This week I worked on some of the assets for the space background, as well as the asteroids. I decided to focus on these assets first because I am still working on the core gameplay loop of avoiding asteroids in space. Adding these assets now allows me to see how the primary gameplay will look, and then I can use that, as well as knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, to inform the aesthetic for the rest of the game.
I created these assets in Procreate. I used a very simple design when creating these assets, only going for a single colour and then a darker variant of that colour for the shadows. I went for this style, as discussed in the visual style document, so that the background elements do not distract the player; it ensures that the focus is on the rocket itself, with the background assets being there to complement the other elements. The exception to this is the asteroids, which have another two colours for the flame, however these are important to the gameplay, so they must stand out more than other the assets.
Each of the assets have been drawn on the same size square, so they can easily be dropped into Unity and maintain their size differences. The assets can be seen below.
So far I have imported the assets for the asteroids into the Unity project, as you can see below. However, in playtesting so far, I have used circles to represent the asteroids, whereas these asteroids are more rectangular and therefore wider. This made initial playtesting harder, as they are more difficult to avoid, however it became easier when I reduced their size to be smaller than the circles were.
The other issue with the asteroid assets is that they look very static and make the game feel cheap. This could be because other assets have not yet been added, however, I feel that it is more likely the flame making the asset stand out too much. This would be fine if there was only one or two asteroids on the screen, but there is usually up to seven. As the assets already stand out too much, it becomes painfully obvious that duplicates are being overused.
The best solution to this would be to create a series of unique asteroids, each with animated flames to stop them from looking static, but I do not have the time to do this. Instead, I plan to simplify the asteroids by removing the flame, which will also help with balancing as they will be less rectangular. I will also change the colour scheme so that they are grey; this will fit nicely with the other foreground elements, such as the rocket and even the UI, to form a more consistent aesthetic.