Placing Picasso

Placing Picasso is a game aimed towards all audiences revolving around restoring destroyed cubism paintings, it is a slow and relaxing puzzle game. The player are task with reassembling the panting pieces back together with the aid of an in-game character, Mr. Moustache, and a hint panel. This game was made for the Lab 2 subject at JMC Academy.

User Interface

My responsibility in this project was as the UI designer and character animator. One of my biggest task was to create a main menu scene that reflects the vibe and feel of the game as a whole. I focused on the user experience to create a feel for the game, giving the player an expectation of how the game will feel. 

User Experience

While designing the main title, I did not want to create a scene that are just a bunch of panels and button. As a team we decided on making the main menu feels like an actual art gallery.

Another design decision was to make the interaction with the menu using camera movement instead of making a panel appear or directly load to another scene. I wanted the different things a player could do to be grounded within the room itself, to create a sense of place. Some background music and noise, such as echoing footsteps, help create a relaxing and easy going vibe. The speed of the camera is also deliberately a bit slow to not rush the player in, instead taking its time to give a sense of pace reflecting to the actual gameplay pacing.

UI Assets

The UI assets were all made in Illustrator to maintain a crisp edge using vectors. Another trick was making them white, allowing me to change the colors as needed to maintain visibility and visual cohesion, as at the time of making and implementing them, the background walls and frames were not yet made nor designed.

Character Animation & Assets

The assets for the character were made modularly, allowing me to animate the character in Unity with great flexibility. This is done for several reasons, the first one is that we did not know at the beginning of the project, how many expression we need. Another reason was, we only have one artist in our team, and while all 3 members can draw and do art, we want a certain consistency with the visual elements of the game. So instead of having the artist draw all the animations, instead I created the expression sheets, the assets variations, such as the eyes and moustaches, created the linework, and then send those to the artist to render them in a style that is consistent with the rest of the game. This allows me to create as much as animation we needed as the project progressed, which comes in handy later on as we ended up needing more animations and expression than we thought we would, mostly due to the fine-tuning of the feedback mechanic for gameplay purposes.