Week 4 - The first of many designs

This week I designed and developed a version of the town which will be sufficient for the gameplay. In the short amount of time we have I am aware that I often have trouble with timekeeping and calling time on some objectives so as not to neglect others. With that in mind, I set this week aside to develop fully the town image. At the beginning of the week I experimented with scanning in the images as previously intended however the image quality didn't lend itself to an appropriate finish so I left the design as is and consulted the others for inspiration.

Having attempted the piece once, my project leader suggested a source of inspiration called 'Lucky Luke'. It is a 1946 published comic series set in the American old west. This has the more cartoon-y stylised look we want for the game and so I used this to drive my next designs.

I also had a few discussions with a third year student around the western genre as I knew she had a particular interest and knowledge for this part of history. She helped me to streamline the town design, suggesting that I attempt to space the buildings a little further apart (which I fear may not be possible with what needs to be included in this scene) and adding extra little details that I wouldn't have thought of. This really helped me in a practical sense but it also gave me a little more confidence in that I was understanding what a wild west scene demands visually and was at least getting some parts right.

Lucky Luke study:

After studying the Lucky Luke comic I found that certain materials and techniques could be used for a relatively quick and easy method of design. More of this process can be found in the art bible, below is the result of this process across all five buildings in the town image:

There were also further discussions this week regarding tasks for the 14 week-breakdown. It is decided that I will be working on the internal shop UI next along with previous tasks discussed such as cursor designs, ability trees, menu icons (i.e. how the items will look on the button designs), battle effects, fonts and potentially 2D animations for facial expressions and cutscenes. There is still a lot that is to be determined and lots that can be cut from this if obstacles get in the way across the project but overall I am starting to get a good feel for our project and what I can achieve within this.