CURRENT ENIGMA

Our first group project of the university course was to design and create a game. As a designer, it was my role to create the designs surrounding the game, and not the mechanics themselves. Our group came up with the idea current enigma, which was a futuristic game where you play as a robin-hood like character. The aim is to steal power from the rich to give to the poor, by killing robots and completing puzzles.

My first task was to create the logo for the game. My idea was to utilise the themes of the game to create the logo, by making an electric type of logo for the ‘current’ part, and a puzzle type logo for the ‘enigma’ part. First off I chose fonts that I think reflected these themes and ensured the spacing between the letters and lines was adequate. The next step was to customise the I in enigma, so that the logo was not too uniform. I chose to put a box around it and added numbers in two corners to give it more of a puzzle look. For the ‘current’ part of the logo, I chose a blue colour with a lightning bolt with a different colour going through the font.

My next task was to create the main menu for the game. To do this, I used the 3D software Blender to produce the background of the main menu for added realism. I created my own circuit texture using shader nodes in the editor, which utilised 2 Voronoi textures mixed together with a wave texture and math nodes. I then created a simple metal plate, and screws to go in each corner that I modelled with a Boolean and symmetry modifier. The main menu text was then placed over this, which added depth and made the main menu more interesting than a 2d image.

A task I took on to help the group out was creating small 3d assets for the game that could be used within the scene. This was so that the rest of the group could focus on more important work, and I could contribute toward populating the scene with assets. For this I created crates, a table and a control panel that could be used to interact with one of the puzzles for the game. One noteworthy part of creating these assets was the use of curves in blender, which I used to create the wiring for the inside of the control panel.

Finally, I created a mockup box art for what a physical copy of the game could look like. This box was created in blender, and utilised a mapped UV so that the design of the box art was positioned correctly. The design itself used the circuit texture from before, the logo, images from the game, and some placeholder text. The box itself is quite simple as it was only a mockup, but if the game actually got a physical copy the box would be more unique and be more high quality.