Making the Gym-Sign minigame -and more-

Hey hello again!

So this week I’ve been wrestling with the gameplay sequence  of he wrestlers story :)

So I imagined that at some point in this story,  Keen would clean out the Storage Room, and turn it into a Fitness Room. At first I wanted to do all this at one moment in the game, but that didn’t feel right in terms of pacing.

So I split this up in two seperate actions. First you turn the room into a basic gym, and later on you will add some fitness equipment to it.  But by splitting this up, I suddenly had to add a new challenge to the story...which wasn't easy!  

Mini game: Changing the Sign

But when I was trying to come up with a challenge for this  room...I suddenly remembered those classic slide-puzzles. And I figured it should be possible to make a puzzle involving the neon-sign I drew for this room. You know, the one saying ‘Sweat Fitness Gym’.

Now since we are in a storage room full of junk, why not place an old neon-sign there I thought? Like something that had the letters of the gym sign, but then  scrabled. So that way the puzzle would be to turn one sign in the other.

But to make this work, I first needed to find an anagram for ‘Sweat Fitness Gym’.

So I tried a few things, and came up with results like ‘Few giant systems,  Wings system fate, My fastest  swine’. But by far the best anagram was… ‘Mateys Swing Fest’, Which was just  perfect !

And so I made a sign from that, and hid it in the storage room, like you can see here.

Now the final step was of course  to make the puzzle screen. So looking at the words I had, it seemed best to make a 3x7 grid, where you can slide the letters around to make a new sign.

*mateys      *SWAET*

*swing*       fitness

*fest**         **GYM**

Now, making anagrams is pretty tricky, so I decided to color the letters as well to make it easier. And this is what I have so far for that  (just a sketch now):

Now the goal here is to make the 3 words; but the order is not  important, and neither is where you place the stars (meant to fill the blanks).

Well and that’s it!  Now considering this logo was first just decorative….I was really happy with how well this puzzle came together! :)

More art

Now  besides making this puzzle I also made some more art this week, including the following two images.

This is the spaceship from the wrestlers:

Through it’s design I wanted to reflect that it’s owner was a wrestler; which in my mind should result in a flashy, bulky ship. Now my initial idea (1) was to make it hovercraft-like ship, which then it beame more of a jetski-like ship (2), and finally I turned it into a monstertruck-like spaceship (3).

And I also made a screen, showing a closeup of a computer on the bridge:

Here the wrestlers will first appear after the Green Beetle picked up their distress call. The screen is vague on purpose, so we keep something to look foreward too :) 

Well, I  hope you like it all!

All the best!

Robin