Death Be Thy Name - Week 9 Development Blog

Based on the looming deadline day which is two weeks from this point and the fact that no progress had been made for the games itch.io page I decided to take it upon myself for this week to begin to think about the design aspect of the page. Based on the fact that the game targets the PSX aesthetic I decided that it would be important to represent this throughout the itch page. I felt that by basing the page around PSX box art it would be unique and something that had not been done before (upon reflection and research on Itch.io I found that there is a significant amount of games that follow this formulae. However all of them are mostly horror games.) Knowing that the use of PlayStation in the project would open grounds for copyright disputes although at indie level I took it upon my self to create a unique title that somewhat parodies PlayStation while staying true to Death Be Thy Name by keeping up the theme of Don Dominik The Dominator.

This concept further evolved when I worked with another designer / artist (George) who created a 3d render which would be placed as the main focus for the games box art which would replicate the likes of tomb raider by having a relatively high poly model on the box art while the game is in reality low poly. Following the implementation of the 3d render I added further detail with explosions fire and a title based off of general feedback in which was all agreed upon throughout the group.

Overall I am happy with the result as I feel like it matches the tone and theme of the game however there are some aspect that I feel should be improved upon depending on remaining time. For example I feel that improvement could be made in regards to the font of the title but as the general consensus of the group is that it is funny to include I would imagine it is relatively low priority. Furthermore, I also feel that the head of the skeleton should be changed (which there are plans to do) as we are aiming for a high poly cover which cannot be achieved by using the pre existing player model in which I created.

Following the completion of the box art I moved on to beginning to design the itch page aesthetically Based on the fact that we are relatively limited in regards to how we can format the page without permission to hard code with CSS it mean that the group needs to be smart in regards to how we display information while staying relative to the theme in which we are trying to portray. my only significant contribution to the itch.io page as a whole currently is changing the banners on each side of the page to images of and explosion. I chose to do this as it felt like it best suited the tone in which we are going for and also was liked by a lot of members of the group. And finally I changed the font of the title of the game after discovering that it was in fact preferred to the prior version.

Upon reflection of this week I am very happy with my contribution as although I did not stick to the task that I set myself in the week prior of creating more environmental assets I feel my contribution was more important to the overall project as we need a nice looking itch page in order to attract more people and subsequently achieve more downloads of the game. As a target for next week I feel that I should continue working on the itch page and further optimize the design of it as there are still areas for improvement such as; Headers for each section, improver title, in game images and overall more content to display the product.