Week 3 - First Environment Tests

We started this week with a meeting with our lecturer. Our current concerns are around the photogrammetry process and whether we can get good enough quality in the scans for the hand-sculpted assets to be useable. The process is mostly trial-and-error considering we haven't done it before but we have shifted our priorities around to get the coding done first, then re-assessing the assets when we can access the professional equipment in the studio. I am continuing to hand-sculpt a few example assets for now so that we will have something to test. If the photogrammetry process isn't 100% effective we can either:

Photograph the objects and use texture maps to apply the hand-made details onto a basic sculpted mesh
Make small details physically and photograph them in to add to a mesh we can 3D model
3D sculpt everything instead and use the hand-sculpted items for display and marketing purposes only

I'm still trying to make the hand-sculpted assets work as this was one of the main selling points of the project (it is designed to be a visual feast, almost like an art piece in itself). Below is the first asset I have fully made - a dreamcatcher for the fortune teller's room:

I also found this week some armatures being sold online. By purchasing some of these we can hand sculpt extra shapes for the bodies, paint on tattoos and make appropriate clothing for the characters without making everything from scratch (this avoids the potential of breaking/not constructing the joints correctly and therefore making the models unusable for stop-motion animations).

They can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Luckhome-Drawing-Figures-Artists-Mannequin/dp/B07KWF5T7Q/ref=sr_1_38?dchild=1&keywords=art+wooden+figures&qid=1614088559&sr=8-38

We have also developed the gameplay and narrative further, so the player will go to the lady, be given all 3 objectives to complete (so as not to go back-and-forth) and then the lady goes off to perform. The player can then explore the room for objects. They must collect at least one item in the room and a piece of the photograph to continue. The photograph piece triggers the lady coming back from her performance and so the show continues (the player then goes to help the next lady get ready for her act). After all of these sequences are completed the player confronts the ladies at the end of the show, choosing one item from each room to show they have found a link between the ladies and the mother. Each object collected will have a corresponding piece of story, so the objects found in the snake charmer's room will provide information about her mother, the objects in the quick-change artist's room will show how the ladies found out about the child and the objects in the fortune teller's room will equate to the ending of the story and how the mother died. This therefore results in a huge number of story combinations that the player has access to.

By using this structure for the gameplay we can eliminate the need for branching interactive narrative (which would add to our scope dramatically) and we can keep the core of the story close to the player whilst allowing them more freedom to explore the environment and investigate the belongings in each room.

Our final meeting this week meant we could talk about some of the technical work in our game (i.e. coding the foundational elements). Our lecturer helped us to get our placeholder character moving at the right speed with the correct camera movements around our basic 3D environment made (which is already textured with appropriate lighting at this stage by James). Next week we will look at adding a few more elements so we can start playtesting for feedback.

This week I also finished the characters in their 2D visual art style. This can be changed later if necessary and we have now uploaded them to our social media with some background information about each lady.