Hello Friends,

March was a fun, busy month for the team. Survival Master was featured at the 3DVIA Virtools booth during the GDC 2010, playtesting continued with our prototype builds of KSBs 1, 2, and 3, and the Development team had a face-to-face meeting to work on polishing the story and GUI design.

I would first like to point you in the direction of our Blog (http://survivalmaster.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/qa-with-ty-hegner-senior-environment-artist/) to read the fantastic Q&A session I had with our Senior Environment Artist, Ty Hegner. He talks about his role in the development of Survival Master, his general workflow, and a bit of his background that led him to work on this project. Here's a small excerpt from the interview:

Q) What's your favorite thing that you've made so far?
A) That's a hard question. I think I get new favorites all the time. Usually, whatever I am working on becomes my favorite simply because of the challenge of figuring out how to make the object. The challenge is making it functional but keep the poly count low and design appealing. For example, I recently made a sheet of cracked ice that is designed to break into shards. Nothing too exciting in the texture department but the puzzle of making it look and function right was fun for me. Other than that, if I had to pick, I made a film projector that I thought was cool, it had a neat texture and was fun to design.

It's a great read, so please check it out!

Aside from the interview, I've been working on some functional art for the User Interface of Survival Master. As we playtested the game, we got some excellent feedback that suggested we implement some User Interface improvements now so that it is easier for the player to access key information during the prototype playtesting.

With this in mind, I tackled the task of designing unique icons for four functions: the Help screen, the Superphone (previously the PDA), the Camera Sequence Toggle, and the Minimap Toggle. After sketching and getting concepts approved, I took my drawings into 3DS Max and created 3D representations.

In order to save time and get icons mocked up as quickly as possible, I got a little creative and found some free dingbats fonts that closely resembled my sketches. I used the appropriate characters to type directly into 3DS Max and then simplified and extruded the shapes to make the icons. In a more final release of Survival Master I would go in and create the icons from scratch, but for the purposes of a prototype build I felt it was an acceptable compromise.

After creating the 3D versions, I then rendered each one at the same camera angle and exported the 2D images (with alpha masks) to Photoshop. There, I added shadows and adjusted color and saturation, and saved each image as the appropriate image type.

I had a fun time with the project, and hope that the next playtest will be much easier for the player to navigate with these GUI icons to guide them.

Thanks for your support,
Cecilia Mason
Art Director - Survival Master