic design then thickened from a "take this idea, make it so" paradigm to a more complex process:

1. Ant e-mails Gozza a design spec
2. Gozza clarifies anything unclear
3. A few more e-mails get exchanged to make everything definite
4. Gozza whips up a first draft
5. Gozza starts his next task while Ant produces feedback on the draft

The main advantages to this process were that the large amount of work could be easily managed and the rapid deadlines for release builds could easily be met. However, since every approach has it's downside, the main disadvantages to it was that Gozza could end up working on anywhere from 3 to 7 things at once (that's enough to spread anyone quit thinly) and that once our weekly meeting came around everyone could weigh in with a recommended change which would delay completion or send a new draft into the process above.

Being the professional he is, Gozza always used the Adobe suite for his designs - namely Photoshop and Illustrator. Personally, I remember how the exported graphics of more detailed aspects such as player faces (yes, they're all drawn dynamically but they have points of reference in design) would be provided for integration into the game: paths and bezier curves. Now, for Flex/MXML (what we've developed our Facebook and web-based version in) this was easy to integrate - all the platforms involved were Adobe-based. But, for mobile development (with CoronaSDK not being an Adobe product) there was no apparent bezier curve library or framework which would allow us not to have to redesign the entire process ourselves. But we figured out the solution, and the dynamically-drawn player faces are still in use today - I don't see us ever dropping them, either. 

So that's how we get from ideas to graphics to your screens - hopefully you've enjoyed this post, if so then check out the others in our series!