I know the phrase "The most wonderful time of the year" is often thought of to refer to Christmas, but for me that ranking goes to Autumn. Changing leaves, crisp night air, apple cider, Friday night football games, corn mazes, spooky movies, pumpkin everything...how many of you agree?
This first session at Bitmask games, students are creating games that are somehow related to Halloween. Currently, we're all moving together learning the basics of the software in order to make a fun sandbox for ourselves to play in. One hour a week is spent working on fleshing out mechanics of our arcade style platformer, while the other hour is spent on creative concepts.
This week, we focused on learning how to iterate artwork. It's no small feat to create graphics for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. You're limited to three colors and an absurdly limiting number of pixels. Yet we all have fond memories of iconic characters and art from that era, right? Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man. So how do you even begin to make something evocative?
Well, we learned about a formative rule of creative composition: creating an iconic silhouette. Everyone took their own concept and used basic shapes to block out something unique. And then, we began a process of iteration, adding details, altering the shape pixel by pixel, and combining the best of the variations to arrive at a final product. You can see some early process work in the included images. They're quickly learning the importance and power of the placement of a single dot.
It will be very exciting to see these projects gradually come to life, and to see just how diverse the games will be despite being based on the same initial building blocks!
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