Catherine Goncalves Work

Catherine Goncalves


High school Detective Game

Role:

My role in the group was character designer and I was tasked with creating the main character of the game.

Mood board:

The main character of the game is a teenage male, in high school, who wants to be a detective. With this in mind I looked at images of detectives and what they wore. I also looked at what style I should have the character in.

It was decided to go with a comic/cartoon art style with the character.

Initial Designs:

These are the first designs I came up for Carlos (the main character).

The team liked both outfits, which lead us to the idea of possible having an option of customising the character. This was later scrapped as there wouldn't have been time to do it.

I also drew up a quick sketch of what the bully (a character that we plan to appear further into the game) could look like.

Further development:

It was decided that we would go with the trench coat outfit as this was a more iconic look of a detective. From the initial design I made a front, back and side drawing of the outfit so we had the complete idea of how it would look on the character.

I also drew up different hairstyles that the character could have.

After a vote from the team (and other classmates), option 4 was the winner (by a landslide!)

Final Design:

This is the final image of Carlos.

Coding the Narrative:

After finishing the main character design, I was tasked with coding the narrative between Carlos and Midnight (the cat).

Coding the narrative was not easy. It took a long time just to even find a tutorial on how to do it, and even then I had to redo it twice as the code either didn’t work, or I found an easier one. But in the end, the narrative was done and I even got it to load into the next scene after all the narrative was done!

Conclusion:

In the end, I am happy with the end result. We've got a fully working game and it looks good! Though, the process to get there wasn't easy. While everyone had no problems with the ideas and opinions given towards the game, working well together to agree on what should and shouldn't been in the game, the main problem the group had was organisation. With a team of five people it was hard to keep track of who had what which slowed the work process down at times, but we made it in the end!