during covid, over at IFgameSH we used to host online gamedev meetups to replace the in-person events. super fun! it was also a joy to welcome folks from outside the region to show projects and join the community.
buuuut...after covid the online meetups slowly faded out, folks wanted to meet in person again, which i thought to be reasonable, but i regretted not being able to have folks from further away joining. so, this year i'm reviving the online meetup, and made this poster to go with it:
"SPIEL&SCHNACK" roughly translates to "play&talk", using words specific to the region of northern germany.
since i want to write about stuff i'm doing (and folks asked about how i made it), here's a quick walkthrough!
concept
i knew the following things:
- incorporate Schleswig-Holstein into the design
- emphasize long-distance connection
- PSX style
- some animated element
process
i started in blender, first modeling landscape, small blob creatures and some related objects. i threw them over into Godot, used some PSX shaders from godotshaders.com and arrived at this:
i simply animated the elements in godot to give them individual movement, making sure everything animates on a looping cycle. that way i'd be able to perfectly loop the animation on the poster, perfect for a gif.
next up, i threw down some face sprites in Aseprite to cycle between randomly. i iterated on these pretty little, since i wanted to have a rough look to the whole model.
after this, i added two dice to the model, careful not to overcrowd, and at the same time got started on the poster. the original poster design i lost the file of, but it featured a water background so the model would look like an island! i just couldn't get it to work in a way that appealed to me, so i tried my hand at something typography-heavy, which i always wanted to try my hand at.
there's honestly nothing dramatic that happens here, just a lot of tweaking fonts & colors, with the colors roughly based on the original PSX logo.
at the end, i exported the poster, threw it into godot, layered everything and recorded a gif from play mode. pretty simple, really!
thanks for reading! just scroll back up to look at the finished poster again!
cool side effect: i managed to create two cute emoji from this!
we love small pals
