Sprint 4 Blog



Hello all! I'm Angie Marquez, and I am the 2d Artist for the game KickBack. This sprint had a slow start, but we picked up the pace this week after the kickoff on Thursday. This sprint, it was mostly UI elements that were needed and a few VFX things. 



Starting it off, I was prompted on my card to create a "UI Memory Shards" so that our player feels secure in how many shards they collect in-game. I had to get inspiration from the shards that will float in-game, just using the main shard as the iconic piece of the shards. This is a 512x512 PNG for now; if any issues occur in-game with sizing or quality, I will have to export as SVG.

After submitting that, I began working on my next card for the in-game speed boost. This one was tricky; I made about 4 versions, but my lead designer decided on this one. For this arrow, it had to be exported as an SVG. I create most of my art in Procreate and export to Photoshop in case I need to touch up, so that the layers are rasterized. But for SVG Illustrator is the only option now, so I have to import my PNG to Illustrator and image trace, and fix the shaping and gradient.

 The white arrows were getting in the way of smooth gradients. So I headed to Procreate (thank goodness I work in layers) and exported each layer as one, and made each of the shapes their own vector shapes. Grouped them together in another layer and exported them as a whole single asset.


The next card was for a simple VFX to display when a bullet is shot. I wasn't sure if just a line or a more wavy/fiery look was needed. Once I turned this in, I was told to make it a little more fire-like, to which I had no issue fixing, and sent 2 versions of bullet fires. Alas, they had agreed on the first line made since it is going to be animated to disappear and be a little unnoticeable in-game!


The 3 UI bullet cards, all being exported as SVG images for no distortion when assembling UI.
This was a tedious time, especially with the Mini-Gun Bullet for some odd reason. Like I mentioned before, I have to turn my artworks into Vector lines/shapes so they can be SVG.
Sniper Bullet

Fixing every single vector line that was out of whack because of raster pixel readings! Very, very tedious and hard to make even, but after an average of 1-2 hours, the edges are simpler and look even better than the original! Can't wait to see that in-game.

Shotgun Bullet

MiniGun Bullet

This bullet has more reflection since minigun bullets are very shiny and reflective. So the vectors were a terror to fix. All done in 2 hours though! It was the most tedious one.

For the last card is my Jira board, I took on the challenge of creating a skybox for the game. 


This took a while due to GPU processing. This is six 2048x2048 canvases put together in each of its respective folders/layers. Then I grouped it as a whole and created one single masking layer for the whole project. Used a series of cloud, fog, and shine brushes in Photoshop.

That is all for this sprint! I had a great time and loved seeing the progress on not only my own work but of my teammates who continue to bring my 2d art to life! Thank you for reading, and see you next sprint.




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