Description

As the games design theme has been finalised any ability pickups need to fit the players design, alongside still being informative and fulfilling their purpose as understandable designs. Additionally, as the animations for abilities had yet to be created, thought had to go into what the player would look like during abilities activity and whether the design correctly represented that. For the colour scheme all abilities centred around a light blue to ensure the connection to the ability cooldown bar and therefore further reinforce that these images will represent the abilities the player has.

The most challenging aspect came with designing images to represent player states as things such as the player flashing between colours when invincible would not be easy to represent in a single image. Therefore, though exploration was done into these kinds of representations, the designs leaned heavily into representing the player within the image so that users could more easily identify the art as representing the player in action/doing something.

Invincibility

For invincibility the design had to represent that the player could not get hurt for a period of time after ability activation. Through research the most common ways to represent this are a bubble surrounding the player and an added level of transparency/lightness to the player (either a colour reskin, of simple transparency) which switches between their regular sprite and itself.

Another way of representing this would be skinning the player to look like they were made of metal/stone (e.g. Super Mario) however, not only would this be hard to represent in such a low pixel style, but it would likely also imply to the player that other effects such as slowness are being applied alongside the invincibility, which is not the intention.

References

For bubble defence this is implemented in both Super Smash Brothers and Shovel knight most notably. Both are popular games were bubbles are used to represent 'walls' were attacks cannot be done through them. Most inspiration was taken from the shovel knight bubbles which had a closer art style to that of this games, with using simplistic pixel art.

Possible Designs

When examining more references to design, invincibility shown by a colour shift tends to be more related to the player either being hurt or the player having other functionality such as pushing enemies out of the way (e.g. Mario kart). Additionally, trying to represent this in a single frame was not successful and therefore the flashing idea was not explored further.

After deciding on using a bubble to show invincibility the two options were considered. The more detailed version more explicitly looked like a barrier, rather than the secondary version which was more of a direct bubble. As bubbles can be seen as more childish or soft it was decided to use the force field version which had a stronger appearance, relating well to complete invincibility. Additionally with having more embellishments it would be more visible during the game if it was later incorporated as an invincibility animation.

Long Dash

For the long dash, designing a selection image was much harder as it very much relied on displaying the players motion and with such a stylised, low pixel character it is hard to change their body position into a lean as is standard. So I used mostly embellishments and tried to imply movement to the left moving character design already produced by jing.

In this I fell back on the common representations of either an afterimage behind the player or a vague explosive pattern behind the character to show either the player is moving/that force is coming from that direction. Alongside these I also used an alternate version of the afterimage by having smears depict fast movement of the player.

References

For references of these standards you can look at path of exile and hollow knight, both shown below. One of these is more pixel oriented game while the other utilises 3D models for the art.

Possible Designs

After producing the design set the decision was based on what design most explicitly conveyed movement as the designs all had similar overall profiles and ideas. This removed the explosion design which wasn't explicit enough without strong alterations to the player (which through experimenting either warped the player too much to be used as a static pickup or barely registered as a difference), leaving the afterimages. Within these the regular afterimage was used as it was the more recognisable design and had very few other common interpretations (as low transparency images are always used to represent where a character used to be).