This week we were sorted into our groups and were tasked with generating ideas for our game:
We narrowed ours down to either ‘Late Night Petrol Station’, ‘Russian Doll’ or ‘Alien Claw Machine – Easy Pickin’s’.
After a mini-pitch to our ‘producers’, we settled on our ‘Late Night Petrol Station’ idea. After class, we set up a discord and miro board, began throwing out ideas in relation to the art development – Games we were inspired by included:
We started to push in some reference surrounding characters, props and environment:
The game development students also started laying out mechanics etc.:
I started with concepting some character models. I thought about the references everyone was throwing out, and these were very simple, flat coloured and airing on cel-shaded looking. With this in mind, I tried to keep the concepts incredibly simple. I took reference from things like:
These are all fairly simple meshes, very low poly and therefore should – theoretically – be quite easy to make. I started concepting:
I really like the look of these noodle arms, really simple models with a set base and long limbs — I thought it might be possible to use one body, and interchange hair styles and facial features to create randomly generated characters. I’m not sure how possible this is, and will have to liase with the game development students for more information.
I also gathered some reference for the environments:
We all agree that the interior should be relatively cluttered – it should represent a solo-employee working late shift. There should be some assets around – such as cardboard boxes and step ladders, showing that there are jobs to be done that the employee hasn’t gotten to yet.
I took colour pallets from a lot of reference to play around with colour:
I blocked out a couple of simple environments for reference to concept with:
I started to concept, first drawing the till view in order to play around with some colour combinations:
I think that the consensus was that we quite liked a very mono-tone, blue and cool (sterile) environment. I thought that this gave the impression that the store was closed, but took the blue theme forward:
I preferred the more teal colour rather than straight blue, I thought it felt a little eerier and creepier rather than the place being fully closed. I also made all of the products incredibly saturated to make them more visable/pop against the muted background.
I didn’t like the purple here, but I did quite like the red and teal — again, this gives me more creepy vibes. Red = Scary, after all – I thought as the difficulty of the game ramped up, perhaps the lights could change to symbolise a transition into a different level.
I also put a little thought into the layout of the employee desk and the CCTV monitors, as the main up of the character:
Finally, I put a little thought into the props:
I think that we should try and use some saturated colours for a pop, since the environment is going to be quite muted and dull. I think that this could be quite a nice change from that. I also thought that we could customise a few props to have parody names, something a little funny just to add a bit of variety. I don’t really know how do-able this is, as it would be quite a task to undertake, but I ran with it anyway!