About the Project

Cheese on the High Seas was a semester-long group project. I was the 2D Art and UX Lead. The result was a 90-120 second museum experience that was displayed at the Peoria Riverfront Museum’s exhibition of Bradley University Interactive Media student work.

The game is a two-player game where two pirate mice on a small ship navigate around and shoot obstacles set by cats.

One player:

• Navigates around obstacles
• Collects cheese
• Uses a wheel controller

The other:

• Destroys/ stuns obstacles
• Uses a light gun

Art Responsibilities

My art responsibilities included creating branding assets such as logos, banners, and web assets; in-game background elements like floor tiles and their out-of-bounds counterparts; and in-game sprites like cat obstacles and cheese collectables. All of the final 2D art was hand-drawn.

I wanted the game to resemble children’s storybooks or older cartoons. The characters I gave a cel-shaded appearance. The backgrounds and promotional art I gave an airbrushed, painterly look.

Game Layout

One of my first tasks was to design a preliminary layout for an alpha test. I focused on design principles over the layout of obstacles itself, knowing it would change during development.

1. Starting off with an easier section to get the users acquainted with the controls and mechanics.
2. A system of risk and reward where the highest reward comes from collaboration.
   1. Places where the cheese collectables are behind a breakable obstacle mean both players must work together to destroy the obstacle and maneuver to collect the cheese.
3. Reward sections that have no obstacles and lots of cheese collectables allow the players to relax for a moment.

Because the players will always be moving along a track at a constant speed, I broke down the layout by time, rather than distance.

Alpha Layout

Background Elements

The pattern was inspired by ceramic tiles and made to resemble the ocean.

I wanted them to appear airbrushed to match the cel-shaded appearance of the characters.

To signify where the driver could go, I recolored the pattern based on a dark, stormy ocean.

Floor Textures

User Feedback

I created many effects to communicate to the players when they have collided with or shot an obstacle.

The effects would appear small on the screen, so I added the onomatopoeia to help convey meaning to players.

The “Boom” effect triggers when hitting a naval mine, “Splash” when shooting a cat, “Snap” when triggering a mousetrap, and “Crack” when running into a bottle.

Feedback Effects

Interface

The interface needed to communicate

• Score of the players
• Progress of the players
• Theme of the game

As I developed the UI, I refined the colors and design to make it less obtrusive during gameplay. This meant shortening the design and reducing the red, since red is used in-game to indicate a shootable enemy.

Crosshair

Designing the crosshair meant striking the right balance between visibilty and not being distracting.

UI Iteration

Crosshair Iteration

Playtesting

I was in charge of creating the playtesting form for our team when it came time to conduct the tests. We wanted to focus on the feel of the gameplay, primarily, whether it felt fair to the players.

The first question allowed us to categorize the results of the testing. Then we could see if either the gunner or driver was more often feeling dissatisfied with the game.

The next questions dealt with the balance and engagement of the players. I wanted to see if either group felt like they were doing significantly more work than the other.

While the drivers more often reported feeling like they were doing more, the average engagement of both groups had no significant difference.

The rest of the main questions looked at the obstacles, how difficult they were, and if the density of obstacles felt fair.

The question asking the players to mark any obstacles that were much too easy or much too difficult helped us refine the game.

Along with the written feedback, we knew that the communication about the functionality of some of the obstacles needed to be clearer, in particular, the mug and yarn obstacles needed to more obviously telegraph what shooting them was doing and how long that effect lasted.

Playtesting Questions

Playtesting Results

Game Screens

These screens were very fun to create because they don’t have much of a purpose outside of being fun thematic elements.

While I was creating the title screen, I was struggling to come up with how to display my logo, then it occurred to me that we had yet to include any kind of treasure map in any of the game material.

We decided that for simplicity’s sake, the title screen would only appear for a few seconds before the game automatically began.

The win screen also incorporated another pirate-y element yet to appear, a treasure chest. I love how the game is framed between starting on a treasure map and ending with a treasure chest.

Title Screen

Win Screen

Promotional Material

Creating the promotional materials is how I landed on the style I did for the game. When creating the web banner, the first element I made in the finalized style, I was thinking about the promotional art created for 2D animated films, primarily of the ’90s. So, I worked with the airbrush tool and tried to create a fun, dramatic, and most importantly, colorful style.

The main logo was created immediately after the web banner, based on a much older concept logo I created when we were pitching the project.

The main focus of my promotional art for the game was personality. This even took precedence over team names in the standup banner (seen in the gallery). The way I see it, people will never remember any of the information conveyed in these pieces. The way to stand out at an event like this is to make people remember your personality.

Web Banner

Logo Iteration

Sprites

I decided to style the moving game elements after cell-shaded cartoon characters for two reasons: For one, it keeps in theme with the style of the rest of the game, and for two, it allows them to be more easily animated.

In the game, some obstacles, the cats, are not permanently stopped by shooting them with the water cannon.

I proposed the draining question mark as a solution to that. I liked it because it fit the theme while conveying everything it needed to.

For the cat obstacle sprites, it needed to be obvious when they were active and when they had been disabled.

To do this, I made sure that in their active form, their eyes were very visible and highly contrasted, and when hit, wet fur would completely cover their eyes.

They also both lose the red from their designs. For the cat balancing on the yarn ball, its animation is stopped, and for the cat waiting to pounce on the side, its claws retract when hit (seen in the gallery)

Because the mice’s sprites are so small on the screen, I kept them simplistic to avoid too much visual clutter.

Animated Sprites

Static Sprites

Onboarding

In order to help my teammates who would be explaining the game to players at the museum, I created a set of flyers that illustrate each of the obstacles.

For the obstacles that can be shot with the light gun, I included red targets on the flyers.

Since these would exist outside of the game, I wanted them to be in a different style while still making sense in-universe. That’s why I based them on pirate wanted posters.

Obstacle Flyers

Gallery