finale

No other level in Eduardo went through more changes than the final level, the Seven Samurai level as we referred to it. For one thing it wasn't originally going to be the final level (it was going to be level 7. haha, get it? eh? ehh...). But I just couldn't get the look right until fairly recently. This was the final level of the game and I was basing the design off of my favorite movie, so it needed to be special. Sometime in the future I'll detail the various concepts I worked on but for now I'll try to explain how I came up with the final design.

I wanted to do something very different from what I'd done in previous levels, and I wanted the whole area to have a very active look to it. I was working with a lot of inks and charcoals in my drawing class this past semester, and the work I did during that course gave me the method for creating the art.

(above: scenes from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai)

Making a WiiWare game means having to deal with a small file size, but luckily most of the art I had made for the game up until now had been done with a small file size in mind. And instead of spreading out space I decided to use about half of the art asset space of the game solely for the last level. And because of RAM limitations this level would be split up into four parts, making one extra large final level.

The idea was to draw four big backgrounds and have everything else in the middleground comprised of three images each, animating at a 10th of a second. I drew all of these middleground assets in pen, so every asset made for the final level (the only exceptions are most of the projectiles, the explosions, and Eduardo's sweatband) was done with regular media and scanned in.

Here's an example of one of the houses for the last level:

(click on image for full size)

That's one of three frames, and after cutting it out on my computer and turning it white, it looks like this:











With all of the middleground assets animating like this, that meant that I had to do the same with all of the characters in the game. So every single toaster and all of their enemies (and most of their weapons) would be done in the same fashion, like so:

I also added some texture work to the characters to help them stick out.

All of the backgrounds were done on mylar with a combination of charcoal, water, and various inks. Below is a section from one of the four backgrounds from the final level

(click on image for full size)

And here's a screenshot from the final level of the game. We'll be releasing video soon with some quick shots of the final level, so that will give a better idea of how it looks.

(click on image for full size)

-Daniel