Week Summary - BA2b Week 3

Collaborative Game Project

After the feedback we received in our tutorial on Monday we made some adjustments to our trello board; it now uses an agile workflow setup as well as having tasks for the entirety of the game added instead of just the ones currently in process. I found this setup much easier to make sense of and I can see it being a real help during the rest of the project.

As for actual asset creation, I spent the first part of this week recreating the main door according to the new design created by one of our team members. Working from someone else's design was a new experience for me, and the kind of problems I encountered with the process made me think a lot about my own work in relation to a 2D to 3D pipeline in the workplace. From the design below, things like elevation weren't readily apparent and I had to ask a fair amount of questions as I was working, making me realise how clear a design has to be when it's being passed to someone else. In addition, making sure my assets sit well with those others have made, making compromises with team members and making sure everyone's opinion is taken into consideration is a new way of working, and although it's sometimes tricky I think it will result in a better end product for everyone.

Below is my finished model and UV map for the door, and the textured model in Marmoset Toolbag and in-game. Making models with entirely hard edges is a slightly different kind of process than what I've been used to in the past, and the decisions I make about where to split my UV islands are more to do with how I can avoid overlaps and blurriness given the small texture size and how it's going to run over the model than about avoiding visible seams as it has been with other projects.

I feel like the game's aesthetic is really starting to come together, and hopefully as more textures and models are added the atmosphere will start to become more and more apparent.

At this point a start screen was needed for the game. I took inspiration from 90s kids' horror like Goosebumps and PC games like I Spy Spooky Mansion for the text - the kind of unashamed cheesiness present in these is something I think is at the core of this project for a lot of us, being used in a slightly ironic capacity.

I used the same assets for the start screen again for the game's end screen, again with a similar kind of nod to the sources mentioned before.

There were also some adjustments I needed to make to models made earlier in the project, things like adding bottom faces to objects which now had physics and could be flipped over. For things like this and in the project in general, I think having a group work environment is really important, allowing for easy and fast communication which allows issues to be addressed and blocks to be moved past very quickly. We've been working in the same room for most of this project, and I can see why many industry companies favour an open-plan office environment over closed-off offices.

Other work

I've been putting together an online portfolio over the last couple of weeks in time for EGX next week and London MCM later in the year. I asked a few different tutors for advice on this which was really helpful in putting together something rounded and appealing across the board. I settled on a few different categories to sort my work into for the moment, though these will probably change fairly constantly and significantly over time.
The live portfolio is available here: http://alexcorlett.artstation.com/

I also put together a simple business card, I imagine the design for this will also change pretty significantly as I go forward.

Week Summary - BA2b Week 2

Cross-course collaboration project

Monday
This week we were working in groups on our short film for our cross-course collaboration project. Our group's theme was 'cube,' and we quickly came up with a few ideas inspired by the prompt image and the cafes around us, of a metal cube on a sandy beach, of using ice cubes and brown sugar cubes to represent the sand and water, and thinking about what we could do with them. We decided to use Monday for ideas generation, use the two days where the group would be split for interchange for preparation, and then come back on Thursday to film and use Friday for editing the film together.

Thinking about collections we could visit, we decided on Norwich castle, with it being the biggest cube in the area, as well as it looking to be made of sandstone (further research revealed it to actually be limestone, but the colour is still very reminiscent). Inside was a large exhibition on dolls' houses - we thought the idea of a cube, in this case a room, containing an environment was an interesting one, and discussed some ideas about how we could implement this in a film. There were some ideas about using a 3D scene in combination with found footage, but these ideas quickly became very technically challenging and out of scope, especially for the fine art members of the team.

After some discussion with a tutor we returned to our ice and sugar cubes idea, but decided to combine it with the cube container concept and use Norwich castle as our object, creating a folding cube net which could be opened up to reveal a structure of ice and sugar cubes, which would then melt away. We would then play the video in reverse and dramatically sped up to make it look as if the castle was constructing itself from the melted materials. During our research we found that Norwich actually has a long history in growing and refining sugar, so the historical link was an interesting one to turn up.

Wednesday
We each took one element of the film to prepare, mine was the cube net, due to the fact that I had the most digital painting expertise of the group. I only had time to paint one wall due to the interchange event during the middle of the project, but filming was done from straight in front of the structure, so it didn't ultimately matter too much. 

I did a lot of thinking about how to construct the cube to give the best effect when it was unfolded, and how we would trigger the unfolding process. After making a couple of test cubes, the best idea I came up with was to use separated sheets for each wall connected by masking tape, instead of a single folded sheet, to allow the walls to fall away cleanly when the trigger was used, rather than slowly and unevenly unfolding. To keep the sides together and provide an easy release, I made a small 'hat' for the structure which could be easily and quickly lifted off, making sure to make it slightly bigger than the walls so that they fell outwards instead of inwards. It was nice to think my way through a technical problem and get my hands on some physical media; I really enjoyed the process and was very satisfied with the end result.

Thursday
When it came to filming, we had a couple of issues like not having enough ice cubes to build a big enough structure for the net, and that the sugar cubes were rough-hewn which made stacking them rather difficult. We probably could have communicated better in order to avoid these problems, but we found ways around them in the end, like stacking the cubes higher in the front to compensate for the lack of materials.

Friday

We spent the day editing the film together; it took a little longer than expected. None of the team really had a lot of experience with video editing, so it was a learning experience for all of us and involved a lot of researching on sites like youtube and just experimenting with the programme to find how to do what we wanted. We used adobe premier for the editing and sped up the video, unfortunately even though the audio sounded really interesting at that speed, there were some problems exporting it that neither we nor the technicians in the media lab could fix, so we ended up abandoning the audio in favour of a silent video, which another team member added some ambient sound to over the weekend. 

In terms of effects, the video quality was a bit shaky due to the fluorescent lighting in the room we were using, so we decided to take advantage of that and go for a more vintage footage effect. We desaturated the footage and added a vignette, as well as adjusting the colour balance to bring out the yellows. The end result had a great texture to it and I was really pleased with how it turned out considering the time frame, I think our group worked really well together and it was nice to interact with others who had very different working methods from mine.

Interchange

For interchange I signed up for a full-day location drawing session at Strumpshaw Fen. I'm aware that environment drawing is a weakness of mine by comparison with the rest of my work, so I wanted to try a session to put me out of my comfort zone and try to strengthen my skills in the area. For the morning I focused on taking pictures and just looking at the environment, before moving onto drawing in the afternoon.

Despite my trying to focus on the landscape, I continually found myself drawn to the birds and fungi in the area. I tried to keep my drawings of these to a minimum and focus on the enviroment, but over the course of the day I realised that I need to be able to use solid blocks of color when creating landscapes to avoid becoming swamped in unnecessary line detail. The parts of the day I enjoyed most were when I allowed myself to do some quick gesture drawings of the birds in the area, in particular the swans with their long curved necks were really fun to sketch.

I tried to vary the line weight here to create depth, not sure of how effective it was.

Below I tried using some artbar blocks (like a watercolour pastel), thinking that I could use them over each other to build up the drawing, but they turned out to be too transparent to paint on top of each other, so it looks very washed out and lacks depth.

Here I did two studies of the same scene in different media, focusing on not going into too much detail and showing what was going on with as little visual information as possible.

The day was a really good experience, although after spending all day landscape sketching I'm not convinced it's an area I want to focus on, or at least not with the materials I was using. I find landscapes uninteresting compared to individual living forms, but I think using something more solid like acrylic or oil paint would make the experience more enjoyable for me, or maybe I just need more practise in the area.

Week Summary - BA2b Week 1

Collaborative Game Project

For this project we tried to organise a group with a fairly balanced skill set across 2D, 3D and development areas. We divided tasks with two people taking the majority of 2D, two people for 3D, and one for development, but with the intention of people being able to move around to help in whichever area needed, reasoning that a more flexible workflow in the style that is used by indie companies would be best for us. We felt that this made the best use of each individual's skillset as well as making it easier to complete needed tasks.

We started with a group discussion about what kind of game we wanted to make given the theme. There were suggestions for an endless runner and a couple of other genres, but in the end we settled on a kind of escape-the-room game set in a museum. The exit door would have four locks which must be opened by retrieving four objects from each of the four exhibits by completing a minigame in each. We reasoned this approach would let us complete one branch first to a polished state before adding further branches, and so would be easily manageable. We decided to go for a mix of 2D and 3D styles for the project, using a low-poly 3D environment and physical props and 2D pixel billboard sprites in the style of 'Doom' or 'Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor.' This setup allowed everyone in the team to use their relevant skills and makes assets relatively quick to make, meaning we can focus on adding more polish to the game.

I'm focusing on 3D assets for this project, covering the modelling, UV mapping and texturing, and lending a hand with 2D assets where needed. I would have liked to do more by way of 2D design work, but for this project we don't really have the time for concept art, and it was better for our team to have another 3D artist than a third 2D artist. Below are the assets I've been working on this week.

Hand model for the first minigame.

Below is the main door which the player has to open. Rather than spend time concepting for it, I instead did rough blockouts drawing on museum and church architecture, which have the potential to be replaced or improved on later during the refinement stage. This is the general approach for all the assets we're producing for this stage, in order to get a base product together as quickly as possible.

Progress shots:

Other assets:

(Texture sheet example)

Our approach for the game's 3D assets is keeping them as low-poly, low-resolution as possible to keep them in line with the game's aesthetic. I've been doing my best to keep each asset chunky-looking and as simple as possible, using textures to add detail where needed. I've used a slight bevel on some assets just to take the edge off their sharp corners, but for the most part each asset is as pared-down as it can be in terms of polygons. The texture size we're using for the assets is generally a 256x256 sheet, but some are bigger or smaller depending on the size of the object to maintain texture density across the game. These are a little bigger than the texture sizes used for our reference games, but when we viewed them in the game on a HD screen with our post-processing volume (made by our Unreal lead, it makes the game appear as if it was a much lower resolution), they struck a good balance between style and legibility.

Here are some of the 2D assets I produced to help finish up the decoration of our first room. The most important thing for me when making these is that they were in line with the other assets made by our 2D lead, so I used her sheet as a reference when making these as well as looking at real-life posters for inspiration.