Sketching Logo Ideas

Before moving over to Photoshop to create the digital logo, it is important to sketch out ideas to create visual templates that can be moved over to a digital format. Sketching out ideas can get lots of ideas out quickly, in a way that is easily digestible. 

The idea I had stems from this pixel art animation I created some months ago. It's a little dude chucking a peach in the air and catching it. One day I referred to it as 'the little peachy juggler', and I thought it sounded quite funny. I want my logo to involve this piece of art, because I think it's a nice piece of original art, one of the ones I am more proud of, and I want my studio name to be some kind of variation of Peach Juggler, because it's quite a random and funny name, and as a result I think it'd be quite memorable and it'd catch people's curiosity. 

Stemming from this idea, I sketched out some of the ways that I could incorporate this art into a logo. The resulting sketches are below.

Developing Ideas For Branding and Logos

As part of our final project, we will be creating a show-reel, complete with our own logo and branding. To get inspiration for logo design, I created this mood board of various video game developer's logos. This board ranges from small indie studios, to AAA publishers.

One of the favourite logos on this board is the Vlambeer logo. Vlambeer is an independent studio based in the Netherlands, with a couple of breakout hits such as Super Crate Box and Nuclear Throne. The studio was founded by two university students, and this logo comes from a drawing that they randomly found in their class one day. To this day they have stayed clear of publishers, and I think that their logo shows that they are proud of their humble beginnings. Vlambeer are flying the flag for the indie scene, and this logo is testament to that. Moreover, the logo's basic but humorous, cartoony style is an apt indicator for the tone and style of Vlambeer games, which are drenched in style and laughs. In terms of the design of this logo, I like the minimalism, I feel that that basic style of logo can add a lot of impact and brand recognition. I'm not a big fan of the colours in this particular instance, I'd like to see some more vibrant colours.

The logo of Dutch indie studio Vlambeer.

Another logo that I like is the Double Fine logo. The logo is super stylised, and has an old school almost western look to it with the bold font, the overall shape of the logo, and the colours too. When this is teamed with the weird two headed cherub, it gives a real sense of oddity to the logo overall, which really follows through the tone of the studio's games. They don't take themselves too seriously, their games are very stylised and humorous, but the logo has a high level of polish just like the games they produce. I feel like there is a juxtaposition in this logo between the old fashioned shapes of the logo and the random nature of having a two headed baby as the subject, however it works together in communicating the tone of the company.

Double Fine's logo brilliantly sums up the style of their games

The Santa Monica Studio logo is quite visually pleasing, but being so basic I question it's ability to be recognisable and have a strong brand identity. Whilst the coloured shape element is nice and works with the text, as a standalone logo I don't think many people could recognise what it is representing, which is a fundamental aspect of logo design and branding. It doesn't communicate anything about the studio's style, about their personality, and it has quite a corporate feel to it. Santa Monica Studio is a Sony first party studio, with their most notable games coming in the form of the God of War series, and as a result they don't have the freedom to develop their own projects like other studios can. You could argue that this lack of personal expression almost comically comes through in their logo, although there really is no excuse to have such a poor and bland logo in a creative field such as video games.

The Santa Monica Studio logo is bland and lifeless

Rough Draft of Character Art

I created this quick draft of what my main character could look like using PiskelApp.com. I think as a concept drawing it looks okay, but if I have the time I'd like to tidy it up at a later date.

Concepting Level Design

Before I can start creating artwork, I need to first create rough sketches of environments that I want in my game. This can serve as a kind of list of things that I need to create.

Production Schedule For Project Three

Here is a link to my production schedule for project three. The production schedule details each task that I am going to be carrying out each day of production. Working alone, I have got a lot of work to get through, and as it is still early in the project's life cycle, I have kept the tasks quite broad, as to not go too specific. The reasoning behind this is partly because I don't yet have a good idea of just what this project will involve, as it's the first time I have done anything like this, but also because I want to give myself flexibility to move from task to task as and when I need to. For example, if I have a brainwave for a certain aspect then I want to be able to move onto that while the iron is still hot, and conversely if I am stuck at a point that I am wasting time on, being able to move to other areas will mean that production doesn't have to come to a halt.

I have also given myself a wide berth in terms of deadlines, as to not leave myself short on time for any particular aspect. Hopefully this means that I won't be working under too much pressure, and will result in me finishing ahead of time for some tasks, leaving time where I can polish up other elements on my project.

Facial Expression Reference Material Research

 For more reference material on how to draw facial expressions, I looked for some different images that I could come back to when producing some of my character portraits. This first image I think is very interesting, as it looks at using a very cartoony style. This style has some draw backs in terms of not having a huge amount of detail to add nuance, but equally I think that this may be the greatest strength of this style as well, as the artist is allowed to over-exaggerate with expressions, and using these broad strokes makes the emotions clear to the reader in an instant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4za5eEmkcCM

These two images are much more detailed than the previous one, and I think they will hold a lot of value for me when it comes to creating my portraits. They have a lot of different elements to pick up on for different emotions, and also the combinations of emotions to create further ones is something I can use to add depth to my characters.

Drawing Facial Expressions

Today we looked at drawing different facial expressions and how to achieve a variety of emotions through the subtle changes in shapes and lines.

The first six drawings are basic emotions such as happy and sad. By changing features on the face such as the angle of the mouth, the height and angle on the eyebrows, the size of the eyes, and also whether or not there are any wrinkles where the face has scrunched up, we can clearly identify the different emotions that each face is representing. For example, the eyebrows on the 'anger' and 'disgust' faces are very similar, but the wide mouth and the wide eyed look on the 'anger' face clearly distinguish it from the scrunched and angular look of the 'disgust' face.

The next four drawings (the ones with numbers underneath) are mixes of emotions. For example, the face labelled '3+5' is a mix of 'surprise' and 'fear'. Using this combination of different facial features allows us to create a depth of emotion in our characters, and give a completely different feeling to the viewer.

Using these techniques will be important going forward into the next project, where I will be creating a graphic narrative. My project is going to be 2D with a side scroller perspective, however during conversations I am going to utilise character portraits to add more emotional context to the characters as they develop.

Developing Story Ideas

I've been trying to get an initial overview sorted as early as possible, so that I can keep a clear vision of what I want to create. I have decided upon a plot synopsis.

Doug is a cow. He lives in a field located directly behind a little burger joint in the backwoods of rural America, who pride themselves on sourcing fresh beef mere yards away from the counter. When Doug's number is up, and the sadistic burger flipper comes for him, Doug fights back, killing the owner. In a panicked effort to get rid of the body, Doug disguises himself as the owner, and puts the still warm corpse through the meat grinder. However, before he can escape, he is roped into cooking up some human burgers for some hungry customers. The burgers are a hit, and by the end of the day he is all sold out of his human burgers.

When closing up for the night, Doug ponders his next move. Will people find out his secret? Will people come back for more of his special burgers? How will he get more meat if they do?Whilst sweeping, a lone trucker knocks on the window asking for a bite to eat, and Doug is presented with an opportunity. "In for a penny...".

I am keeping it brief for the time being, as I want to focus on this sequence. I think it has a lot of opportunity for tension, suspense, laughs and some key moments where the player can direct the action. Rather than enhance the scope, I would rather maintain a narrow, focused vision at least for the time being. 

Graphic Narrative Research

For the graphic narrative project, one of my first tasks was to get some inspiration by researching into existing games that use graphic narrative techniques. The first game I chose was The Walking Dead, by Telltale Games. This game could be best described as an interactive film, where players watch the action unfold in front of them and are prompted into action at specific moments to influence the story, usually in the form of dialogue choices and mutually exclusive action choices. What this makes for is a very well paced story, whilst still allowing the player to feel like they're moving things forward with their actions.

Dialogue choices in The Walking Dead offer some engagement for the player

The Walking Dead, and other games by Telltale, have been criticised for presenting the player with the illusion of choice, where the player's actions may seem to have impact on what unfolds, but in reality the diverging paths converge in the same points later down the line, and ultimately don't have the huge repercussions on the ending that is intimated. This seems like bad practice, and once the cat is out of the bag for these games it generally blows up in their face. However, the reality of developers creating vasts swathes of content that many players may never see results in a lot of potentially wasted work. For the purposes of my project, I have to side with Telltale on this, and as a result I won't be entertaining the idea of branching paths of dialogue for fear that it would waste time that I don't have.

The second game that I chose to research for graphic narrative was The Secret of Monkey Island by LucasArts. A classic 2D adventure game, this game may not be a typical graphic narrative, however it has some elements that I would like to incorporate into my project. The environments in the game are very meticulously created, and are littered with lots of little details that add character to the locations, contributing to world-building. In my project, I would like to focus on creating a small number of 'sets', and have them be rich in details that contribute to the world, as I feel this is more realistic goal in the amount of production time I have, than to create lots of different settings for the game.

The Secret of Monkey Island has environments that are bursting with world building details

The main criticism of The Secret of Monkey Island, and similar games such as Sam and Max, is the use of 'moon-logic' in their puzzles. The game's puzzles are usually solved by using one item on another, choosing from your inventory and the environment around you, in order to complete the puzzle. The problem is that these puzzles are often not logical in their solutions, hence the term 'moon-logic', where the solution is completely nonsensical. Having these puzzles results in the player becoming frustrated, fumbling over ideas of how to move forward, and it slows the pace of the game down to a crawl, ruining the momentum of the story.

The frustrating puzzles of Monkey Island have been eradicated due to the new style of adventure game such as The Walking Dead, and this does result in much better pacing. However, some argue that The Walking Dead takes too much control away from the player, and is teetering on the edge of not even being a game. I personally favour TWD's style, and I think for the purposes of my project I will lean that way.

Generating Ideas for Project 3

Project 3 will be based around creating a graphic narrative. Graphic narratives are a very popular form of media, best known in formats such as graphic novels, comic books, comic strips etc. The initial phase of this project is the ideas phase, where I will be researching existing examples of the medium and mixing these with my own ideas, to formulate a basis of what I will create for this project.

I am interested in creating a web based project, in a classic comic book style using panels, speech bubbles and big artwork. I think that hosting my project on a website speaks to my web design skill set, and offers my content out to a wide audience in a familiar format. One such website that sticks out as something similar to what I aim to create is The Wormworld Saga, a digital graphic novel by Daniel Lieske.

The basis for the story is a modern take on Sweeney Todd, whereby a burger van owner goes on a murder spree to supply his meat. I think that this represents a lot of opportunity for some interesting characters, and for some dark comedic elements to seep into the writing. The art style is going to be pixel art based, and I am going to use some of the spatial storytelling techniques from the last project when designing my environments.

Reponsive Portfolio and CSS Transitions

The first task I had today was to make my portfolio website responsive, in particular to have it be mobile friendly. When designing for mobile, everything must cascade vertically, whereas my website previously had a grid layout where many divs were positioned side by side. To do this, I used a media query, where the browser would check the width of the display, and if it were under 640px wide then it would execute a certain section of code, and if it were over 640px then it would execute different code. This means that in the under 640px code, I can take out the flexbox structure, and change them to block elements, meaning they will stack vertically, for viewing on mobile. Because my images are already responsive, the content changes dynamically when viewing on a mobile device.

The code for my mobile media query

The code for the desktop media query, complete with flexbox structure

I also wanted to use some CSS transitions in my website, as they are a simple yet effective means of adding a more interesting look to a site. I started by adding a transition to some of my links, whereby when the user hovers the cursor over the text, the font size increases slightly over 0.2 seconds. This is a simple trick that indicates to the user that this text is clickable, and will most likely carry out an action when clicked. The other transitions I added were to images. I scaled up the image on the hover, and also made the image slightly transparent, with the idea being that there will be some text appearing over the image describing what the image is, or what it was created for. 

Here is a link to my portfolio.

Building and Exporting in 3DS Max

Today I started creating a new model for our game, a simple bedside table. I started by creating a simple box primitive, and increasing the number of segments in the width and height, to give me some control over extruding polygons.

Increasing the segmentation allows for more control over creating complex shapes

From here, I used the extrude tool on the middle set of polygons to create a recess in the box, giving it more of a table shape. 

Using the extrude tool to make a more complex shape

I then deleted the bottom face of the object, so that there wasn't an awkward edge sticking out from underneath. Because this object will be on the floor, it doesn't matter that there is no bottom face to the object, because the player will never see it.

I then used the extrude tool once again, this time to bring a section out from the shape, to represent a drawer.

Extruding to create a drawer.

When making models, it is important to maintain as low a poly count as possible. Whilst it is tempting to think that more polygons will equate to more detail, this isn't always the case, and simplicity is often key to great looking models. Moreover, a low poly count is an important aspect of optimization, as having models that have thousands of polygons each will slow your frame rate to a crawl.

This model contains 186 polygons, which is a good, low number.

Once the model is completed, it needs exporting for use in UE4. This is done by using the export function. From here, the model is saved as an Autodesk file (.FBX), so it can be imported into Unreal.

The model is exported and saved as an Autodesk file

Creating Basic Models in 3DS Max

Today I was creating some of the basic assets that will be found within our game. These assets included a bed, a side table, and a lamp. I google image searched for all of these objects, and found some images to use as reference material, to maintain a realistic look to the objects.

Making Changes To Production Schedule

After having the unexpected interruption of industry week, we were a week behind schedule through no fault of our own. This being followed by half term meant that after two weeks of our project, we had don barely any work, and left us a lot to do over the remaining four weeks. As a class, we asked if it would be possible to extend the deadline, and give us another week on the project, to which the answer was yes.

In response to this, I edited our production schedule to reflect the new dates that we were aiming to hit, and we are now back on schedule.

Decals in UE4

Today we looked at creating a scratches decal in Photoshop and importing it over to UE4. The first step was using the brush tool in Photoshop to simply create some lines, that when used with a transparent background would resemble scratches on any underlying textures. Then, importing these into Unreal Engine, and changing the material properties to 'deferred decal' allows us to paint the decal all over the level.

My scratches decal implemented in a UE4 level

The next thing we looked at was creating unique shapes using practical methods and translating those into the digital world. We used ink and sponges and created a number of interesting shapes using this method, then using the selection and fill tools in Photoshop, I created a slime looking decal for use all over the level.

A slimey splat decal

Workflow and Importing Textures

This was the first day where both myself and Mitchel were working together on the project, and part of this work would involve me creating and editing textures for him to import into UE4. To help our workflow, I created a shared folder in Google Drive for all of our files. This allows me to upload the textures to the folder and Mitchel to download them, whilst keeping a backup of all the files that is accessible to both of us at all times. This is a good solution to the problem of working on two different machines, and eliminates the need for the constant passing back and forth of USB drives and such.

This is a capture of the shared Google Doc

After I had created the textures, Mitchel imported them into UE4 and applied them to the relative surfaces. Some of the geometry in the level is particularly big, such as the main corridor walls, so for this we needed to use the 'Texture Coordinates' node in the material blueprint. This allows you to set a tiling rate for the texture, so that rather than stretching it across the wall, it tiles in a way which is consistent with the rest of the walls. We also have a carpet texture in our game, so we had to increase the roughness of that texture, so that the light didn't reflect off it and it didn't look shiny.

The main corridor, with textures applied to the surfaces

The blueprint view of the material, including the 'Texture Coordinates' node.

Creating a Door in 3DS Max

Today I created a door asset in 3DS Max for use in our project. Our game consists of a corridor connecting five different rooms, so naturally doors will be one of the first things that the player sees and interacts with. I started with a basic box primitive, shaping it in the form of a thin, tall door. I used the cylinder and sphere tools to create a doorknob also.

Extruding the sections of the door

I had the basic form, but wanted to make something a bit more interesting, so using the extrude tool, I indented the door in four places, as I saw was a common thing when searching for images of wooden doors.

A door asset created in 3DS Max

The last thing I did was find a wood texture and applied it to the door. I don't think the texture matches the door particularly well, but it serves a purpose as a placeholder as it gives a clear indication of what the object is.

Responsive Images and Layout Website

Today we were tasked with replicating a website from a choice of three, including the webpage having responsive images and layout. This is the website I chose to emulate.

The original website that I was aiming to recreate

The website I chose is full of images of different shapes and sizes, and it has a very sporadic layout, so I felt it posed a good challenge for me to test my skills. I created the layout first, using flexbox elements to have divs cascade horizontally and wrap onto the next line, as opposed to everything falling vertically one after the other. From here, the challenge was to make the site mobile friendly, and this means making all of the divs fall vertically one after the other, the exact thing I was trying to get away from. This has reaffirmed in my mind, the importance of design a website 'mobile first', where you create the website for the mobile experience and then adapt it for tablets, then laptops, and so on. To make the site fall vertically, I used a media query to take out all of the flexbox functionality, and set all of the divs' widths to 100%. This way, everything was vertical, a much more user friendly experience on mobile devices.

Here is a link to the site, hosted on Github.

Wall and Floor Textures

The first part of production for myself is to get textures for the walls and the floors. I started by finding some textures for wallpapers that were labelled for re-use and importing them into Photoshop. From here, I used various adjustments such as color balance, hue/saturation and brightness/contrast to change the colours on the image, making sure it was the right colour for what I wanted.

Once I had achieved the right look, I exported the images as PNG files at a resolution of 1024x1024px at 72ppi (pixels per inch), as this is the optimal texture size, and I chose PNG as the file format as it is lossless, meaning there will be compression and loss of quality over time, as would be experienced with JPEG.

Campo Santo - Creators of Firewatch

On February 9th 2016, Firewatch was released to the world. The first game from San Francisco based studio, Campo Santo, Firewatch is a first person adventure game, centered around the story of two characters, Henry and Delilah. After generating significant buzz from their E3 2015 reveal trailer, expectations were high and hopes even higher. The game released to a very good critical response, with the game sitting at an 80 on Metacritic averaged across the three main platforms. Success for the team, their first game is a hit, and a new indie darling studio is born. In hindsight, the quality of the game should never have been in question, if the pedigree of the developers is any sort of barometer.

Jake Rodkin - Creative Director

Past Work: The Walking Dead, Poker Night at the Inventory, Puzzle Agent, Tales of Monkey Island, Sam & Max.

Sean Vanaman - Writer

Past Work: The Walking Dead, Poker Night at the Inventory, Puzzle Agent, Tales of Monkey Island.

Jane Ng - Environment Artist

Past Work: The Cave, Stacking, Brutal Legend, Spore, The Godfather, The Return of the King.

Chris Remo - Developer, Composer

Past Work: Gone Home, Thirty Flights of Loving, The Cave, Battlefront Rogue One.

James Benson - Animator

Past Work: Ori and the Blind Forest, Fable 3, Project Milo.

Ben Burbank - Graphics Programmer

Past Work: Double Fine, EA Sports.

Aubrey Hesselgren - Gameplay Programmer

Past Work: Brink, Super Meat Boy Galaxy, The World is Flat.

Gabe McGill - Producer



Kathy McElwee - Accounting & Finance

Past Work: Telltale Games.

Creating Responsive Images of Project One Work

Here is a link to the responsive website that I created to showcase some of the development work of project one.

Colour Psychology

Red

Red is an effective colour at grabbing our attention. It stimulates us, raising the pulse rate. Red induces a physical reaction, and as a result is good when used for call to actions, or when it is important that something is communicated above all else.

A great use of the colour red in video games is in the game Mirrors Edge. The game uses a mechanic called 'Runner Vision' in their level design, whereby important elements are highlighted in red. Red being the first colour we recognize, this has the effect of grabbing the player's attention and directing them in the right direction.

Blue

Blue is seen as the colour of the mind, and has soothing qualities. Whilst red gives us a physical reaction in terms of raising the pulse, blue allows us to think with more clarity and aids concentration.

A common use of blue in video games is in strategy games, where concentration and clarity of thought are important to achieving the optimal strategy. Developers will use blue in various UI elements, in order to help the player think more clearly.

Yellow 

Yellow is a colour that is linked to emotion, for better or for worse. Different tones of yellow can induce different emotions, ranging from confidence, optimism and improved self-esteem, down to other tones of yellow giving us feelings of fear and anxiety.

A game that uses a great range of yellows is Journey, a game about life and death. Naturally, this game is very emotional, and being set in a desert gives the developers a wide range of yellow tones to play with to illicit various emotions, ranging from hope and joy, to fear and loss.

Green

Green is a restful colour, the colour of balance. Green is a reassuring colour, which dates back to a primitive level where people would associate the colour green in vegetation with nearby water, indicating little risk of famine.

Green is used frequently in video games to reassure the player in the form of pickups. Whether it be health kits, more ammo, powerups, green is often the colour of choice in the instances. This is because it is a colour that the player will associate with help, a colour that will aid them in some way.

Day and Night Cycles

Whilst not necessarily different colours, having the same world in the day and the night will greatly impact the way that the player views the world, and will illicit different emotions dependent on that. The biggest impact on this is lighting, and the colours associated with this lighting. For example, a well lit scene could make the player feel quite calm, like they can explore freely. However, the same scene lit darkly for nighttime will make the player feel apprehensive, and will make them think twice about every move.

Researching Games That Use Spatial Storytelling

When thinking of spatial storytelling, the games that immediately spring to mind are those that have been termed 'Walking Simulators', such as Dear Esther, or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, both games from The Chinese Room. However, spatial storytelling exists in a wide variety of games. The two games that I will be focusing on in this report are Dishonored 2, from Arkane Studios, and LA Noire, from Team Bondi.

Dishonored 2 has brilliantly designed levels, full of rich detail

Dishonored 2 is a stealth action game that gives the player complete freedom to choose how they approach their objectives. The game can be completed by killing every enemy in the game, by killing none of the enemies, or anything in between. The 'Chaos System' is central to the story of the game, and will have a physical effect on the world around you as you move through levels. Throughout the game you come across areas that have been condemned, victims of the Bloodfly plague. These buildings are infested with vicious, blood sucking insects that will attack you if you get to close, and pose questions about how to approach the level. The more lives you take throughout the game the worse the Bloodfly plague will become, and more of these condemned buildings will surface as you progress. From a game play perspective, this creates different situations to navigate. From a narrative perspective however, this adds incredible weight to your decisions.
Whilst it may be easy to justify killing 'bad guys', the repercussions of your blood-lust result in a darker world, where hundreds of people are losing their lives to the plague, and those lucky enough to escape the infestation of Bloodflies spreading through their homes are destined for a life of famine and poverty. This adds a level of morality to the mechanics of the game, where your actions can be directly linked to the dead bodies you find strewn throughout these condemned buildings. I think that this method of spatial storytelling is particularly interesting, and takes full advantage of the medium of games. Where most games use spatial storytelling in a passive way, for the player to experience different stories of the world, Dishonored 2 puts you right in the center of the spatial storytelling, and develops it around you and your actions.

The bloodfly infestation that spreads across Karnaca can be directly traced back to the tip of your sword

The other game I am going to talk about is LA Noire, an open world detective game. The player arrives at a crime scene, and must explore in order to find clues to solve the case. If ever a game was tailor made for spatial storytelling, then it is surely LA Noire. The job of the player in this role of detective is to assess a situation, and using all the clues at their disposal, come to conclusions about what happened. For the developer, spatial storytelling is about giving the player visual cues that answer some questions whilst posing others, and giving just the right amount of guidance to let the player come to their own conclusions. A match made in heaven.

LA Noire captures the feeling of Hollywood crime dramas, placing you in the starring role

Environmental storytelling is the main mechanic in LA Noire. The game has driving, shooting, conversations, all those natural open world tropes that it seems so hard for AAA games to deviate from (even when it is a complete juxtaposition with the tone of the rest of the game), however the standout sections of the game is when you enter a crime scene, and have to explore to find the various clues, piecing them together to sleuth your way to a victory. You really feel like a Hollywood detective, and this feeling is based upon the strength of the spatial storytelling. My one gripe with this is that I feel it slightly lets itself down with some very 'gamey' systems, such as audio cues when you're near a clue, which can result in players just jogging around until they hear a sound, rather than searching in a natural way. However, whilst I find this mildly annoying, I appreciate that it's a necessary contrivance to keep up the pacing of the game, and not have it become frustrating,

Both games are great examples of spatial storytelling, but in very different ways. Dishonored 2 sees the landscape of the world shift around your actions; the spatial storytelling follows the mechanics.In LA Noire however, the spatial storytelling is the mechanic, and the game play is centered around using this to immerse you into your detective character. I think that the LA Noire method of spatial storytelling is more akin to those titles I mentioned in the opening of the report, the 'walking simulators', but framed in this guise of being a detective gives it a unique perspective and lifts it from feeling like a passive experience, to being right in the thick of it. As a result, this is a unique example, and whilst I think studying the techniques that the developers use has it's merits, it would be hard to take any direct influences for my own project. Dishonored 2 however, and the idea of your actions influencing the world, is a surefire way of giving the player agency in the world. This is an idea I will explore in future projects, a more subtle method of environmental storytelling that means the game isn't based on spatial storytelling, but rather the technique enhances the experience as a whole.

Production Schedule

I created the production schedule for mine and Mitchel's project. It contains each activity that each of us will be undertaking each day, sometimes working together and other times working on separate tasks. The production schedule contains a play test day, where we can gather external feedback about our game, so that moving forward we can use said data to influence development. There is also a major progress review in the schedule, situated just before the week that is scheduled for writing, so that if necessary we can use this week to make up for lost time. We chose this particular week as we felt that it was most important to work on the environment and make sure that was at a suitable level, rather than spend time writing.

Here is a link to the production schedule.

Over the six weeks of production myself and Mitchel will have 58.5 hours each of time to work on the project. This is not counting the sessions that we have with Dwayne, due to the fact that during his sessions we do not work on our projects, and this also does not contain the half term week. We have settled upon one milestone per week, so we will have roughly 11 hours per each miletstone.

After researching the pay rate for 3D modelling and environment artists, I found that the average hourly rate falls at around £18 per hour. At this hourly rate, over the course of production I would earn £1053.
The cost of using the two different programs, Unreal Engine 4 and 3DS Max, would be £340 for a two month license for 3DS, whilst Unreal Engine 4 is free to use, you simply have to pay 5% royalties on gross revenue once that number surpasses $3,000.

Map Layout For Project 2

Today, Mitchel and myself worked on the map design for our project. It is a simple five room layout, connected by a single corridor. Each room will be the same room, but will be depicting a different time in the character's life. The rooms will all be open from the start, to allow players to piece together the story in whichever way they see fit.

A top down overview of the map

A perspective view of the corridor, and a view through the door

Top down view of the room, including some items found in it

As previously stated, each room will be the same, so the layout of each room will stay largely the same, however it will be in the small details that the value of each different room will be found.