wackyracesmaxleighton - Tumblr blog

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is both the digital version of the card featuring Starlene and a board space that I created for a board game. Since I had already gotten a rough mock-up created already of my card, I simply took a photo of my physical mock-up and uploaded it onto Illustrator, where I traced over it with coloured lines and changed a few parts of the overall look, mainly the colours of the triangles around Starlene and the text, which is now all gold in a suitable futuristic font, as well as changing the rules from going back 5 steps to 10, just because I want it to be even more infuriating for those who get it. Secondly, I designed my space for the actual board, which features a very minimal interpretation of what will happen if my card is pulled in the form of a logo, with triangles of blue and pink from the card as well as purple, gold and light blue from Starlene’s colour scheme. Overall I’m very happy with how the designs turned out, they perfectly capture the overall vibe that Starlene and her whole space theme gives off, alien yet very interesting with the colour choices and shapes.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

These are 2 examples of creative packaging that can be found on different products and merchandise, a KFC Pop! Colonel Sanders T-Shirt from the toy company Funko, and a O-No Sushi vinyl figure pack from Dead Zebra. The one thing I find unique about these things, aside from the actual contents themselves, are the packaging the products come in. The KFC T-Shirt and Funko Pop come packaged inside of a box styled to be like a KFC sharing bucket, complete with the red and white stripes, which is very appropriate considering the product’s theme. The O-No Sushi appropriately comes packaged inside of a tray of sushi, with a large window at the top to give customers a sight of the contents, and due to the actual vinyl figure inside taking the appearance of different types of sushi and seafood, alongside a label at the top that perfectly captures a brand of Japanese sushi. I love it when products do this, it makes the experience of buying a product that one more bit enjoyable due to the creative packaging that captures the feel of the actual product.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is a small handful of fonts found from a brief dive into the website DaFont, a webpage where you can download thousands of different fonts of all shapes and sizes to apply onto any work you’re doing that requires typefaces. The 5 I have chosen came from the Sci-Fi, Chinese / Jpn, Retro, and Groovy categories. The first one, Game of Squids, is very on the nose for what it is meant to be, it is a recreation of the font used for the Netflix series Squid Game, so people can make custom logos in the same style. Origin Tech is a very generic yet very intriguing to the eye, mainly with how the lines go across the letters to give it a much more futuristic appearance, the sharp and oddly shaped edges are nice too. Yozakura is exactly what you’d expect for a samurai / ninja sort of font, the harsh edges and the apparent paint like texture. Demode and Prisma are both in the same sort of stylistic, classic font type, with Demode having a three dimensional apperance using the negative space to take the form of the front of the shape, and Prisma using multiple lines to make up the main shape of the letter, in the case of the I and S, it looks like several of the letter are being made to make the big one. This is just a small handful of fonts though, there are thousands of unique and different fonts to choose, to appeal to all styles and themes.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

The aim of the game.

In my racing game, created using the Unreal Engine, the main purpose is to simply clear 3 laps around the racetrack in the fastest possible time, whilst also maintaining balance and not falling off the track as many times as possible. The challenge is definitely easy enough, but when it comes down to how quickly you can clear 3 laps and avoiding the pitfalls, it definitely ramps up the difficulty, considering the default controls set in the Sudan.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is the fourth and final day of process of creating a clay model of my Wacky Races character Starlene Spacewheeler, made using Super Sculpey. Having the basic model done the previous week, it was finally time to paint it and add the finishing touches, and before I did that I had to bake the model, so I put it in the oven for around 8 minutes to start with, but then I had to put it in for an extra 2 minutes as it wasn’t quite ready. After that it was finally time to paint, the process of creation that I wasn’t looking forward to in the slightest, if anything I was terrified. After a lot of trial and error mixing paints with a friend to try and get correct colours, until we were given small tubes that had just the exact purple colour we were looking for. After that it was relatively smooth sailing, painting all over the model with a selection of purples, greens, and yellow, and a black for the wooden base that she sits on, and after a long painting process, the model was finally complete, 4 days of work in 4 weeks. In the end, even if some of the colours aren’t accurate to the original illustration of Starlene, I love the final result, I’m proud of the pose and how well her design worked with the material, even if it might have been a little complicated in some areas, especially the face, which I think turned out amazing, her cute little wink and cartoony style really works in her favour. The only thing I wish I had done better is if I had made the hair bigger and more round, like the original drawing, instead of it being flatter on the model, and I wish I had found a way to incorporate her antenna. 

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is a card featuring Starlene that I created for a board game using an empty template I was given. Once I was given the empty template card, which seems to be made out of a thin sort of card or maybe a wood material, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, as a few days beforehand I was brainstorming what I had wanted to do for the action for my board game space, and thus that also meant what I wanted to do for the main action that will occur if the space is landed on. After drawing a logo and writing down the instructions, I drew Starlene looking incredibly smug, as if to purposely anger those who would unfortunately pick up this card. After drawing the card, I left development on making it for the day as I had to finish off my model of Starlene, so I took the card home the same day and applied all the colour to it the next day. I’m very pleased with how it turned out, the colours work nicely, the text is easy to read, and I adore how smug Starlene looks in the finished result.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

These are 3 notable recent games that have been created using the Unreal Engine; Fortnite, Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Yoshi’s Crafted World. Each game is from a different genre, with Fortnite being a shooter, FF7R being an RPG amp Yoshi’s Crafted World being a platformer. I have not played any of these games, but I’m very familiar with them all. Making games with such a large amount of content and incredible details is definitely difficult, and I can’t even begin to imagine how the developers of each of these games even manage to do it.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

Unreal Engine is a software used to create video games developed by Epic Games, first showcased and named after the 1988 video game Unreal, which was also developed by Epic Games. Originally designed for only first person shooters in mind, like with the game it was initially named after, it is now used for a wide variety of different video games, ranging from shooters, platformers, racing games and whatever else a developer wants to create. More recently however, it has also been used for film making, to create unique sets and atmospheres. Personally, I don’t fully understand how to use the software, but I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the full experience with messing around and creating things in it.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is the third day of process of creating a clay model of my Wacky Races character Starlene Spacewheeler, made using Super Sculpey. Knowing I already had most of the model completed, I knew I wouldn't have that much to do, with the exception of the left arm and general TLC to the surface of the model and some extra details. For the left arm I did the exact same process I did for the right, taking a thin bit of tinfoil and posing it how I wished, before coating it in a few layers of Super Sculpy, and then finishing it off by adding a hand and a thumb. After showing the finished model to my teacher, she showed me how to sculpt a proper hand with individual sculpted fingers, so we did that to both hands on the model to make it look better. After that was done, I dedicated the rest of the day to smoothing out surfaces on the model and adding very small details. In the end, I'm really happy with how she turned out, I don't think i could have done anything better with her, and I'm both really excited and absolutely terrified to paint it next week.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is a selection of different victory screens and game over screens from a wide variety of games. From top left to bottom right: Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, Crash Bandicoot, Cuphead, Deltarune Chapter 2, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Fortnite Battle Royale, Among Us, and Super Mario 3D World. With these victory screens, they usually try to make you feel accomplished, usually by showing positive graphics, positive words, and colours that are commonly associated with good, like blue or green, and they usually play happy sounding music or sounds. With game over screens on the other hand, they do the exact opposite, typically featuring the signature phrase of GAME OVER somewhere in the screen, accompanied with graphics like your main character in a state of peril, urging you to try again and win, and usually accommodate darker and meaner colours, most commonly red.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is a custom logo that I created for a fictional parent company to the Meteor Motors brand, a giant brand conglomerate called Echo Enterprises, which is headquarted on Venus and is equivalent in size to that of Nestle or the Walt Disney Company on Earth. At the beginning, I was deciding between two names that I liked, Echo and Epsilon, before I settled on Echo in the end due to it being a nice sounding word. I then experimented with different type faces that I could include for the logo, trying out unusual shapes, generic fancy type, and words only using triangles, which is what I ended up going with, creating a logotype that is deliberately confusing to read yet just enough to be comprehensible. After I got the logotype done, it was time to create the actual logo itself, and I had 2 ideas in mind; something that related to the typeface that used triangles or something that looked planetary and space-esque. After experimenting with different logo designs I finally came up with my final design, a sound wave made from different triangles, making it tie into the name of the conglomerate and also the typeface. Overall I’m quite happy with the design, it looks alien enough and very confusing, which is exactly what I wanted from it.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is the second day of process of creating a clay model of my Wacky Races character Starlene Spacewheeler, made using Super Sculpey. As soon as I got my model pieces I was shown how to create the specific eyes I wanted for the model, using a harder, coloured type of clay. Using black, white, and blue the eye was created, and I think it works really well, but due to not being able to replicate it nearly as well, I made the other eye a wink. With the face mostly done, I could finally start work on the hair, which I had wanted to start on last week, so I started on the round hair that goes all around her head. After that I gave her the visor she wears and all the other details around it like her ear covers. I then finally attached the space buns that I had created on top of her head, and on that note the head was finally finished, much to my delight. After finishing the head, I took another ball of tinfoil and wrapped a thin layer of clay around it to act as the lower torso, which I then attached to the main body and then finally attached to the base, before adding small details to it. With the head and body done, I moved onto making an arm. I made a thin stick of tinfoil and coated it with more clay, giving it a small separate bit at the end to act as a hand with a smaller attachment for a thumb. After altering the body a little to make the shoulders not as broad, I attached the arm on. At this stage in the process of making this model, I’m really surprised and incredibly happy with how good it’s turning out, I cannot wait to fully finish it next week, I’m certain it’s going to look incredible.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is the custom typeface that I created for my fictional motor oil company Meteor Motors, for my Wacky Races project. My initial intent was to create something that was super unique and stylish but also easy to read, so I created this custom logo only with the usage of triangles, giving it a sharp and futuristic look. After the logo was completed, I added some small stars onto the bottom to give it some more detailing. Overall, I'm very pleased with how it turned out, as I was worried I'd make it too incomprehensible to read with how I wanted to do it, but in the end, it was much clearer to read than I had imagined, and for that I'm happy.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

These are coloured, remastered digital versions of the 2 characters I have created for the Wacky Races project so far, Starlene Spacewheeler (the driver, left) and Astra (the mascot of Meteor Motors, right), which I created using both Illustrator and Photoshop. They were both created in my spare time at home after college, as I thought they deserved this sort of clean up and colour treatment due to the fact I don't tend to colour on physical drawings I make on paper. I firstly traced over the original drawings I did from photos I had taken on Tumblr and added some changes to them, like with Starlene having full legs for example. After the linework was completed, I saved them both separately as JPEG files and brought them into Photoshop, where I gave them all the colour, and for Astra respectively, detailing they needed. I'm incredibly proud with how they both turned out, I hold both of their designs close to my heart and I love seeing them flesh out in colour, especially with Astra, as I got to include all the stars and nebula designs around her body.

[wackyracesmaxleighton]

This is a custom title screen I created for my Unreal Engine racing game, which I have decided to give the placeholder title of Astro: Space Race Extravaganza, made entirely using Illustrator. The process was incredibly simple, as I just drew basic purple polygons around to give it a futuristic and modern look, before I then added one of my pixel art renditions of Starlene in the background. After this, I downloaded a font I liked off of DaFont, and I used it to create the games temporary logo. Overall, it's very simple, but sweet in a way, and I really do like it.