This post is about the techniques and progress of the title screen for the game.
Firstly I chose the default resolution of the game window as the resolution of the canvas. For the game it is 640px by 480px. I felt that I should use consistent resolutions throughout the game.
To begin with, I used the paintbrush tool with full opacity, I used this tool for both the title text and the yellow back to the eye. After that I used an orange-yellow for the front of the eye. I found that it was easier to use a separate layer for each element as I went along.
After using the blur tool to make the eye look more 3D I added a pupil in an off-black shade and used blur to add shading to the pupil also. I did a bit of cross-hatched paint brushing with shades of grey to map out where the mist/smoke effect would go.
After I did the cross-hatching I used a zig-zagging technique with the blur tool in order to create a ripple on the cross-hatching. On the layer bellow that I used a huge brush size and did 2 large areas of colour, 1 purple and 1 maroon, again, using a large blur brush I melded them together in order to gain an interesting effect.
In addition to this I used a big, partly transparent black brush to create a smog-like area for the menu items background (so they'd stand out off of the "busy" title screen).
I changed the text colour to dark red and started to use the text tool to write in the menu items.
Finally I converted the menu item titles into a non-text object and blurred them all slightly so that they didn't clash with the rest of the theme.
This is the (blog friendly) final product, I feel that it turned out quite well. This version isn't as high quality as the version going into the game as that'd be far too big to go on the blog!
The reason the file size on the main version can be so large (I'm using a .BMP) is because the title screen is fairly static and loading a large image won't slow down any in-game processes at the time that it is there.
