Hey everyone, Chris here! Weird times, huh? I’m technically back in the saddle working for Wraith on my 3rd (and final) internship before I graduate next spring, this time doing everything remotely from home. That being said, I figured I’d take a minute to talk a little bit more about my design processes from last semester, by focusing on, drumroll please……
THE OBSCURE POWERUP!
Out of all the powerup blocks I redesigned, this one by FAR went through the most iterations. (AKA. Get ready for a TON of images) So to begin with, let’s take a look at what it looked like before the redesign:
Hmmm… it’s not horrible, but it doesn’t exactly scream “Obscure”. For those who might not have played the game, Obscure hides how many resources the other players have left, in the hopes that they underestimate how close they are to losing. While this definitely gets the “hiding” part of that across, it’s not all that well designed in general. And with that, the prototyping began! It started with a brainstorming sesh talking with Jay, which produced a very rough drawing on a Boogie Board (we use them a lot at the studio since we’re paperless) that looked something like this (I looked for like 4 hours and couldn’t find the original photo, oops):
With this sketch in mind, let’s see if we can translate that into an actual block:
Cool! It’s a great start, albeit a little plain… let’s spice it up with some variations on this idea. We can try stuff like adding eyelashes, messing with line weight, adding some cool curves, stuff like that; just go absolutely BUCKWILD:
Most of these could probably work, but let’s take the idea a bit further. The split-horizontally look is alright, but how would just a plain eye with an X in it, I wonder?
Not too bad, but it feels a little dense. Let’s fatten it up a little, make it feel a little more icon-like, and call it a day:
Much better! At this point, I posted what I had in the company discord and waited for feedback. Steve had the idea of splitting it diagonally between an open eye and a closed eye, so with a quick phone sketch from him in hand, I made this:
And so, with all these ideas in hand, we put it up to a company-wide old-fashioned democratic vote between Steve’s design, my original split-top design, and the plain X-pupil design, with the X-pupil ultimately winning out, and becoming the new design for the Obscure powerup!
With that being said, I believe that more or less wraps up this blog post! I’ll most likely be writing more of these over the course of the semester about any number of things. I’m thrilled to be back and working for Wraith, and I look forward to getting fully back to work, but for now, thanks for reading, stay healthy, wash your hands and see you next time!
~Chris Q.