Concepts 'N Modelling

This week I’ve been finishing concepts and iterating them so they look like the style we’re aiming for.
I’ve made concepts for each section I have designed trying my best to make it look good and stick to the style. These are the concepts at their current stage they're all nearly finished. 

At this part of the level the player has to jump on the tree branches and travel through the hole in the tree to the next area. 

In this section the camera will zoom in on the fountain as the player has to jump over the lily pads to get past the fountain. 

This is the canal area and the player has to cross over this canal. There will be punts that can be used to jump on to cross.

Entrance to the rabbit hole 

This is the rabbit hole. I just wanted to get an idea of the objects I want to be seen in this part of the level. Trying to keep as close to the book as possible I'm there will be objects that are described in the book here. Yes, including the empty marmalade jar.

This is the puzzle room I designed which leads off the rabbit hole. When the player enters the door will lock or the door will be blocked and the player has to change the time shown on the clock to 4 o'clock (tea time) to exit the room. 

We’ve all made basic asset lists, I plan to make mine more in depth and make sure I haven’t forgotten anything at the weekend. However my current asset list is useful to me and contains everything I can think of for now. Making asset lists makes it easier for us to see what every section needs in terms of assets and it helps us assign work to everyone so the workload is more manageable. So far looking at the all the asset lists it doesn’t seem too bad in terms of workload as we still have 6 weeks left although saying that I think we should be planning to have all the modelling done in the next week or so.

My current asset list.

After creating my asset list I started on modelling. Firstly with “The Danby Gateway” which is probably the largest model in my parts of the level. I made it to the reference image I had but I also made iterations on the design as it should look wacky and stylised. 

Here are some iterations I have made. 

These iterations are still in their basic structure and will be iterated more and polished up. I will show my group on these iterations and we can decide the final model as a group. 

I've also started modelling the some main assets for the other areas in my part of the level. They are very basic at the moment as I only started by the end of the week.

These models are pretty basic at the moment as I only started modelling at the end of the week, I plan to get a lot more modelling done next week. Hopefully the modelling will be done this time next week which is what I'm aiming for. 

Week Two of OTM

For this week the brief has a vague outline of what we should have done and should be doing, each week we're trying to keep to this plan so we stay on top of work. 

Week 20:             First pass project plan

                            Must have, could have, Should have lists

                            Assign times to list                            Assign times to tasks

                            Work out dependencies to create a timeline.

                            White box level

                            Set up in engine

                            Test and iterate on level design

                            Concept characters (rough)

                            Choose key images/style guide

As it’s the second week on this project we’ve finished the block out and now have a finalised white box. The white box level still needs some work but thanks to engine people aka Jennifer, Callum and Johannes the puzzles that we have decided on using in the level are pretty much all working. I think there are still some problems with the puzzle I came up with which is to be expected as it is quite complicated. 

We’ve all been working on our assigned areas to concept, keeping to the style guide which Imogen created. Last week we thought we wanted to go from realistic to stylised and trippy as the level progresses, however after talking to Chris and Steve we decided on keeping it stylised so we chose a style and we’re sticking with it.

Personally I find the style hard to paint for concepts as it’s very different from my style and it’s very blocky and angular.

It’s been a busy week and I’ve finalised my concepts keeping as close to the style guide as possible, by colour picking off the colour palette and trying to block shapes for the environments.

These are the first iterations of my concepts, in their most basic stage. 

Next week I will continue to work on my concepts and hopefully make them more like the style we have chosen so we keep to the same style. 

Off the Map

This week marked the start of the “Off the Map” competition.

“Now in its third year, Off The Map challenges budding designers to use collections from the British Library as inspiration to create exciting interactive digital media.

Off The Map competition accompanies the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition on Alice in Wonderland. Curators from the British Library have selected maps, sounds, text and illustrations for ‘Alice’s Adventures Off the Map’!

Three themes have been chosen especially for the competition:

• Oxford

• Underground

• Gardens”

So yes, it’s based on the original text of Alice in Wonderland which is pretty interesting and exciting.

We were all assigned groups for this project, teams of six to be exact. After the initial brief outline given by Emma as a group we went into the labs and talked about ideas and what we should do for the project. Originally the project was set to be a 3d sidescroller game however due to complaints and conflicts of interest with students the tutors opened it up to be any type of game, open world, first person shooter for example. However we liked the idea of a 3d sidecroller so we stuck with our original plan and went with it.

“The main focus of this brief is to:

1. Make this journey interesting and rewarding for the player, through game play and navigation

2. Create a visually interesting environment that reflects the literary world of ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’.

3. Whilst you can look at modern adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, your designs should be firmly anchored in the original collections held at the British Library”

This project last 9 weeks so we are able to be adventurous however sensible because we are representing the university and it needs to be good and show those 3 aspects.

Week 19:

Brief introduced, team, roles and themes assigned.

Read “Alice’s Adventures Underground”. No seriously READ IT before you start!

Research, mood boards, asset lists

Plan journey & interactive elements

This is the project plan that the tutors have given us, it’s a rough vague idea of what we should be doing each week. This week we had to read the book of course, and do lots of research and start building up an idea of what we want the level to look and work like.

So we made a linear blockout of our level and then sectioned parts off so everyone had something to concept and work on.

As you can see I was assigned the first garden area and the rabbit hole to concept. First I did some research and read the book, especially focusing on the parts I was working on in the book and made a list of objects Alice sees as she falls down the rabbit hole so I could include them, I also made a load of moodboards.

As a group we had decided to keep as close to the project as possible. As it’s still early days I just drew up a very simple linear blockout on my part of the level. 

After doing these concepts and seeing what the group had done I wanted to make the level more interactive so I decided on making a puzzle somewhere in the part I had concepted. I had an empty room down the rabbit hole so I made one in there. 

After a review session with Chris and Steve on Friday we got some helpful feedback and decided to discuss the style guide and actually pick a style to work from so everything would be uniform and work together, as this is what Chris and Steve brought up when we showed them the concepts we had done so far.
When we had finished discussing it we had decided that we would go for stylised throughout the level as before we had decided on starting off realistic and then gradually becoming stylised and slightly trippy and weird. Chris and Steve brought up the fact that that idea would probably be very time consuming and hard to accomplish in the time limit as we want to really polish up the level and make it really awesome.

So we looked into stylised games and Imogen suggested “Puppeteer” which is an interesting looking game where you play as a wooden puppet. The puppet style made the characters to look quite low poly and blocky, which is something that interests the group as a whole. The colour palette of this game was also inspiring as it’s so colourful as uses almost opposite colours for the characters. 

Puppeteer environments moodboard

Puppeteer color palette

So the plan for now is to carry on with concepts and building up the stylised idea and making it work. 

Container City Post Mortem

Overall our final Container City looked a lot better than I had thought it would. Due to all the hard work put into it the level worked really well, compared to other levels it had very little bugs or problems due to gameplay.

The level was also very interesting to play once it had all come together for the final product. The music that was picked also created suspense which matched the environment we had made making it not only suspenseful but exciting and fast paced.

As a fairly large level, especially to begin with, it was a bit of a rush to get it done and working. However as we had cut it down to a smaller level than before we were confident we could finish it in time which we did. I’m very proud of my group for getting it all done and working pretty well together.

I think as a group we worked fairly well together however there were a few communication problems which if we were to do the project again or go back to it we would try to communicate more and work together as a group in the labs more often.
Personally if I was to do this project again I would try plan a bit better and make a proper project plan so we would be able to keep on task and on time as for the majority of this project we were behind on most weeks.

I definitely could have contributed more for this project however I was ill for the last week or two which meant it was difficult to do a large portion of work I managed to come in everyday though and get a bit of work done. Thankfully as my group were super nice and understanding they helped me out and were patient with me.
The work I managed to do was ok, not my best work by far however I think it worked for the final level and the project in general so it’s alright for now. I still really need to work on concepts as my digital skills aren’t to the standard I want but I think I’m getting there slowly.

As an overview here are some of the concepts and work I did for this project.

Inital concepts for assets

First paintover of assets

Original paintover concept of the market stall 

Basic concept of the market stall 

Final concept in unreal scene

Don't Quarry About It

As the deadline is this Friday some last minute work has to be done aswell as some tweaking in engine. The level is almost done and just needs polishing and some extra assets adding in like emergency lights and pipes to populate the level more. 

As this was necessary I was tasked to make the pipes which were to go into the tunnel area.
So I modeled the pipes fairly quickly. I then did a really quick unwrap and textured it. We decided to make it a tile-able texture as we were running out of texture sheets to use as for the whole level we only had 10 1024 texture sheets. So I photo manipulated an image from cg textures to and offset it then used the clone stamp tool to edit out the seams to make a tile-able texture. 

After adding these elements the level was practically finished. I had been fairly ill throughout this week but I tried my best to help out the team and do my part, thankfully my group were all very understanding.
So Friday rolled around and the work had been uploaded to the K drive. It was done, 4 weeks of stress pretty much over. The last thing to do was the review presentation on Monday. 

Between us we had created a level that had really good interactive elements and looked pretty good. I'm pleased with the final outcome as it's really interesting and different from the work made by other groups. Here are some final beauty shots of our level. 

Also here's a final playthrough Zhané recorded. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4sIG7y9GzQ&feature=youtu.be