Creating graphics for a Silverlight game
The concept
As a way of learning a little more about Microsoft's Expression suite and Silverlight, myself and a developer friend decided to create a very simple game. I pretty quickly decided on a Space Invaders approach where a character shoots at an army of attacking invading characters. It meant we didn't have to spend time thinking too much on the gameplay concept and could quite quickly learn the techniques to create something playable.
Having decided on the kind of game we wished to make, I started to think of the characters. We quite quickly came up with an environmental theme. Ideally it would be nice to build something educational, but for the simplicity of our chosen game genre, a basic message to raise awareness was as much as we could hope to achieve at this stage. We came up with a polar bear as the main character who would battle off polutants to try and slow down the melting of the ice flows. The idea was that the ice was melting at a steady rate, but you could slow it by destroying the causes.
Firstly I sketched and doodled some ideas for characters, considering different bear shapes based on stuffed toys. I also considered the enemy characters and settled for a car, a toilet representing waste, a light bulb, an aerosole can and an aeroplane.
