Possible Painting Idea [02]

I like this one better, mostly because I had a photo of the skeleton of a bird to take reference from. Inspired by ROA. I can imagine this one on a floor, and the player having to get up high somehow to view it from above before being able to get in through the square.

Possible Painting Idea [01]

We have a presentation for tomorrow, and I wasn't sure what to draw for the painting example... So I drew Tim's Tagger dude coming out of the wall.

On the left is the image from straight on, on the right is the image when viewed from the left side of the image. When the image is activated the player will have to jump "through" the circular/square portion of the image to enter the next level.

ArtFire Studio

Teehee. Does this make me a shop keeper now?

Staircase and Door Frames

I completed a usable staircase today, so now the player can move between the floors freely. Will most likely pretty-up the staircase during the Production phase. I've also fitted door frames into position, but when I did I realised I'd made the upstairs rooms too tall compared to downstairs, so the door frames were too big for downstairs. That will be fairly simple to fix though, I'll just need to adjust the heights of the door frames and the upstairs to match those of downstairs.

Also started thinking about lighting for inside the house. May just [unrealistically] place point lights in strategic areas, or will use multiple dimmed directional lights. At the moment it's quite dim, I've just placed one point light in most of the rooms.

Haven't managed to pull together the script for the Level-access mechanic, but I have collected various scripts that could be handy to mash up and put together and written out a basic outline of what the scripts need to do.

Plan of Action!

Final Project

I've been feeling very unorganised lately and don't feel like I've been focusing much brain power on course work. So, today is going to be a full on organisation evening, where I'm going to gather up all the different bits and bobs to do with the final project, such as placing blog posts into the dev-diary, and gathering written work into the Concept Doc, so I can figure out how much time we've got left to do what.

Rapid Films

Jess and I managed to hand something in, unfortunately I can't figure out what the problem is with the exporting of the avi... it did the compressed version but all the colours were screwy and the animations didn't play, but the uncompressed version ended up being 3.3GB and wouldn't play... I don't know.

The next brief is to add to the story of a video the organisers created, in which each of them died an unorthodox death and there was a mysterious brown envelope involved.



Only rule is that entries must contain the brown envelope. The original rules were to have exactly 3 minutes 33 seconds with an unorthodox death and less than 25% dialogue, but the organisers changed it and pushed the deadline back to December 5th to try to get more people involved and not scare off those already around. Personally I didn't think the original limitations would have caused any of them any problems, but some people seemed put off for some reason.

Dissertation

Got some a couple of interesting links about Digital Natives and Immigrants recently [here's Part 1 and Part 2], which nudged the direction of my dissertation over again. Definitely going to have to rewrite my proposal now and change what's going to happen with my chapters. I'm hoping this will be the last time now for major direction changes, especially since the Digital Natives idea has brought the ideas in the dissertation closer to the essay I handed in last year. It gives another explanation as to why writing an essay would be difficult for students now.

Logo

Upstairs?

Here's the initial layout for the upstairs of the house. As for access to upstairs, we were originally thinking of putting the staircase in the middle and knocking out a wall downstairs, but I'm wondering now if it might be better to put the staircase in the top left corner of the building..

Baby Steps

Tim here., I've been busy working on the 1st Puzzle level aka. Training Level. Simple map which will look at movement and painting. I also wanted to see what kind of atmosphere I could get from Unity. Still having problems with the actual Mechanics though So any programmers out there please help out.

Downstairs

Here's a quick printscreen of the ground floor of basic house model I've been putting together, based on the floor plans shown. Eventually there will be a staircase in place to allow the player access to rooms upstairs.

And an update on the Unity3D vs UDK question: We've switched back to the idea of using Unity3D. Much easier, so more brain power can be used on the puzzles :)

Lots to dooo

Dissertation

Had a help session on how to write a dissertation yesterday, was probably very helpful. I realised that if I write a minimum of 500 words per week [starting yesterday], then that will be 9000 words in the 18 weeks I have left [not including 2 weeks for proofreading the final draft and a week for printing and binding]. I'm still a bit iffy on the subject I'm writing about, but I think it will definitely be centred around the concept of fun and having fun and the effects of the need for fun on society.

Final Major Project [blog]

It's going alright, this week I'll be working on the house which will act like a hub for the levels, while Tim works on the levels and some character designs.

Rapidfilms

The animation seemed well received, I enjoyed how many laughs the "that's what she said" joke got. The next challenge is to create a 2-3 minute film by Thursday based on two characters, in the genre our groups picked out of the hat. Our genres were Horror and Scorsese styled gangster/crime.

It's probably going to be an animation from us again, but so far all I've actually drawn is this picture of De Niro's face:

The story I came up with is this:

A gangster is walking along a street. He's somewhat aged and world-weary. He passes a young pretty girl; he doesn't know her, but her face seems familiar. He wonders where has he seen her before. As the girl passes, she also seems to find his face familiar.

Flashback to a faded past, and the guy is much younger. He has been sent to kill the men of a rival family - the girl's. Shots fire everywhere. Blood falls everywhere.

Colour returns. The man's eyes widen as he realises who the girl is. He turns, a breeze blows by. She's not there.

Colour fades and we're back to the past again. The camera pans up towards the nearby window. The girl has been left alone, surrounded by the dark red of her brothers. The breeze blows by, the scent of blood filtering out through the night, attracting the attention of a dark figure. The dark figure, fangs glinting, dissolves into the darkness, and the scene fades to black.

The quiet echo of a scream is heard, as the camera pans across to a close up profile of the man's troubled face, still peering out at the dimly lit street before him. Out of the darkness behind him, the girl emerges, hate ablaze in her eyes.

Just as she is about to strike, the scene cuts swiftly to black.

The Hub-House

This week I'll be working on the abandoned house, which will be the "hub" of the strange puzzle-levels [Tim will be working on those].

The layout of the house will be loosely based on the layout of what used to be my grandparents' house; a detached three-bedroomed house with two floors, kitchen, living-room, bathroom and study, with access to loft spaces either side of the upstairs-bedroom.

Some sketched layouts of the place

The house itself was built in the Sixties, but for the game we may make the house older. The time period is yet to be decided, but here's a study of a nice little fireplace I found in some friends' terraced house in Newport.

Some Art-Style Work

I did a little bit of playing with some watercolours and salt to see if I could get any nice colour/texture combinations:

And here's an image of what some graffiti on the wall might actually look like in-game:

"Stealing's Bad"

There we go:

Hand in for it is before 7pm on Monday. As this was pretty much just for fun for Jess and I, we're not going to spend the weekend making it look better... Especially not after Jess said it looked "delightfully crappy".

Being Productive: RF, D, and the FMP.

Final Major Project:

Have not done a lot of work the past few days due to RapidFilms and life, but I did find some more beautiful pics of abandoned places and copied out Escher's "Relativity" to get to know it better. Tim sent me a link for another website with more nice photos of abandoned places too.

RapidFilms:

Been working on a RapidFilms project this week, so far spent two days on it. The brief was to create a film no longer than 2 minutes based on your favourite joke. I'm working with Jess Reynolds and neither of us seem to have one favourite joke [because all of life is either hilarious, or ridiculous...], so what we've done instead is taken some things we have found funny and worked them together into a storyboard [day 1].

Yesterday [day 2], I pulled all the images Jess drew into an animatic with silent-movie style piano music by Kevin MacLeod. I made a few minor changes to some of the text that would appear and switched the first and last scene around, but yeah, we're pleased with it so far for two days work. All it needs now is the images to be done properly and the transitions and camera movements put in, which will probably take a couple of days.

Dissertation:

Jess posted the help sheet under my door this morning that they were given for writing dissertations. I copied it out, did the exercises, and I'm now going through the Georg Simmel text on "The Metropolis and Mental Life" we were given last year, separating the sentences with pencil lines. It looks horrendous until you separate the sentences out; then things become much more clear..

Here's what I wrote for the exercises:

"Free" writing [5 mins each]:
1. State the subject of your thesis in one sentence.
Fun - what it is, why we want it, and why it sometimes feels like we shouldn't be having it.

2. List the aims of your research/analysis.
To explore the feelings and mentality of those who strongly align their arguments with a "superego" kind of point of view. To suggest that living a life of fun is not at odds with working hard and being a productive member of society. To show the importance of "having fun" as a driving force and as a glue for a productive society.

3. "My project is about"
... the relationship between people and what they perceive as fun, and how society sees "fun" and those who have it.

4. "The stage I am at now"
... still the "Free" writing stage, although I have some authors to look at as well.

5. "The main argument is"
... that the freedom to have fun is vital not just at the beginning of our lives, as children, but throughout a person's entire life.

"Generative" writing [5 mins each]:
1. What I find difficult in writing and researching my dissertation is:
... keeping my mind on one subject. If I come across something interesting I will take the time to read it, even when it has nothing to do with my subject.

2. The key sections of my dissertation are:
- What is fun? [because fun is a term that covers different things for different people]
- Why we all NEED to have fun
- The ways we prevent ourselves and eachother from having fun
- "Rules were made to be broken". Thanatos and Chaos. How humans strive to break free and remain free.

3. What I can write about NOW is:
Expand the section about the ways society has prevented itself from being a fun one...
- Law, order, rules.
- Morality, religion, thou shalt not.
- Goals of a society and the accepted norms, how people are expected to behave, and the attitudes towards those who deviate from the expected behaviours.

Meet Mr Shiny

Hi guys this is Tim the monkey of the operation. I been working on some character concepts. Here he is "Mr Shiny" a character you will meet at the start of your journey and helps you out in times of need.

Unity3D or UDK?

I know I said I wanted to use Unity3D, but that was when there was only one person on the team. It feels quite daunting starting over with a program I've only played with once [yesterday], but the tech sessions on Tuesdays will be covering UDK, not to mention there's plenty of support on the Internet if we need help figuring out how to do something. I feel like we should be trying to rise to the challenge here...

And I know graphics aren't everything, but after seeing what can be achieved fairly simply thanks to the materials and stuff already on there, the idea of learning and utilising the Unreal Development Kit for this project is prrrretty enticing.

It will mean a little more brain power for learning it, but I think that's okay. I think we should probably limit the number of level designs down to the Main House [which will act a little like a hub], and a few Strange-Levels [say... 3 to 5?] and treat this project as a demo game-slice rather than a full-blown game.

As for actual course-aims, the task for the next Tuesday morning [which will actually be the Tuesday after next, due to the GameCity trip] is to nail down the visual style to show everyone. We already know that the Main House will be neglected and abandoned with spatters of graffitied images here and there, and the Strange-Levels will contain "stairs, lots of stairs", so most of the hard work is done already.

Dissertation: Shouldn't be too hard...

Had a group session with Caroline, an animation lecturer, about dissertation stuff yesterday [I think.. my memory is mixing my days up a little thanks to Freshers Week], and it doesn't seem too bad. She said a dissertation is basically taking a few key texts about what people have been saying about a subject [preferably something academic..], and rewriting and writing about them to show that you understand what they are saying, and that dissertations normally get better marks if they are posing a hypothesis, an idea that needs to be tested.

So, just thinking about it today, I was thinking of writing about what people think about ethics or moral duties in computer games or what should or shouldn't be put or allowed to be put into computer games. Should give me plenty to read about, but I'll have to check out academic stuff to see what's there.

Solo Project no longer solo :)

Now that Freshers Week is starting to wind down to it's last few events, it's time to get busy.

Everyone met up for a session on Tuesday, and we went around the group telling each other our ideas for the final project. When I told the guys what I wanted to work on, they told me some stuff that might be helpful for me to look at [including Echo Chrome, Labyrinth, Inception, 13 Ghosts and Arkham Asylum], which was great. After the meeting, Tim messaged me saying he liked the sound of my game idea and the art style and asked if he could come on board. Awesomeness.

We met up before the Dissertation session to have a chat about the idea and presentation stuff. I think we're calling it FP3 [cubed], at least for now, as it's a 3D first person perception puzzler. We came up with a few ideas for M. C. Escher-inspired puzzles, and realised the most challenging part of this project will probably be coming up with some good challenges for the player in the first place, but it should be fun.

I've just been looking through some of my 6th Form work as some of things I'm thinking about are quite heavily based on the art I researched, back in Year 13 of school. The things and people I wrote about in my art dissertation included graffiti, Feek, oblique [perspective] and catoptric [mirror] anamorphosis, Matthew Carver, Trompe L'Oeil, Julian Beever, Community Bridge, Felice Varini, Cool World, Daniel Rozin and Michelangelo Pistoletto. I'd love to utilise in the game some of the techniques those artists use :D

I'm going to have a play in Unity3D later to see if I can get some of the initial ideas to actually work, and get a bit of self organisation going on. Module Handbook says we've got until end of January 2011 to work on documentation and test pieces, with the intention of creating one of three things afterwards:

- a completed game and/or interactive project utilising an existing game engine and/or games development software;

- an extended design portfolio suitably presented demonstrating an awareness of professional context;

- an extended set of dioramas and/or moving image sequences including full character and situation detailing.

Pretty sure we're going to go for the first option.

Escher!

I was trying to think for ages who it was who did those pictures that mess with perspective. I was only when I saw stairs moving around strangely and the mention of an Escher Vault on a Warehouse 13 advert on Syfy that I remembered. His work is amazing, so check it out if you happen to have never heard of him before.

[Wednesday, 27th October 2010]
Edit: This is a tracing of Escher's "Relativity", which I did in the past week to get to know it a bit better.

Colours?

Started packing and getting ready to go back to uni [woohoo!] so I haven't done very much work today. Basically just started thinking about colours, using a few of the images I liked before to pick colours from.


I want to give the game some colour without going too bright or in-you-face with the hues, so I'm liking how the colours in these pictures are generally quite muted but not all too grey. There are a few greens, blues, purples and some very different browns that I can have a think about.

The shifting-architecture aspect of the game is one I need to start thinking about more as well now. I kind of want it to feel a little like you are inside a machine-like maze, something systematic but also a little unpredictable.