Sprint 3 Blog

 Hello all, my name is Angie Marquez, and I am the 2D artist for KickBack. This sprint was smooth and not too jampacked. Although I had a hiccup at the end, I'm confident I can get back on track and continue to bring my best to my team. During this sprint, I primarily worked on VFX items for our game.

First, I had to complete the enemy attack to implement in time for our first build. My producer and main designer, Angel and Matt, told me they had chosen one of the concepts I had drawn previously and wanted me to refine it in a 2048x2048 space.

I had a few different refined versions, but this was the final one. There are 4 different paths of electricity, so that in Unity, it will rotate them around and create the electric effects. I hope the glowing effect from my brush doesn't look too odd in the game. Electricity is so fun to draw; the wildness and unpredictability of it are sometimes hard to grasp. I soon found out that drawing from the wrist helps so much for unpredictable but steady lines.

Next up, I created the floating portal to be able to teleport into other levels or areas. I hard reference was used for this one!

After that one was made, I was in charge of creating the poofs that would appear when the player walks and jumps around. This card was confusing for a bit until I spoke with Angel and Matt; all they needed was 4 different cloud puffs into another 2048x2048 so that it would rotate the puffs in Unity.

Soon after that was finished, I created the 2D VFX animation for the cloud poof that happens when you make hard contact with the ground cloud in-game. I created a quick animation in the workshop of a cloud puff disappearing outward to show the lead designer, Matt, if this is what he had imagined for the cloud puff.

Thankfully, he did like my rough draft, so I added 2 more layers of animation and shaded it. Exported into individual layers so Unity can do all the animation magic. This one was fun, especially because I love 2D animation, and I was happy I got to create something both Angel and Matt liked!

Lastly, the memory shards of the glass card. This one we spoke over the call and decided that the memory card in Jira was going to be rainbow glass shards that glowed gold. Now I won't lie and say I did forget it specified gold outlining/glow. But once I was in my flow state, I accidentally outlined with a rainbow and inverted the colors that were in the glass. So the glow for the blue part would be orangey/pink, based on the cyan blue color that was created after a Gaussian blur.

I only realized once I sent them to my Producer and she informed me that it did say Gold glow, so I quickly created a gold glow alternative to show what that would look like.

Final Draft

Once my lead designer and producer both agreed on which version was the best, I went ahead and changed the sizing of the other 2 bigger pieces because we wanted to keep the main big shard, the center piece.

That is all to show for my work this sprint. I wish I could have done the sparkles card at the end, but a family emergency happened, and I wasn't able to complete the last VFX card. But overall, I am glad with the work I created this sprint and hope my team enjoys it as well. Thank you very much for reading through! I'll catch you next sprint.