The Character Design

So first off I started with a quick rough sketch on paper. Because even my quick sketches have a bit of detail on them this took me a bit to sort out. I tried to think of the time period that the game was based in and kind of took it from there. I gave him big shoulders so it made his frame look bigger than it actually was. Since our characters had basic roles and mine was the tank, I decided to make him look like he was built to last.

 

The drawings above show the progress on how I went about with my drawing. We decided to go with the 2D graphic look so I designed and coloured my drawings in illustrator. Since I had a bit of experience with the program before I was able to navigate my way around it and finish the drawings alot easier so this helped alot on time. I scanned my drawings into Photoshop and just edited them in illustrator. I done a basic outline and just coloured them in after. I had to mess around with the colours quite a bit since I couldn't figure out what I wanted it to be. Once I had the basic colour I began defining the detail with shade and highlight.  

Well after spending a while on developing the drawing and making it a final piece, I also did a final shield and sword for the game. After having a week sorting out everything for the design document and getting stuff together I think we caught up pretty fast. Yes we might have a few pieces missing but I think it counts on how well you present and get across your point. I think I have achieved the kind of look I wanted to give my character and happy with the overall results. I think if we had a little more time and didn't decide to change the game we would have had a better chance to develop it more.

Changing the plan..

After a couple of weeks working on this project I came back after half term to find out that our group had changed the game we was creating. Obviously because I drew out a bunch of concept art it was really frustrating. Going from the few scribbles I drew and to now creating a totally different concept was hard. We had basically a week to do everything again and since one of our group members left we are only left with three people. 

The basic story involves a dragon that is terrorising the worlds of the each three characters. The leaders of each race have chosen certain warriors to take battle in defending and saving the world. From the adventure they are blessed with a powerful crystal that embodies into their weapon, giving them abilities.
 
After I was told what the game was actually about, It was alot easier for us all to go with this idea, as much as I found it frustrating. The game is basically a side scrolling puzzle adventure game. Going off ideas like Trine gave us a basic start and base to build on. We had 3 main races; the human, the dwarf and the elf. I was left with the human since they already chose theirs. I didn't mind this because I was pretty excited about coming up ideas with this game.
After knowing what I had to do I began to look for inspiration and ideas I could incorporate into my own design. Creating a mood board gave me the examples I needed.

Here is my mood board,

I wanted to have a medieval kind of type armour for my human and that was the plan in the begging. Because our storyline in the game is all to with this powerful crystal that gets forged into special weapons, I decided to go with this type of look. The game itself has alot of depth to it and would give the player the experience to team up with two more people and play through the main story together. For a simple side scroller we wanted to add alot of detail, no matter how simple it came across.

Games Development Project 2

Coming Up With The Idea

Group Members: Richard, Russell, Leon and Myself.

The new project was launched today and we found out that we had to work in groups to take a game idea and develop it more. We had a choice to choose the total genre and style of gameplay but since we couldn’t decide on an idea, we ended up going blind and picking out the hat. We ended up with a Sci-fi strategy game for the PC. We chose to stick with what we had gotten and created a brainstorm of different ideas that all ended up revolving around a base strategy game. Taking ideas from games such as Command and Conquer, Halo Wars and StarCraft we pretty much had a base for our game to build on. So starting off  having two different teams and battling out with built turrets and waves of units against each other , this was the overall idea of how the game was going to develop.  

To give you example of what I mean, the game is more along the lines of Sanctum.

After working out what the main objective of the game would be and that there would be two main sides we split into groups. Richard and Russell are handling the “Sci-fi human cyborg” race and Leon and I are handling the “Sci-fi alien creature” race.

We first created mood boards so it gave us an idea to show each other the kind of creatures we wanted to create. This gave us a chance to throw ideas easily and be able to get a quick idea of what we wanted. I used different pictures to show the different colours and different kind of armour an alien could have. Here is a picture of my mood board,