Week 11 Presentation / Graphics

Week 11 – Presentation / Graphics

Introduction

This week I focused on tightening up the visuals and presentation of my game to better reflect the overall horror-farm theme. Up until now, a lot of the attention has gone into functionality, but this checkpoint was about replacing placeholder elements, finalizing the look and feel, and making everything more visually consistent and polished.

Development Progress

I started with the menu backgrounds and UI presentation, aiming to keep everything visually tied to the farm and horror aesthetic. For example, the new high score window now uses a background showing a pile of dead zombies, generated using ChatGPT image tools (OpenAI, 2025)

which helps communicate that the player has just survived a massive wave and achieved something big. Each menu panel is backed with themed imagery — keeping it either farm-related or unsettling to stay on-brand. I also selected Pixellari as the primary font, which fits well with the pixel art style of the rest of the game and keeps things clean and readable.

Image 1 (New high score screen)

On the in-game side, I added more decorative tiles to make the world feel more alive and thematic. These include crops, piles of hay, shrubs, creepy trees, mud pits, and other environmental props sourced from the pixel farm tileset (Szadi Art, 2023). to help visually communicate the haunted farm setting while filling out the playable space.

Image 2 (Decorative tiles)

Image 3 

I also worked heavily on particle systems to give the game more visual feedback:

• Blood spurts when zombies are shot

• Dirt puffs when zombies spawn from grave clusters

• Sparks when bullets hit obstacles

• Explosions when the egg bomb power-up goes off

• Gold glow particles around the pitchfork power-up, which only activate when the player is nearby — helping both with theme and functionality

These effects all add to the visceral, reactive feel I’m going for and help make moment-to-moment gameplay more visually rewarding.

Challenges

One visual element I struggled with was the mud pit. I initially used a sprite generated with AI tools, but once placed in-game, it didn’t match the pixel style of the rest of the assets — it stood out in a bad way. To fix this, I edited one of the terrain tile sheets I was already using (originally a water hole from the pixel farm tileset (Szadi Art, 2023). and recolored the blues to muddy browns. The result is a tile that matches the existing aesthetic and blends seamlessly with the environment.

Image 4 (Mud pit edit)

Feedback and Testing

I received a bit of positive feedback during this week’s testing session:

“Coming along really well 🧟, menu looks good and sounds def fit the general theme.”

This told me that the visual tone and menu presentation were heading in the right direction. Another tester mentioned:

“Wow great game so far, I love the use of sound here! Something I found was that when zombies were killed, as they died (so during the death animation) they could still move and kill me.”

While this second comment is more gameplay-related, it’s still helpful — and it reminded me that visual feedback like death animations should also communicate clearly to the player when an enemy is no longer a threat.

Planned Improvements

Next, I plan to:

• Continue refining the UI to make sure all screens and popups match the final game style
• Revisit the death animation issue to ensure zombie corpses can’t harm the player

References

• Szadi Art. (2023). Pixel farm tileset [Game assets]. itch.io.(Image 2)
• OpenAI. (2025). Pile of zombie bodies background image [Image generated via ChatGPT]. 
  (Image 1)
• Custom. Mud pit final sprite created by editing terrain tiles from Szadi Art’s tileset (Image 4)