Developers Log. Development Date 151. Box Art

Up until now, we have had only one box art. The one on the left was the only one we had until I started making some waves about problems with the design. The one on the right contains the fixes.

The first one had shurikens to add a ninja feel, but we don't have shurikens in the game, so they had to go. Additionally, for whatever reason, half of the title was missing. Around the time that I made mention that these item should be changed, I sat down and designed a rough idea of how I thought we could improve the box art.

The first phase of designing our game during fall semester was to come up with a slogan that would be the driving backbone of our game. No matter what decision we made, it should always go back to that slogan, to see if it fit. Our slogan: Unleash your inner ninja. I feel that this current poster is less "Unleash your inner ninja" and more "Unleash your inner happy place."

I really wanted to capture our slogan, so I tried a few poses, the first being an avatar with a Katana in his hand, sort of following the cliche pose of today's triple A titles. However, after taking a somewhat different approach I fell in love with the three point landing pose. It's just so hardcore. Now, I'm no artist, so this was never intended to be amazing, but hopefully capture the general idea I was going for.

There are obvious problems here, poor quality on the avatar, the essence scarf around the avatar doesn't read well, and looks more like smoke than an attached scarf, and the title has several problems. The background is also too busy, but it was the best of the few screenshots I had on hand at the time of creation. The other leads didn't seem to impressed, as they only got hung up on the flaws, and didn't seem to catch the idea I was trying to create. They wrote it off as a "nice try" from a programmer. Well, I happen to believe in myself, so I set out to get some help from some of my friends who are artists to make the idea actually look good. I actually framed a shot (rather than using an existing screen shot,) was able to get a better picture of the avatar, had a Photoshop genius help me with the scarf, and had lots of input on title and the color pallet. This is the final result.

I still hope to get a better quality picture of the avatar, and am working on some code to extract a high def picture from the xbox. I hope to achieve this by writing the bytes of the current frame to console while debugging on the xbox, then re-creating the image in a separate program. Given our current hardware, we have no real way of getting a high def picture off of the xbox, so this is our last viable option without spending money. However, despite the small pixelation, I am very pleased with the result. The colors really pop and the framing fits so well. It really invites the viewer to unleash their inner ninja!