I was bored.

So I played around a bit in Photoshop today and made some graphics for a word game.



I don't do much vector style stuff. Usually I'm limited to colorful geometric shapes in that regard. But I got inspired after seeing a word game with bad artwork, and decided to see if I could do better. A magnifying glass in the other game's logo made me think of Sherlock Holmes, and with a theme in mind, I set to work.

The art isn't finished yet, (the font used for the letter grid is likely to change) and I don't know if I'll turn it into a game or not, but I plan to work on it some more and make buttons and things, and if I do make a game out of it, I'd have someone do up a nice sherlock style character in a circle for message popups. That sort of thing is beyond my abilities as an artist.

The plan for the gameplay would be to have a timer that gives a bonus for finding words fast, and enough words on the board that only a few letters remain uncircled, and the player has to unscramble those to spell a bonus word.

Oooh, this looks good.

nice color combinations, depth, clear design... etc
I like it

nice man:)

damned, where's DOF, Glow and Motionblur? ;-)

Nice one Sswift!

Oh there's glow there. It's very subtle though. Without it the image feels too computer generated. There's a glow with a large diameter around the wordpad, and around the letter grid, and even a tiny bit around "Word Detective".

well if/when you do change the word grid font lets hope you choose a mono spaced font or grid it out apropriatly with a normal one
the I and M if swapped on alternate lines would show this to be an ungridded line of text where the game shouldnt

"DEFGH" isn't on the list.

Its not a word, either.

;)

Look into the eyes, the eyes, the eyes, don't look around the eyes, look into the eyes... You're under... You will believe that DEFGH is in the list and is infact a word in common usage... 3,2,1.... You're back in the room.

Ginger:
Obviously I will place the characters on a grid, that's how word searches work. :-)

But I wasn't gonna go to the trouble to set that up in Photoshop!

DEFGH may not be a word, but what about ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr5er4ueWBQ

Where's TUVWXYZ? I want TUVWXYZ!!

"YOU SUMMONED ME?"

trust me ive seen the odd one slip by in print ;)

Nice work! All parts fit nicely together!

Is that a self portrait? ;P
- whatever it is its really cool :D

The game screen looks good.

Although there is one tiny weeny thing bugging me; the notepad. Try adding a few -slightly- darker antialiased lines to simulate a wad of pages and perhaps a very very very feint gradient to the page's edge.
(I also saw the bottom left corner of it has a very slight 'peach/bum' effect going on when it should be a straight line)

- this stuff hardly shows though, i only thought about them after close scrutiny.

New version.

Adjusted the shadows a bit, using a different blend mode after noticing the bottom left corner of the grid paper looked like it lacked contrast.

Also created a menu button. (That one took quite a while to get right.)

Also, I tried a few variations on the title, including making Super Sleuth yellow, and making Word Detective black, but decided the white was the right choice and the least distracting to your eye.



I may play with the shadows more. While the old ones (multiply blend) were too desaturated, the new ones (linear burn) seem too saturated. Unfortunately there's no blend mode between the two, so I may have to make a new copy of each layer that casts a shadow below the original layer and use the multiply blend mode with that and set the fill to 0% to be able to blend the two blending modes together to get the desired result.

I made those changes to the shadows I mentioned, adjusted the coils on the notepad a bit, and made the menu button shinier:

Looks nice, but the notepad still looks a little too white.

Also, might it make sense for that shinier menu button to be the mouseover'd version, and the original the normal?

How can the notepad be too white? Do you mean it's too bright? Or do you mean you want there to be some kind of color tint to it?

You're nitpicking over minor details if you want it to be an off white color. :-)