Category: Creative industry

Style guides:

Posted on by helou-s

What I did a style guide for: Characters, enemies and animation.

At this stage of the project, we hadn’t settled down on the style and the right words to describe it. We had ideas and narratives going but we were lost with the choice of word to describe what we wanted to go for. Although, with the lecture we were given in which we were tasked to analyse the style of a game or movie of our choice, I found it quite helpful in understanding what was wanted from us a lot clearer and we decided as a group to also do that exercise again with one of the games students as well.

This cleared up the image of what we had to do which later led to us having concepts that already were within the same universe.

My concept:

ex: Sophies concept

When it came to doing the guides, I paid close attention to the examples that were given to us and the potential mistakes that might arise when redrawing the same character multiple times. I even found my own guides handy when I reached the animation stage. Heeding the words of our lectures I made sure I meticulously followed my peers’ guides for example when drawing 2D assets, I consulted the guide and my team mate to double check that I understood the style and the guide.

On the other hand, I feel like because our story kept on changing and ideas continued to develop, not all the parts of the guides were followed to the letter, for example we were meant to have two worlds, two colour pallets, but later we ended up with one world and mostly used one colour pallet. In short ideas changed and the rules changed with them.

For the technical guide, as our teammate had unfortunately left us we didn’t make one, but It wasn’t something we felt the need for mostly thanks to a very active group chat that helped and supported each other a lot.

My style guide examples:

Concept:

Posted on by helou-s

As I explained earlier, the playable character is an odd-looking little boy who escapes into his creative imagination to entertain himself. The goal of our game is for the player, to reach the boys treasure, which is the many papers his father has in his office so the boy could then continue to practice his art.

We all looked for any games we could inspire our minds with, and compiled pictures and screenshots on a miro board, which I wasn’t very familiar with but still participated on a more familiar software and shared it in the group chat.

My research:

 

Fran bow/ Little misfortune/ little nightmares/ goodbye Seoul being the most important ones.

We got started on visual concepts of rooms and characters

Here are some of the ones I works on:

Brief:

Posted on by helou-s

This is a brief introduction of what this game group project was about and my role in it.

Our game, “little boy” is a 2D/3D platformer moving in a 2D space but with the environment in a 3D space, our props were a combination of 2D, mostly smaller interactable ones and 3D, usually bigger environmental ones. The character himself was in 2D, and it is composed of 3 levels in different parts of the child’s home seen through his artistic imaginative mind. We wanted it to feel like a children’s book but with a grimmer twist, like Fran Bow or Little Nightmares, which reflects on the child’s neglect by his parents.

As a group we decided on each other’s tasks based on our strength and so I was tasked with character design, 2D assets and animation. Due to the changes our group experienced during this assignment, we all ended up doing a bit of work in whatever field we could help in, due to the lack of team members. It was decided as a team I would be doing the design of the main character and the enemies, as well as, with the help of my only other animation peer, we separated the task of animating, for most of the animations, in 3 parts, meaning one person does the block out, the other line art and in between and finally one the colours. An attempt to speed up the process.

I helped with making some additional props in 2D for the office and some of the kitchen. As well as doing the 3D assets for the kitchen and the office, with some were even recycled in different locations.

Some research and experimenting were done on my part for potential post processing, which later didn’t really fit into the concept of our game anymore and needed more research done.

Finally, us animation students gave level designing a go, which was a very new, but difficult yet interesting attempt. I took charge of designing the concept, block out and final stage of the kitchen/office level which would be the final level.