To begin this project our group wanted to establish what era the forge was going to be in, our conclusion came to a celtic forge set in between the 17th and 18th century, moving in a more stylised direction. We decided to aim for dark fantasy in the vain of World of Warcraft and Sea of Thieves, utilising exaggerated silhouettes and unrealistic design in certain props, form over function essentially. We created a moodboard of aspects we would like to see and aim for in the environment.
This helped us get an idea of the layout as well as what general props will need to be designed to help bring the scene to life. A lot of reference images were just compiled into a Discord server for convenience sake. With this we could get started doing thumbnail sketches for the environment, I did my own digitally below:
I wanted to consider what the focal point of the scene was and I felt the obvious answer was the Anvil itself, then I placed aspects such as the furnace and window in a position which would highlight the anvil by having the light sources meet on the said anvil. I also just placed Celtic imagery such as the cross itself over the window. I also noticed from the forges of that era that they were generally incredibly cramped and messy. This is something I tried to convey in the concept.
This is a moodboard we created illustrating the general style mentioned earlier.
After the style and setting was established we needed to decide on a workflow, I decided to make a trello to better organise who would do what as well as setting up a place where people could dump handy resources they found on top of info on the course criteria. I also designed it so once an asset list was created it could be turned into a set of cards, and whoever wanted to make an asset to establish this by simply dragging it under their name card. I did this as everyone was indecisive on a specific role but knew what assets they wanted to create, apparently in my research this type of workflow is called a Kanban workflow, below is a picture of the trello and a link, as well as an article on Kanban workflows:
https://www.cio.com/article/217626/what-is-kanban-workflow-management-simplified.html
https://trello.com/b/CQVDXoJz/blacksmith-environment-project
