reflection
Final Project - Introduction
As this was the final project for my course, I decided to focus on the main interest I have in terms of making video games - the concept. I was greatly inspired by the many 'Art Of' books that I own, including my favourites Halo and Bioshock. The idea of being a concept artist is very exciting, as it requires the ability to think outside the box and create a character/world/object in a way that matches to a theme or period. This is most satisfying when the ideas become futuristic, as there is no one to say that it isn't possible; although I am also partial to period clothing, which is often recognisably unique and can quickly frame a scene in time.
The intended audience for my project is young adults; people my own age who I feel like can relate to and appreciate the themes that I will put forward throughout the game. That is not to say that it is limited to this age group, however there would be a restriction for the minimum age and I would likely give the game an 18 PEGI Rating just to be on the safe side for all the possible criminal activities that take place within the plot.
My goal for this project was to create the concept art for a game of my creation; I believe I have achieved this. This project pushed me out of my comfort zone and into Maya, learning how to 3D model has been incredibly frustrating and then very rewarding. The techniques I used to make all of the art works have improved greatly since the beginning of the project, largely due to the breadth of my research and perseverance.
Over the course I have had many thoughts on creating my own games, and it was therefore a natural progression for me to pick what I felt would be the most viable idea and explore creating the concept. The gratitude I feel for the people who make games, even the bad ones, is immense, and I only wish someone had told me when I was a kid that I could do that too. It's taken me years of unnecessary failure and ache to be able to take a baby step towards a career that I want. This project for me was the first real step I've taken to seeking out what I want to do for the rest of my time here.
The game itself is based around a main
female - Ada - character, who has two dogs.
I based the dogs themselves off of my own,
as it would be a homage to them both;
allowing for them to outlive me if not in real
life, in a world of my creation. It has a
Cyberpunk setting, with the hopes to be
open world and an emotionally riveting story.
To make up the components of my final
project, I did lots of research; spent time
planning for what pieces to create in
production; made several artworks in order to
supplement the discussed concept.
The story opens with a montage of Ada making a robotic dog, while another dog watches. The robot dog wakes up and that's where the player will pick up control. There will be several interfaces and the controls will take a lot of tweaking to ensure that they are efficient and not too complex. The game will follow her as she deals with the moral and political implications of (what the player will discover) using Neruolink to put the memories from her dog into the cybernetic AI. It will deal with her guilt at saving her dog now and not being able to save her Nan earlier in her life. This technology is well sought after, so she and her dogs is thrust into fights, larceny and more. The finite details may well be adjusted during the development process, but I feel like my initial concept art helps to set the tone and give people a good base of understanding the plot.
Final Project - Research
I consider research to be one of the most important aspects to a project. Gathering relevant information allowed me to have a strong foundation to build my concept art and idea from, while ensuring that I have properly explored the many pitfalls that could cause me issues further on. I looked into my theme, the design process, how to write scripts and most invaluably, decision
making while creating games.
When starting a project, I generally focus on secondary research because I feel that the information that other people can offer is more beneficial to me than that of a primary source. I would have preferred to do more primary research, such as having a questionnaire for my target audience's favourite games and genres, and I could therefore use that information to ensure the product I create is well received. In my research I evaluated my own favourite games to see what they did well, however it would be less biased to have a pool of other people's favourite games to analyse too.
The research side of a project is still the aspect I feel most confident in, as information gathering is one of my strongest suits; this allows me to have a slight advantage when going into production as I am better prepared. There is no such thing as too much research, so there is always an opportunity to find more details or explore something that I could benefit from a greater understanding. If I could go back to the beginning of the project, I would put a greater emphasis on my research into relevant tutorials in Maya, giving myself more time to become familiar with the interface - it slowed me down in production being so green to the software.
Final Project - Feedback
The most important aspect of any project is the feedback and criticisms people have on the work you've produced. The ability to turn the opinions of others into something constructive, and understanding that despite the fact that emotionally and literally so many hours get put into a passion project, using the comments can make it even better.
These responses were a really positive encouragement for me and the time I've spent on this project.
I must have put enough detail and thought into the ideas that based on a few created art works and descriptions, people are invested enough to consider a playing a demo. Although my pool of participants was small, it was a 100% positive indication from the people I asked.
It would be interesting to see after some more time fleshing out the ideas whether I could ask the same people to play the demo and get their response to it. Providing people with game plays demos is another way that game developers gather primary information and feedback.
The target audience of a game - or any kind of media - influences all kinds of design decisions throughout the game. It aids in the consistency of tones and themes, while ensuring that you deliver the gameplay desired by that age group.
It's also key in deciding how to market the game. Looking at trends for this age group and developing a game that matches them, means that the game will be more likely to be successful. This is the reason that Fortnite has blown up to ridiculous proportions; they saw PUBG was trending, then delivered the same content but aimed it at the (larger) audience of children.
It's just good business.
It was interesting to see a mixture of answers to this question. The fact that two of the respondent's said that their favourite part of the concept was the setting was a good indicator that once again I was meeting the requirements for the target audience. The robot dog (cybernetic still sounds cooler) sort of matches up with the setting, as otherwise it wouldn't make much sense in a game with different concepts. The most useful response was that of the person who actually thought about the concept and decided that the unknown was the most interesting part of my idea. To that extent, I agree, there are so many options for me to effect the setting.
Most of the things people mentioned about disliking the concept would be answered once they played the game. it's a difficult balance to get the intrigue and still present enough of a concept to interest people. Some people aren't going to be a fan of the fact that the story with compliment the open-worldness in a way that isn't always going to be funny. The best stories make you feel all kinds of emotions and just because I believe openworld games to be the best for longevity of a game, doesn't mean I'm going to ignore that fact that I have a story to tell, too.
I've elected to disregard the last response and giving up on the story would diminish the point I had in making the game in the first place. The amount of detail I put into the animatic only gave a glimpse as to the setting itself, so I understand why people have said that more detail would be better. The rest of the story is being laid out and the details have changed since even the beginning of this project; it was hard to decide what I could conceivably create in the time frame.
The low poly artstyle is not commonly used in large titles because story based games - and games on a grand scale - generally have to be cruxed in detail and reality. Breath of the Wild (well, Nintendo in particular) has been the only game I've seen in a lower detail art style to pull off such a magnificent feat. Honestly, the scale of the map and the effectiveness of the gameplay means that Breath of the Wild is more of a game goal than GTA in some ways. It's going to be a Marmite situation with the art style for most people; they'll either love it or hate it.
This last question was more for my curiosity than anything else. While I lack in self confidence like you would not believe, I also believe it is beneficial to get an idea on whether other people think the idea is viable at all. A good story writer may have the idea for a million different settings, but must choose to explore only one. The collective yes/maybe is enough of an indication that this may not be the right idea to person at this point in my game development career, but once I have more experience.
Final Project - Finished Product
The general theme and design of the final concept art that I produced is in kind with my initial project designs. However, there have been some changes to the story and how I've presented the themes of grief. Most noticeably, I took out the scenes in the animatic that showed all of Ada's losses, as I felt that this was far too on the nose and good story telling should be subtle and able to be worked out by the player. Knowing everything about a character doesn't necessarily make them more interesting, and showing all of Ada's weaknesses right off the bat seemed like a foolish thing to do upon reflection of my storyboards. The story has also taken in a longer stride, as I've leaned more into the open world genre, it would be necessary for the story to be longer and the increments of plot divisive missions spread out more. Due to this, the structure of the story and the depth of the intro animatic had to be changed.
The game is going to give the player a window into a Cyberpunk universe, with my own take on it (artistic influence and all of that good stuff). The city will be immersive and the storyline playable at the players leisure. The setting is communicated through the designs of the characters, down the the colour keys of the environment concepts. The materials I used in Maya were metallic, and the designs of the clothing and objects were technologically more advanced than current times. These are all clues for the player to help them settle into how the Cyberpunk theme works.
I chose Pink Floyd's Welcome To The Machine as the music for the animatic. This was for several reasons, but most importantly because the build up to that song sounds futuristic and unique. It matched with the setting and helped to create tension within the long pan shots across Ada's desk. I also liked the image that 'Welcome To The Machine' presents, and to me it is a metaphor for the city. Going forward, I am going to have to learn how to use audio software to properly combine different sounds and make sure they have an impact in time with what is happening on the screen. I wanted the line 'welcome to the machine' to be said as the camera pans to the city, like an introduction to the machine that will chew you up and spit you out. It's not fun, optimistic or flattering, it's saying it how it is.
Overall I am very happy with the artworks that I created, feeling that I learned new techniques with what I am familiar with and how to understand a new program. The art reflects what I was trying to communicate about the setting, with the buildings and lighting being key to a Cyberpunk aesthetic. As always, there are things I'm not happy with (Oreo's face, Ada's nose, the headset) and things I would change with a better understanding of the program (materials, textures, design). When I go on to create in the future, I will use what I have discovered to be my strengths and weaknesses in this project to ensure that I do better in the next.
Final Project - Personal Development
I first opened up Maya months ago. I took one look at the interface, said nope to myself and closed it back down. This project forced me to spend the time and have the patience to learn parts of that interface, and create something. I never thought I would 3D model anything, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I'm grateful to have been pushed into learning a new software, because it is something I may seriously consider pursuing in the future (not that what I made was particularly incredible at all, but it is still clearly identifiable as two dogs and a human, so I consider it a success). Also, I believe I have improved on my Photoshop and drawing skills, as I actually produced two pieces of art that I was almost completely happy with - which I have never done before. My organisations skills were slightly better this time around, as I was in control of the project myself; I could create my own goal posts and content to create within a certain time.
The use of Maya in this project has been a highlight because I don't feel completely inept when it comes to making a model. It took me time to develop this understanding, and the satisfaction I got from looking at the first dog model I tried to make, to the third and final one that I did was pretty incredible. There is still a lot to learn and I am excited to continue to learn how it works and become proficient at it.
This project gave me many challenges to deal with. Being in the position of creative control is great, except for the fact that you literally have to think of everything. I had barely the idea for a story and I need to extrapolate that enough to generate suitable concepts, and at first it was completely daunting. The issues I had with understanding Maya slowed me down, leaving me frustrated and it took several days of just sitting there doing it for the technique to click. I ended up with so many vertices and faces, all extruding at the wrong angles, and the fix was simply to merge the vertices but when I started I didn't know that. The beauty of watching the tutorials to make the dogs like I did was that I could only copy them as best I could, and even down to the size of the original cube made everything look so different to the tutorial I was watching. This was great for learning how to do it wrong, not so great at teaching how to fix said mistakes.
There isn't a skill that I don't need to get better at. Everything is a constant process of learning and changing previous conceptions on. My focus will continue to be Photoshop and Maya for the foreseeable future, with everything else being gradually improved by proxy in the background.
With the knowledge gain from this course, I am even more certain than ever that my career path will be hard, slow and I may never reach the point I actually want to. I will not be pursuing university, or a traditional channel to get into the video game industry, as I'm not suitable for that kind of teaching, and while I have my foot into a job I have to accept the responsibilities that have come with my decisions in my youth. This means that I will be working a job while trying to get into the industry, which is the slower and hardly ever successful route. It's good to have a destination to aim for even if you don't ever reach it.
As I anticipated, my research and planning were my strongest suits during this project. I consider myself to be very good at gathering information that will be beneficial and relevant, even in preparation for obstacle that I wouldn't encounter much further into the development process. The artwork that I produced I was actually happy with, and the only thing I would do differently given more time would be to create more of them. If I had more time I would also create a more in-depth animatic, and a full script for the story mode section of the game. I would also like to have begun to use Unity, even if it was only to create the gameplay cutscene for the opening.