This week my main focus was on drawing what we’ve been calling the “end credit portraits” for the game.

After the player completes the third puzzle, a door will open that the player is forced through, where they find a room with a wall of faces. It was our idea for this to be a second sort of credits screen that people can interact with, where our contributions are displayed by drawn pictures of us as the developers.

This idea was inspired by some other games and student projects I’ve seen where the developers ended up making their credits interactive as a way to draw more attention to them and make them more entertaining to engage with. I also think that, since the game only has one ending, the ending needs to be satisfying and engaging so the player doesn’t feel like they’ve wasted their time.

A little less than 3 hours was spent on these, with the remaining 12 hours of the week being spent drawing posters for the arcade and fixing up more environment textures.

The posters I ended up drawing for the arcade interior were spoofs of classic 80s movies with the main NPC (Bezel) in place of the characters displayed in the original art.

These were a fun challenge to do, especially from the perspective of trying to balance finished product with time-spent-painting. Each of these ended up taking about 45 minutes and having a semi-rendered final product. Most of what I did was just using the lasso tool to block out shapes, and then going over it with a couple layers of texture brushes to give it more of a rendered effect.

The effort of doing all this seemed a little over the top to me at first, but I think the personal touch and immersion into the world is worth it. It also works to encourage the player to explore the environment if they’re looking to see what other posters and Easter eggs they can find.