At the beginning of this assignment we were put into teams with the understanding to develop a video game with the games design students. We were shown the “theme” unstable, and was shown a video presentation on examples in which it could be interpreted.

We then met in the games design room and quickly got to know each other, we discussed the general media we liked to consume alongside the genre of games we liked playing. We also showed each other some of the work we created up to that point to get a consensus of the type of style we worked off of, and what could probably be capable of producing down the line. I was really nervous to work with people I’ve never met before, and from a entirely different course, but when getting to know the group I found they were really easy to talk to and bounce ideas off of. I’ve had it in previous groups before where I felt nervous speaking up and just went with the flow opposed to being passionate about the work I was producing, so this was a nice change of pace.

On the first day we were to come up with 50 concepts for games based off of the word “unstable.” I had asked the group what was the first thing that came to mind when they thought of the word unstable and noted it down. It wasn’t anywhere near 50 ideas, but it was a good start for idea generation.

Wrote down what we needed to do to keep on track:

We then thought to down down 3 ideas on a word document each and read them out to each other based on what we previously discussed. I noted down the 3 ideas at the bottom of my document.

When Daithe suggested the Grim Reaper idea we bounced jokes off of each other about him doing it as an employee to death, him getting promoted and earning more with each kill. I liked the concept instead of him stereotypically scary that it was a “cutesy” design to contrast the dark acts he was performing, this stemmed from showing the group me and Ellen’s crane game short that featured cutesy, low poly characters.

I quickly put together the PowerPoint with the help of my team to present our ideas to the class. We had our hearts set on the Grim idea and was happy that the lecturers agreed this was the most solid ideas out of the 3 presented.

I then relayed onto Chloe what she missed and was agreed on in her absence. I also created a separate discord (Named GG, I had no other ideas for the time but the name stuck) and invited everyone so our ideas were organized into sections and easy to access.

 

Progression and Concepts:

We organized a day to call so we could discuss further in depth our style approaches for our game. Thankfully Chloe documented everything that was discussed so we had a point of reference to reflect back onto.

We had agreed that “Untitled Goose Game” had a lot of crossover with our idea (objections to carry out, cute simplistic design causing chaos where you’d least expect it) and discussed a lot of style influences that we can take inspiration from. The main design elements that we boiled it down to was “soft fantasy/dark whimsy”, a cute Grim Reaper design that interacts with objects to cause humans demise that subverts players expectations in a comedic light. We originally wanted to have the Grim Reaper directly cause the deaths but took Mike’s idea into consideration where it would be better to have Grim interact with objects to cause the human deaths, having the player think carefully about the different approaches they can take. We also originally planned for the game to lack blood but the lecturers were disappointed by this, so we thought it would add to the cute/dark juxtaposition to include this element.

I also showed my team Death’s Door and Aka, games that I had came across when browsing low poly games. They focused heavily on stylised approaches to their design and enviroment that I personally enjoyed alongside the “soft fantasy” genre that we were looking into.

There was also a brief discussion of roles. I was aware of how well Ellen and Chloe’s 3D character models turned out from posting on discord I suggested the two to focus on characters if they were comfortable in doing so, and I would be happy to focus on environments. Since I’m mostly a character focused person I thought I would challenge myself into doing environmental concepts for the style guide, but it wasn’t really set in stone. For the time being I mostly done up some designs for the reaper alongside environment concepts for the office, sharing these in the discord/miro board that Ellen created.

I made a pinterest board to reflect back on other designs as I went to gain inspiration. Looking back I should’ve invited my teammates to build on this board but we were mostly using Miro/discord to share ideas, so I would usually just post what I found for there. I thought the more designs we had for Grim the more design components will can pull and draw inspiration from each others designs. Mostly kept to Chloe’s idea of having a cool colour palette for Grimm.

I went over a few design elements for the office and “upgradable” sections for cosmetics, at the time we discussed the more he earned the better his equipment became. This didn’t add anything to gameplay, it was mostly just a change of visual (like his upgradable outfits.) I thought if I were to focus on environments the office would’ve been a good place to start since its a condensed space opposed to the construction site so I noted down some considerations for the space and shared them with my group.

The following class lead us down to an activity where we were to analyse existing video games and their influences as a team. We chose 3 different games to analyse, one that I had focused on was Cult of the Lamb. Although I never played the game it intrigue me as it was a similar concept in what we were trying to achieve, so I looked a little bit more into it. We again did this in Miro so we could discuss what we wrote while live-editing our choices. My research was very surface level, but it was nice to think of other medias visual devices and what led them down that road.

Not soon after we had another call, primarily just us animation students. This was were our roles were solidified, Shane wanted to focus on the office scene where I was to focus on the construction site itself for the style guide. I was a little nervous about this decision since there were so many elements that would’ve needed to go into the construction site scene, but it was a challenge I was willing to overcome with the help of research and other established style guides. Before the call took place I quickly sketched a fast concept for Grimm vs human designs, there needing to be contrast in their silouette’s as they’re from opposing worlds. I remember mention of the human characters carrying boxes and thought, in terms of shape language, the Grimm had circular features and the humans square features. I wanted to experiment with the characters reflecting their enviroment.

Another character feature I mentioned was not to use complete blacks for Grimm as I thought it would contrast too heavily for the style we wanted to go for. I had thought by using dark purples and blues opposed to black meant death can still have hue variance in the scenes without having him too too plain, especially in the construction site. But by keeping to cool toned values it would be enough to pick him apart from a warm-toned enviro. I also made this suggestion for shading him with muted purple/blue for the skeleton to not made him appear bland. Although he is devoid of all life there were other elements that I wanted to include to establish that visually while having Grimm look to be part of the same game- keep design cohesion.

 

Creating the style guide:

This is where I struggled. As mentioned prior environments really aren’t my biggest strength, one of my hobbies is sketching character concepts so this was something that didn’t come naturally to me. I made a style-guide channel in the discord and posted references for both the character and environment designers to look back on.

Safe to say I didn’t really know where to start, so I looked back at our chosen inspirations that was posted into miro/discord and reflected over these, similar to our team exercise that we completed in miro. I wanted to see the inspirations and development of these games to get a better understanding on developing our own, and what I can carry over into our own project based on the research done. (I had also posted these research slides into miro for my teammates to look over. A lot of the research me and Chloe conducted bore similar results, a lot of cross over with Studio Ghibli/painterly aesthetic.)

Chloe and Ellen did a slide in our presentation that documented how well they were able to replicate an art style. I wanted to do this too in terms of environment so I high lighted areas of interest from one of our style influences and tried to replicate the painterly texture they used in game.

From these observations, as well as gathering a few references online into PureRef, I built my style guide for the construction environment. We briefly discussed items that would be in the scene and Shane noted them down and uploaded them to discord, which I went over and drew out the objects as a visual dictionary, keeping in mind the minimalistic art style we were going for:

Pure ref:

(This gave me a better idea on what to include, alongside referencing my team members style guides for consistency.)

 

Style Guide:

I broke my style Guide into 3 different sections. 1: Colour and Mood, 2: Construction and 3: Perspective/other considerations. I discussed my style guide with my group and went over aspects that I included from our style influences to see if they would want to change anything/ agree on the aspects included. I tried to go into as much depth as I can, but I feel as though I really could’ve expanded on this as I felt as though I struggled with what I needed to include. There’s so much that goes into a setting that I was nervous about how much work I needed to fulfil. I also realized that modelling every individual aspect of this scene would take up so much time, alongside texturing, however my group agreed that they will step in and help if the workload proved too much. That made me grateful for the production of style guides, as this would gloss over the details my team would need to know in order to help me in producing the props for the scene. Showing visual steps alongside notes is a good visual tutorial.

Texture Guide:

As Chloe was taking on so much work I offered to assist her in the texture guide. She sent in a scene example into discord where she demonstrated out texturing style in a 3D space.

We discussed about what could be included to fit the style better. I saved the screenshot and went over the shading on the work to fit the style of our influences a bit better (mainly referenced Death’s Door shading style, no normal maps, lighter colours at the edges, inner shadows definition. Included an example with no shadow for less detailed look. I was worried as it was only me painting on top of the image so it wasn’t an accurate reflection of what it would look like in the program.

This is how Chloe was able to replicate the style. I felt a bit more positive with the way to texture objects after seeing this as it worked pretty well in substance.

Chloe was also was working on a texture guide series with wood and metal. I offered to texture some of the objects for the style guide slides and she sent me over 2 blender files, but one of the files wouldn’t load up son in the end I only did the metal texture. This also provided me the chance of wrapping my brain around how to use the stylized texture in a 3D space, but closely looking at what brushes were used in Chloe’s examples for consistency. I documented my process as I went.

This was my first attempt, which I wasn’t keen on and sent into the discord chat for feedback:

Chloe then pointed me in the direction of this tutorial, which used different colours of blue, purple, teal and grey for a less monotone approach to shading grey. I was glad for this as I wasn’t really working off of any real reference bar from Death’s Door, which really wasn’t detailed.

I then was able to produce this. Since I was using colour masks opposed to paint layers I was able to change the base colour to experiment with the different hues of the metal which was a GODSEND for speeding up the process. I ensured not to include too harsh of a light reflection to avoid messing with the lighting that’s going to be implemented in unity.

Then followed a similar layout to Chloe’s slides. Had to keep in mind that it is a step-by-step tutorial that needed to be followed. This was a great idea to include as the techniques for these objects could be carried across to a lot of other objects in scenes.

Overall I felt like I could have done more in terms of the style guide and pre-production. Looking at how much my teammates were able to produce in such a short amount of time inspired but also concerned me due to how much work they were taking on. When we were building up our PowerPoint we began to feel nervous about the amount of work we had to present but the pay off was worth it in the end as I feel we’re ahead in terms of developing our game, and my group was really chuffed with the positive reception we received. We all worked really hard but I feel like I could’ve stepped in more in terms of splitting up the workload. Still, despite being nervous going into this project as it seemed like a BIG daunting feat, I’m really happy with the work and quality my team’s been able to produce so far. I hope to communicate my ideas across better in terms of presentation as I tend to stumble over my words and not be able to articulate my thoughts well verbally, but this is mostly due to nerves and I hope to improve better in time. I’m slowly becoming more comfortable expressing my thoughts and ideas into groupwork and only hope the project will proceed smoothly throughout the production stages of the course.