Art Dump and Slow Internet

Apparently, someone in this block needs to be downloading something huge all the time, lest he face some sort of severe consequences such as the death penalty. I suspect he's using torrents because they seem to get some sort of priority. Because of this, I have the sheer joy of being unable to do so much as view images on Google without having to wait a good 15 minutes for the pictures to load. Because of this, I can't do research outside of uni.

Hooray.

On a lighter note, here are some concept sketches, just to show that I am in fact doing something while waiting 10 minutes for the "New Post" page to load, or to see a picture, or instead of effing and jeffing in Left 4 Dead 2 because Versus Survival is finally out again but I keep getting disconnected every few seconds so I can't enjoy it.
But I'm not bitter about that or anything.

So, we have:

Evil Modern War Civilian

Good 1920s Assassin

Good 1920s Range

? Eastern Fantasy Tank

Evil Horror Support

Neutral Punk Soldier

Some Futures Direction

Today was the first meetup for Futures. I feel a lot better now that I have a proper grasp of what I'm meant to be doing. We had to come up with 2 or 3 interesting elements of modern culture or media that could influence and have been influenced by a lot. It's hard to explain - and that was probably a bad way of doing it - but I do get it.
Even if it doesn't look like it.
There were some things I didn't really see how they could work (Someone's doing exploration, which I don't really think is creativity-driven), but others - such as bullet-time and dreams/nightmares - seem really cool.

I'm doing:

Colours and Emotions
Non-Verbal Communication and Body Language
Symbolism in Art

Sounds like a lot, but they're pretty knitted together so things like colours and emotions will overlap. I like these subjects so I think I'll have fun in the project.


Basically, we look at examples of these in modern times (Not so much in games at first), then we see how the users of them were inspired to do them, and from that we estimate how they could be used together in the future. So, I could perhaps design a game with no text about someone whose emotions turn them different colours. Something along those lines.


... It's not as confusing as it sounds once you get your head around it.

Success!

I made a sticky post (Except not really, I cheated and just set it in the future) so that if you want to just see work from a particular area, you can follow a link and it'll take you to all of them. Neat, eh? I worked it out myself!


From now on, I'll also be colour coding modules. I couldn't think of a better way to do it and this seems good enough. All GDD text will be red, all Honours will be green and all Futures will be blue. Remember that!

Reformat

I will be talking about my Futures a bit later and hopefully can do an Honours concept art upload extravaganza, but I'm just quickly going to try to rearrange this blog. I was speaking to my sister about it and she said it can be hard knowing which project's which. I want to find a way to have a sticky post or something similar at the top with links to specific big tags (i.e. Honours, GDD, Futures). I also want to have maybe a header on posts with the main tags there. This might be a lot of effort, but if I can do it, it'll help the clarity looooads.

I also need to change the images on it at some point. I don't like using someone else's stuff, even if it is freely available.

Eastern Fantasy vs Western Fantasy

I bumped into a design-based hurdle yesterday when I was working on my Honours yesterday. I was working on an Eastern Fantasy tank when I really began thinking about the difference between Eastern and Western fantasy. When I struggled to objectively categorise them, I considered just compiling them both into fantasy. However, that wouldn't be right because, though I can't put my finger on it, there is a difference. Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy are very distinctly different.

But how?

I came up with a few ideas, but none of them could be considered definite differences. There was always an exception.

1) Mythology

Western tends to use creatures that have never really been thought to exist, such as orcs and elves (A lot of things like this bother me because they're clearly someone else's reused ideas). Eastern has dragons and chi and things like that.

But this instantly falls through when you consider Gandalf and Harry Potter. These are big characters, and back in the day people did think witchcraft was real. So there is real life influencing it. Also, knights definitely existed, and dragons were rumoured to. So they do take some 'real' elements.

As well as this, Eastern Fantasy is not all about mythology. Take Dragonball as an example. Sure, it's based around Journey To The West, but I'm sure stretchy alien Piccolo and pink rubbery villain Buu were not part of that.

2) Abilities

Maybe it's just the style of powers used. West is swords and bows, East is magical powers. Right?

Well, no. Wizards use magical powers (Though they are less common in the West), and many characters in East have some sort of weaponry.

3) Beauty

 I read a good article about a similar point ( www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node733 ), though it was about the 'cuteness' of the East. I was thinking about it more in terms of the elegance of the East, in the way that nothing is particularly ugly. For example, an orc in the West is very ugly. Compare that to the droves of cutesy little anime girls that may be seen in the East.

Basically, West has more grit and East has more elegance.

But the article brings up Disney films in it, and I think this goes against the point I believed. The Little Mermaid portrays a pretty and cute heroine with an attractive love interest. Other characters may be less attractive, but the main ones are what I'd expect from the East. However, I guess a difference is that hero Eric is a strong, beefy man compared to cutesy little Tidus from Final Fantasy...

... But compare and contrast superhero Goku from Dragonball. He is absolutely not the elegant, slender stereotype I believed.

4) Colour

This is the closest I think I may have come. West is earthy greens and browns, East is pastels and bright colours. I suppose in this way, West can be thought of as more 'foresty', whereas East is sort of 'spacey'. Though East can also be set in an old-timey environment like West often does, the clothes are frequently bizarre and bright.

Obviously there are exceptions.

5) Art style

East is anime-children, West is busty women? East is pretty beasts, West is hideous trolls?

I don't know.

I give up.

All I can guess is that these are some criteria, and each genre can pick and choose between a couple. They may tend to lean in one direction, but could perhaps not stick to every cliché.

I just don't know.

baw

Any point coming in other days?

This is the second day I've been in class outside of when our year has to be, but I'm not seeing much reason to. I mean, I'd like to say I feel like I'm using my time well and whatnot, but on Wednesday I didn't see any tutors, and today I still don't see any but I am potentially depriving second years of a computer. I don't know how Bambaloo Guy did it. I don't want to be a pain, and it seems like I might be one for no good reason.

It seems that there's more point just staying at home.

A Little More W-Fantasy Assassin

I need a way to abbreviate my character 'names'. I'm ending up with files called WFantasy_Assassin_ConceptSketch_1 . Very long.

I had a go at doing some stronger shapes by building my character primarily from them. As she's stocky and muscly, this girl was made mostly with boxes. I think they're quite a manly shape though, so I really pulled in her waist to give her a more recognisably female look.

I made a couple of simple outfit combos and stuck them together. If nothing else, at least I'm making progress on one character! These images are maybe a bit blurry, but that's because I was working with a large canvas and had to shrink down after.

The main sets of apparel to look out for are hair length, fringe, ears, top, bottoms, shoes and extras. Also posting the template so you can clearer see how she looks shape-wise.

Another note about the shape: Jack asked me, "Why does she look like that?", in reference to her shape vs her archetype, I guess. It's a good question I think, luckily with an answer (I just think of everything don't I?).

Well, assassins are normally depicted as lithe and elegant, right? That doesn't make sense for the way this one behaves. She tends to sneak around in trees, often climbing and jumping about  (This is also why I want her to have green hair: camoflage). However, if you're going to be doing such active movements, you're not going to be a slender little stick. You need to be very strong to move the way I imagine she does. Also, her small stature helps her squeeze through little spaces, ideal for persuing, hiding and escaping.

Imagine her actions as sort of like a treefrog.

Proposals

Well, I went into lesson with Jack yesterday, and it was dead. Not even quiet. Just... dead. There was one other person there, and apparently he was from MA. I honestly thought someone else would turn up.
I might not come in Wednesdays so often because there were no tutors around, so I couldn't really ask for help. I'd rather come in on a day when they're available.

Today has been more about GDD, but Rhoda was nice enough to check my honours anyway. She showed me some links to artists in regards to body shapes and sizes. The pictures were so good. Makes me jealous.

Hmph.

Must remember to bring headphones to lessons as well. There is some, uh. Slightly distracting raucus laughing.

As for the GDD, though I had my heart set on the one I'd been planning over Summer, we had to jot down 3. At first I struggled, but I came up with two other ideas that I actually think are okay. I might implement some features if they have a place.

The first one is ViDys, obviously.

The second one's a game about mythical creatures that's really simple and preferably without any dialogue. They all have individual abilitiesand you have to switch between them to solve puzzles - for example, a tsuchinoko could roll, a griffin could glide, etc.

The last one is about glitches. I love glitches, so I thought it might be fun to make a game where it was either presented in a way that seemed like it was glitching, or certain areas that were purposefully shoddily made that can be breached, with them being the only way to get through the level.

Now I just need to pester a tutor apparently, durr.

AHHPANIC

Okay, I spent the past couple of days taking the concept stage of one of the characters slowly and being nice and thorough.

HOWEVER

If I spend 2 days on concept art, and it takes me about 2 days to do a finished picture, that leaves me, what.

1 character a week.

And it only leaves me 3 days for everything else.

 One character a week is about 20 characters.

And that is NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH

So basically I'm not so sure on how to juggle concept art, finished art, GDD and futures.

I'm just not fast enough at drawing.

Anyway, here are some sketches for the Western Fantasy Assassin. She's partly based off a character I made up a looong time ago that I thought had some qualities that would be fitting. The annotations pretty much sum up everything, I think.

sdsdfsd

Well, I've just hard my first futures lesson and it's sort of thrown me off. I thought the project was research into potential future technology, followed by a games proposal that would use it. I spent all of summer thinking that's how it was, but I was way off.

Basically, in the way that some trends come around later - whether because they are applicable to people today, or for the nostalgia factor of the people who first enjoyed them - we have to design a game that reflects trends that were present in our childhood and uses them as research. This is going to be hard because I was planning to do a horror game, and my childhood wasn't particularly filled with much decent horror media, but hey. Let's just think of it as a challenge.

Inspirations

The concept of dreams is so unique to each person that there's probably an abundance of good research material out there. Unfortunately a lot of it can be fairly generic, but these are 3 films that I thought were better than Inception by miles really great at capturing elements of dreams.

Paprika

I was quite surprised with this one considering what most anime is like. It's visually stunning and very creative. Basically, it's about a woman who can enter the dreams of other people using a sort-of alter-ego. It's more of a bright, exciting representation, and it makes for some really wonderful scenes.

Science of Sleep

This one is much more relaxed but is more happy and warming. It's about a man who gets his dreams confused with reality and is trying to win the heart of the woman living in the flat next door. It's a bit unusual, but it's very sweet. There's lovely moments where he's able to rewind time, make clouds of cotton wool and attack the people in his office with giant hands. It really gets across the fuzzy surrealism of dreams while putting in really bizarre ideas in a nonchalant way.

Waking Life

This one is a very difficult (and probably pretentious) film and, while it does have dreams in it, is more based around philosophy than anything else. It's set out sort of like a documentary in parts, but is completely rotoscoped. It looks very strange, but it's also very beautiful. It's about a guy who feels stuck in a never-ending dream and meets loads of people along the way who impart their wisdom. It's really nice in its changing appearance, and again portrays that almost intangible 'oddness' that dreams have.

A Little bit of Character History

I've been doing a little more work on my honours characters - mainly Western Fantasy Assassin - but I did it in my sketchbook and I don't have any camera batteries so the upload will have to wait.

For now though, I'll just put down some history for 2 characters for the GDD.

Don

Donovan Joseph Sheppard - Don for short - is a designer living in a city flat with his girlfriend Becca Garrett. He doesn't make a great deal of money doing what he does, but he gets by. However, he suddenly finds himself especially burnt out with work as he struggles to keep on top of it. Problems with Becca also start to wear him down until he begins to lose sleep.

When realising the risk he could be causing to himself, Becca sends him to a doctor for help. He is prescribed sleeping pills. However, he chooses not to take them.

These pills also may be used as a mechanic when Don inadvertantly eats them when sleepwalking, sending him into a deeper state.

The name of Don isn't too elaborate, and there isn't any history behind his surname (which will probably be changed later). Basically, Donovan Joseph can be shortened to Don Jo. This is a spoonerism for Jon Do, i.e. John Doe. This is meant to reflect him losing his sense of self during the game.

Blackbuck

Another name that will probably change later. I was considering using animal names for the dream characters but I'm not so sure anymore (If you don't know what a blackbuck looks like, look them up now because they're so darn cool). I wanted this character to be the main entity that Don encounters and the most helpful one. Blackbuck is meant to be genderless, but I'll probably just say "he" for sake of ease.

Blackbuck appears to be almost child-like but is distinctly not so. His bizarre facial features make him seem more alien than human, and he tends to speak in a way that shows him to be wise and thoughtful.

Generally, he's meant to represent Don's ego in several ways:

1) He holds the knowledge of Don's dreams that Don himself believes he doesn't know. However, as Blackbuck is just a conjuring of his imagination, it is knowledge that he unwittingly carries himself.

2) While Don wanders through his dreams, directionless and confused, Blackbuck seems able to guide him through when he is lost. His wide eyes represent the clarity and knowledge he possesses - in other words, it's sort of a literal way of showing that his eyes are open to the world around him.

3) In the way that he seems like sort of like a spirit guide, and the duality of the dreams that Don is in, Blackbuck is also meant to reflect the Soul and the Ego - like God and the Devil (The latter more linked to principles like LaVeyan Satanism than evil hellish things). I wanted to show Blackbuck as inhuman, possibly spiritual, so I looked to Byzantine depictions of Jesus as inspiration. His face - the large eyes, long, thin nose and small mouth - are characteristic of that sort of work and were fitting to the sort of feel that Blackbuck would have.

I don't have a picture of Don (again, the camera thing), but I have a doodle of Blackbuck I did when I didn't have my graphics tablet.

First Day

Well, today was the first proper day of uni and now I'm starting to get worried. I get the feeling that being just another character person isn't going to be enough to do well, especially considering I'm not a great artist. I came up with a new idea but it might be waaay more than I'm capable of doing.

I was hoping that, for the honours, I could make some sort of presentation-y thing to show off the characters. One could go on the Steampunk category, or the Assassin category, and view all the results. Or, they could do a specific search for, say, "Eastern Civilian" and get that character; or maybe something even more vague like "Female Horror" or "Evil Tank" or "Male Neutral" and see what comes up for those.

Also, when a character is selected, a really basic animation plays to give the feel of what the character is like and what it does. I'd love to be able to do this but I think it's probably too much work. Sigh.

Jack suggested I could do all this in the form of a website, which could be useful. I used to know how to make animations in ImageReady, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work in the newer version so I might have to track down an older one.

Or I could try to do it in Flash. I have veeeery limited experience with it and can only really make uncoloured animations, but at least it's a start.

fdgdfgfgh. Everything suddenly got really hard.

Clear Delusion

+Sanity, -Sanity.

Piercing Loss

Today has been really bad work-wise. For the majority of it I was completely lacking ideas and motivation and was pretty much just staring at a blank sheet of paper. Thankfully I finally got something done. It's only a minor change, but... It's something.

Instead of choosing from a selection of items to determine stats, Don chooses from pictures. I think that'll make it easier to design something a) less cryptic and potentially hard to understand, and b) a lot less tacky. I mean, what does he choose for a speed boost? Trainers??

Anyway, I've made a start on them, which should set me up for getting them done smoothly. Here are the ones for +Attack and -Attack. They're pretty messy, but this early on I don't think I need to have it spangly and perfect. Just a draft for a concept will do.

Female Face Practice

I've spent today mostly doing practice for faces. Apparently I'm still drawing sort of anime-ish (dfdsgfdsgfdg) so I thought I should try researching faces to get a better grasp on how they really look. I did 3 females: African, Asian and Caucasian. They're not too good because, unfortunately (though not surprisingly), when you try to look up pictures of ladies' faces on Google Images, most of the results are, uh.

Not helpful.

Ahem.

I did find one good site that had a couple of typical human faces on it though.

My references were pretty limited, but here they are anyway. Also, I did some extra eyes on the Asian one in the hopes of getting better at that epicanthic fold thing.

Long Post leads to BoreDom

Naming Mechanic

I wanted to make the game feel personal to each player; to give it something unique to make it special. So, I came up with the idea of a sort of file naming system. Each game playthrough has its own adjective and noun randomly assigned to it (for example, "Crappy Blog" or "Pointless Mechanic") that the player keeps through the game. If they start a new file, they get a different combination. It serves as a way to keep track of which file's which, as well as making it feel like you have your own special name.

This comes into play when Don looks at his sketchbook after waking up. it basically looks something like this.

Blankety Blank

leads to

ViDys

I thought about giving each word a stat too. Allow me to demonstrate it in the most exciting way possible: A CHART

For example, if your 'name' is Piercing Decay (i.e. 'Piercing Decay leads to ViDys'), Don will have +Attack and -Stealth. If it's Fleeting Loss, he will have +Speed and -Attack. In the case of getting two of the same stat - such as Clear Delusion (+ and - Sanity), they cancel eachother out and Don is unchanged.

This system was going to be random, but I asked Jack and he said he hates when the player doesn't get to choose such things. So, there will be some sort of area in which the player chooses 2 of 12 items - one they like and one they dislike. They will be asked a question, such as "Would you say you're quick-witted (+Speed) but reckless (-Defense)?" or "Would you say you're balanced (+-)?" If they say yes, they keep their stats. If they say no, they can choose different items.

As for the Special words, these will only be unlocked after completing the game. When the player is at the item select area, there will be a bang at the door (or something similar). If the player picks the items as normal, the same rules apply. However, if they go to the door and open it, they are automatically assigned the words "Vigil's Dysphoria". This is pretty much just unlocking Hard Mode. However, you get the bonus of an extra enemy:

This is meant to be the physical representation of the vigil's dysphoria: Don's confusing and distressing entrapment in both reality and dreams. If you stay near this guy for too long, the scene tends to fill with black. If it completely fills, you die - so run away!

He won't be around too often - lest the game become too difficult - so just think of him as a little bonus.

Vigil's Dysphoria

Well, I spent pretty much all of yesterday learning to centre-align the header of the blog (Seriously, why is that so hard??) so I'm gonna try to do a bit more work today. Right now I'm going to run over the name "Vidys" and its meaning, and later today I'll write a looooong post about a small mechanic and a character to accompany it.

So, Vidys.

It's basically a word that I found Jack had written down but couldn't remember what it meant. I looked it up but it doesn't seem to be anything. I thought it was a nice looking word though - sort of elegant and cryptic. I reverse-developed it to have meaning: Vigil's Dysphoria - Vigil being a period of wakefulness and Dysphoria being... well, the opposite of euphoria.

So long story short, Vidys is meant to represent the suffering Don feels through his constant not-quite-awake-not-quite-asleep state.

Initial Outline

Alright, just a bit of info on what I'm hoping to do for each project.

Vidys

This is a games document about dreams and the subconscious which I hope to make surreal and kinda trippy. The protagonist Don has been suffering from insomnia and stress to the point where he falls into a confused state of neither proper wakefulness or sleep. He begins searching for meaning behind the seemingly nonsense word "Vidys" that he hopes will end the delusions and various other problems he has.

Troupe

For my honours, I'm doing a whole bunch of characters from different genres. I'm going to try doing as much varied work as possible without giving myself too much to do. I spoke with Josh and Rhoda about it today and they gave me the neat idea of assigning set ranks to certain characters - kind of like in Team Fortress - to show that I can take a guideline (tank, for example) and make a fitting character out of it for different themes.

Futures

For future technology, I'm going to be doing about interactivity and motion sensitivity, especially in regards to emotion. It sounds confusing but there's probably a much simpler way to explain it.

Basically, it's like the way that people react when playing video games and how to immerse them deeper by playing off the way they feel - for example, if your pulse increases, you're probably feeling excited or scared. If your eyesight's being tracked, the system would know where you're looking and, if it thinks you're spending too long looking at the left of the screen, it could throw some enemies in on the right.

Stuff like that.

... If that makes sense?

First Post!

Just thought I should write an introductory post before I properly begin.
This blog is for my third and final year at uni, but I might post some other stuff in here if I think it could belong.

I have 3 projects to do for this year, but one of them might be split in two: Game Proposal (Vidys), Honours (Troupe) and Futures, which consists of a small game proposal and a technology report.

I should probably get round to changing the blog's appearance at some point too.

Here's hoping I do well :'D!