I chose the concept of a treasure room from a fantasy game, as I love the Zelda series and I feel this ties in heavily to that. I chose to go with treasure room in maybe a decrepit dungeon, but with the feeling of a past, rich castle, so as to give the player context as to why there is a treasure chest randomly in the centre of the room.
Maya is a really fun and interesting program, and the controls are simple enough once you’ve spent half an hour googling shortcuts. I think I still have a very long way to go if I were to make a character model, but I have a strong idea of at least how to make a pillar! After experimenting with different ways to deform objects I came across a way to make a more crumbled pillar, and once that was complete I added some rubble underneath. I also tried to add some flags which would have emblems placed on them in the background, but getting them to stand out was difficult.
I decided to go with the Victorian Steampunk FPS as the best simple UIs I know are in Bethesda games like Fallout and Skyrim, neither of which I have played. However! I appreciate the simple look of those games, as well at Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Pro UI mode, in which only your health appears on the UI, leaving you to determine other factors by looking around.
While I can’t find the original photographer or site (or perhaps this IS the original), the source for the image I used is from an article on the history of the London underground, as linked here. I decided to use this image, as it would not require any editing to pass for a very low-tech steampunk image.
Again, not much was learnt about Illustrator this week either. I found a way to make polygons with different numbers of sides, and also a way of combining two shapes, which I used to make the small green ‘exit’ indicator in the center left of the screen. For the rest of the image I mostly traced elements, like surrounding the bench with an orange outline to represent interactivity, and the hand to separate it from the background. Due to the playscreen being entirely monochrome, it blended in a little too well. I really don’t think llustrator is good for me, it’s uncooperative and I can do anything I’d want to do on it in Photoshop in far less time.
When I was creating these characters, I spent the two hours in lesson time just writing up ideas for them, as I do not think I am very good at art and rendering my ideas to paper (or screen). I didn’t really intend to use 2 hours on this but that’s what I did. I will include all my writing in the Read More section, but here is the information requested.
I chose a post-apocalyptic setting, mostly based on the book series Mortal Engines, a series set after a nuclear apocalypse destroyed the world. The series starts off with a group of people living in the wreckage of London, which is almost exactly the basis of my character design location as well, with the minor difference that in Mortal Engines, cities are mechanical, and move around like giant animals, eating each other for resources.
I’m really ashamed of the quality of my images, and designs, and ideas. So, sorry.
I started with creating the vague body shapes of the two characters. At this point I realized just how similar my concepts were to Roadhog and Junkrat, two apocalypse survivors who live in a destroyed city and travel around together, from the game Overwatch. My main excuse for this is that their archetypes are so, so common that it would take a long development process to make pair of characters where the main contrasts are weight and height.
These characters are yet unnamed, and little detail can be made from these images. The left character is designed to be more square in visual design, to represent how set in her ways she is, and how she doesn’t want change. She is sturdy, and capable of taking hits, and her two main weapons are a pair of industrial strength scissors and a crowbar. She does not use these much for melee, instead they are used in dismantling nearby rubble to use as makeshift bludgeoning weapons.
The character on the right is designed to look a lot more unbalanced, and top heavy, to represent how she wants to change the world and does not mind if that changes her too. Her tools are her backpack, which she uses to store materials she has scavenged, and her spanner, which is used to create small simple robots that become brief allies in fights.
I haven’t learnt much about Illustrator since last week, just that layers are much harder to manipulate. In all honestly, I just wanted to get the visual designs over with as soon as I could because I hate drawing, but I don’t think even with more work the characters would be much improved.
Below are all my notes that I wrote down when designing these characters. It’s in Read More cause there’s a hecky dang lot of it and you might not want to waste your time.
Post Apocalyptic
Potential for conflict between the characters
One is quite satisfied with the way the world is now, and one is trying to go back to how it was before the apocalypse. Their two ways of fighting might get in the way of each other at the beginning, with the large bulky weapons potentially breaking or undoing the work of the intricate mechanisms, and the large fighter would have to avoid hurting the small techie. Obviously these difficulties would be overcome further into the game as they learn to synergise with eachother, and also the player would get tired of having to control to opposing forces which are constantly putting each other at risk.
Opportunities for both characters to demonstrate unique strengths and weaknesses
Obvious size and body type differences are an easy place to start, with one being able to perform tasks (break walls, slip through cracks) that the other cannot. But it can go deeper, with the technician (they need names) being so obsessed with returning to the past that they cannot see the positives of life here and now, the scrapper struggling to cope with seeing remnants of the past as they explore over because of the guilt and resentment these images bring up.
Who
I mean they’re both clearly gay and I’m having that right here in this document so on the off chance these ever become real characters I can shove it in the face of people who try to deny it. Additionally, there are plenty of ways to explore transgender stuff in a setting where societal norms have just absolutely collapsed, and I cannot name a single trans protagonist, so I think if scrapper was trans it could present some things to explore in her backstory, but would not need to affect the present day in any way.
I’m struggling to come up with names because while I want to be racially inclusive, I don’t know HECK about different names culturally and I would like their names to have some kind of meaning. And right now I have up the ‘top 60 popular indian girl names of 2014’ and I don’t think that’s the best way of deciding names, so I’m going to leave them blank for now.
They would have an age difference, not too extreme but enough to justify the different ways they reacted to the apocalypse. I think the scrapper lady would be older, perhaps about 20-21 at the time the apocalypse took place, leaving her at around 30 now. The technician girl would have been about 14-16, leaving her in her mid-20s by the time the game takes place. This age difference creates a dynamic of having one person knowing what the real world was like, and was still coming to terms with losing the rose tinted lense of being a child, so she was living in the harshest time of her life. This contrasts with the other person having experienced a mostly positive and supporting world, and being angry that it was taken away from her before she could complete her life goals.
Their key relationship, as I said earlier, is definitely going to be each other, but maybe at the start they don’t have much more than a friendly acquaintances partnership, or perhaps even just ‘together by necessity’ (I still don’t know what that necessity is). In terms of family, I think having a very sparse group of people they are related to by blood, perhaps just the scrapper lady’s father and a sibling for the technician. I think outright stating that the rest of their families were killed would have a small effect on the player, but at this point ‘dead family’ is a little cliché and I’m not interested in a ridiculously tragic story, despite the setting. I think a general idea would be that, as society fell apart, so did social norms of relationships and family, with plenty of families completely splitting apart and losing contact. Despite what I just said about tragedy, this could lead to another contrast between the two main characters again, with the technician only realizing 16 years into their life that their parents were only together for the sake of their children, and that the family was highly strung up on high achievement and was not particularly close otherwise. Her only remaining brother could be disabled in some way, perhaps having ADHD, which in the old world would have been a burden in schools and maybe could be explored as a way of showing just how abusive techie’s parents actually were. I don’t want disability to be seen as a burden though, I want him to be succeeding in this new world, however the ways he thinks affects him. On the opposite end of the parent-child relationship spectrum, but still exploring abusive relationships, I think if the scrapper lady’s parents were some kind of British equivalent of an American republican, I can’t think of a name for that type of person in England, but when I reread this I’ll know what I mean. Maybe they were a very loving family, but were also a very hateful group of people, and scrapper didn’t feel like she fitted in. I think her father wouldn’t realize who she was in the new world, as she came out only after the family had collapsed, and he would be a low tier society member because of his beliefs that he still holds onto.
Their upbringings could dictate their motivations, with techie believing her perfect family can still be resurrected by returning to how the past was, and that everything can be fixed by innovation, contrasting with scrapper recognizing a lot of the rotten parts of the past for both herself and other people, knowing that her life is better here and now, and that a society that no longer struggles with racism is the way forward.
This returns to the idea of an anti-utopia, a world that is, in all simple definitions, perfect, with plenty of love, and teamwork, and innovation, but anyone looking at it sees a very clearly destroyed world.
This makes the problem of conflict and motivation for a game INCREDIBLY HARD. We have a ‘perfect’ world that is perfect BECAUSE of its destruction. What can jeopardise this life? I’ve created a world where I can’t see any conflict this is so dumb.
I think the original motivation for the game could be that, due to a shift in something space related, a lot of space debris is raining down. It poses little threat to people, as luckily it is falling outside of inhabited areas, but provides a lot of interest, as plenty of satellites are returning to earth (and suspension of disbelief is keeping them from burning up).
What
Scrap Harvester
Vehicle Technician
Where
A post-apocalyptic city, probably British? (because I know the UK better than America). A city based off of a real life one, but with some clearly derelict and some clearly ‘renovated’ areas. People living in these towns eke out a life scavenging for building materials that can be used to create housing and farms. This city in particular is almost an anti-utopia, being incredibly well developed but having an aesthetic of run-down, bombed-to-death suburbs.
When
Sometimes in the near future, or present day in an alternate world where society collapsed very quickly and briefly because of some unknown event (unknown because I don’t know what to make it).
Why
The scrapper lady is happy with the life she has now, as it is (somehow) an improvement on her previous life. She helps people to build their houses, and has some architectural knowledge, so leads teams to salvage any building parts they can.
The technician is trying to replicate the vehicles from before the end, in the hopes that improved transport can help recreate the old life everyone had. One day maybe she can move on from vehicles to other mechanical engineering works, and rebuild the old cities.
How
I think a simple crowbar would suffice for the scrapper lady, along with perhaps some large wire cutter-type scissors. She’s very strong, so focuses on melee, and can perhaps utilise nearby rubble and structures as weaponry as well. In terms of game mechanics, this would result in having two reliable, unbreakable weapons, the crowbar and the scissors, and then some low durability weapons that can be acquired from the countless piles of refuse all over the world map.
For the engineer, she would be the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a hacker finding use out of anything mechanical and controlling it, or building very simple robots to work alongside her. These means, in combat sense, she would be a flimsy character on her own and has to create small mechanisms that perhaps inflict status conditions on opponents.
Archetypes
It’s very difficult put these characters into one archetype, or at least it is for me, as I’ve already put so much thought into them that I see them as more than one dimensional. For the scrapper, I think that The Caregiver is very fitting, as she is satisfied in her life as long as she’s able to be helping someone. I think that The Explorer fits techie the best out of the options, and she wants to go and discover what is inside the satellites, but a lot of the points of the explorer is that they are in an enclosed society, which could not be further from the truth in this case. Anyone is allowed to do whatever they want. I think she doesn’t fit in very well, as her knowledge of life no longer has too many practical applications, with mathematics, science and mechanical knowledge being of a little use to a society where farming and building are the main jobs. Despite being loved and accepted by the community, she feels a personal burden because of how she doesn’t think she is needed, so is afraid of being abandoned.
My high concept for this brief was an espionage-based game, with my basis for it coming from what little knowledge I have of the Metal Gear Solid games. I wanted the player to infiltrate some sort of shady facility, acquire information through a set of computer terminals, and escape, all without being caught. In spy games, there are two main play styles: ‘Avoid the guards to not get caught’ and ‘You can’t get caught if there are no guards’. I decided to use elements from both of these, giving the player a stun baton in the small building in the bottom right corner of the map. This has 3 charges in it, so the player can disable any unsuspecting NPC, but you have to strategically choose who to stun, and be sure not to leave an unconscious body lying in view on another NPC. Another mechanic I employed was different tiers of unlockable doors, with each door in the facility requiring a different level of clearance card, ranging from 1 to 3. The cards can be obtained from locations stationed around the map, either on the person of NPCS or nearby, requiring a large amount of stealth to progress through the game. Finally, most guards have a low range of vision, but there are some areas where exploration without cover is impossible, and these are marked in pale red. �
Before this week, my experience with Illustrator has been very limited, due to any project I faced where I could use it, I instead turned to Photoshop as it was easier. The few times I had previously been forced to use Illustrator, I hated it. It seems very similar to Photoshop, but has so many more limitations for you to learn how to work around. This attitude has not changed. I think Illustrator is difficult to work with, at the very least for the purpose of creating a technical map. It may be good for people making digital art, it may be good for people with drawing pads, but I am neither of these people and I hate Illustrator.
This week, our task was to make a mock up screenshot of a game, and the game type I chose was side-scrolling beat em up. This was the option that I have had the least experience with, so I thought it was an interesting challenge to take up. I started with finding a wall that I could tile, which was surprisingly more difficult than I expected as no real-life wall is flawlessly structured.
In the end, while the seam lines of where the wall connects are overly visible, there is still a repeating pattern which could be avoided next time if I used at least 3 different wall tiles and randomly placed them. There would still be obvious tiling, but it would look less bad. Next, I created the window and door sprites, which can be placed on any tile to change it’s appearance from a wall to an entrance or platform. Finally, I found an image of a pie as some sort of collectable, and reduced it vertically, to make it seem more like it was sitting on the windowsill.
For the photobash exercise, I decided to go with the prompt of ‘Darkwood - A high fantasy enchanted forest inhabited by a society of dark elves.’ I started with finding the right sky, and I looked through several different space images before I settled on a rather plain image of the nightsky, which I then put a pink gradient on top of, then reduced the opacity to about 25%, to give it just the slightest tint.
I did the same with the moon, finding a normal coloured image and then tinting it pink. I used a small circle of grain, reduced to very low opacity, to make the moon rays, and I bent the tree images I found to give some kind of concept of a clearing in the middle of the forest. Most of what I did today was with gradients, opacity and the Free Transform tool.
Not very intelligently, I didn’t save the images I used to create this bash, so the only originals I have are the images untouched by my editing, like the night sky. This is something I need to get better at remembering to do.
The basic idea for my game is an under-sea puzzle game, where you adventure across small coral cities solving a number of puzzles per level. You play as a small seahorse/mermaid, moving objects and climbing obstacles to collect and place gems around the locations.
My first moodboard is to represent the colours and patterns found within the game. Because it’s underwater, I will be using a lot of blue for areas that the player doesn’t need to focus on, but will use reds, yellows and green in explorable areas.
This board is to show the location aesthetics I plan to use, with a ‘city’ (level) being a coral structure. All levels will be in the same reef, in the same way Mario Galaxy has multiple levels in one system. This will tie all the levels together.
For character, I started with the basic idea of the Splatoon characters, focusing on the childish proportions. I progressed to a somewhat mermaid-y concept, with seahorse elements as well. I got very hung up on hairstyle, I like the idea of androgynous hair for any game character I make so that was a major influence.
Photoshop is one of the few programs I came to Abertay with a decent knowledge of already, so in terms of new knowledge obtained I haven’t learnt anything. However, tools I practised with include the eraser, multi-select, and the move tool. It’s really hard to talk about this stuff as if it’s revolutionary, it’s as simple as it gets really. I guess I can include google image search tools, I used Colour and Size restrictions to make sure my moodboards had a nice colour scheme, and also to assure that most of the images were high quality resolution.
