A new term and a new project! Our brief this time is much more open. You had the choice to work either alone or in a group, follow a given brief or make up your own. Last term, we had to work in a group. This term I decided to continue working with two members of that group, Dan C and Dan R, whilst the third member decided to work alone as they have different ideas they wish to pursue. Myself and Dans are also working with Jake. Last term, whilst we were working on our project he worked on his group project in the same space and time as us, subconsciously getting to know our work patterns and ideas. When this new project came around it felt natural to ask him if he wanted to join us, which he did :) From seeing the way he worked last term, and working with him this week, I think Jake is very smiler to Dan C in working style. Although we all contribute to ideas and designs, I think myself and Dan R are more creative and enjoy designing and making everything, whilst Dan and Jake are more technically minded and have the problem ,when me and Dan get too carried away, of trying to make our ideas possible to build. I'm glad as now the numbers are more balanced, and hopefully the work and pressure can be divided equally. Last term we gave our group a cheesy name: 'Team DIEanna', (thanks), so it seemed only fitting to give ourselves a cheesy name this time too. This time we are called 'Jandanna'. Basically trying to fit all of our names in there, although it sounds as though we have someone called Jan in our group :)
Before we did any research, looking for inspiration etc, we had a group meeting to discuss if there was any particular direction we wanted to go in or anything we wanted to avoid. Last term, one of our tutors Dan Dali, advised us to go to the 'London Games Convention', which was so much more useful than what I had expected. We got the chance to speak to people in industry and listen to the pros and cons of working in this type of field as well as finding out what sort of things potential employers look for. The experience convinced us that this was the direction we wanted to go in career wise, so we all agreed we wanted to hopefully build a level in a game that we would design a concept for. The people we interviewed, had told us that characters and cars were the things that were looked for in a showreel so we wanted to do something that had either one or both of these.
Myself and Dans have been working closely together for a year and a half now and thought we should try and maybe continue keeping our style varied. Although all our past work together had dark humour and involved death, we had always tried to opt for different settings and styles etc. For this project we wanted a different setting again, so that there could be a variety in our showreel. We weren't really bothered if death was involved or not, it isn't something we consciously want to put in our work, it kind of evolves.......hmmmm. Something that we wanted to avoid was our constant use of bold colours, again for more variety in our showreel.
To start us off, Dan R showed us a folder of a few images he had found online, hoping that they would help us in thinking up an idea, like we did our last project. Unfortunately, unlike last time, although there was a variety of images, this was a less productive method in finding an idea, as we kept selecting images that were smiler to the work we did last time.
This was my favourite image out of the selection, but as you can see, the colours are very smiler to those in our last project and follows our conventional Tim Burton style.
We moved on to creating some brainstorms, which you can see on our group blog. Just general ideas we could use for games. The results were quite varied, but nothing seemed to be fitting to expand on. To gain more inspiration and to find out what we wanted or didn't want for our game, we went away and did some individual research to bring back and show the rest of the group later.
One of my favourite games is Crash Bandicoot, only 1,2 and Warped though, the ones made by Naughty Dog (the later games I feel are too commercial and Crash's character design has been altered making him too cartoony if that makes sense). I know this game sounds pretty lame to most people in my class who prefer more killing-everyone games, but this is still one of my favourites. Basically the games are in 3rd person play mode and the player controls a anthropormorphised Bandicoot to complete levels to collect gems to save the world, and smiler situations. The reason I like these games so much is that there is so much variety on each level. Yes, you have to always collect fruit to get lives and collect the certain gems, but each level is themed differently and there are always very different tasks to complete that involve different skills. You can say that's the point with most games, but others that I've played such as Assassins Creed, I find to be very monotonous and not as exciting. There are approx 25 levels to each game as well as hidden ones. I also love the colours used, very bold and bright, but like we discussed in our first meeting as a group, we wanted to get away from always using such bold colours on all of our objects etc.
Crash, in his glory days.
Crash nowadays, lacking the look of determination which has been replaced by a cheesy, 'cool' expression.
Another old game I enjoyed playing was Alone in the Dark 4: The New Nightmare. Again, a third person game, you can play as either a male or a female, trapped on an island with a spooky mansion, infested with undead creatures, whilst you try to uncover what happened in this place before you came here and look for a way of escape. I love the spooky atmosphere of this game and the ruined mansion, but yet again I found my self slipping into familiar territory. Last time our whole animation had been about a deserted building. The undead characters in this game are much more sinister than anything we had created before and serious instead of humorous, which I found interesting, if we were to go for a spooky theme again. I also like the way the female character Aline, was portrayed as feisty, intelligent and vulnerable all at the same time, as apposed to completely helpless. The thing that was annoying about this game was the lack of save options, the player only being able to save when they had found a save medallion, which was annoying if you had to go out somewhere and didn't want to lose how far you had achieved.
Most games on the market have male characters as the lead. There is sometimes a female thrown into the plot for men to oogle and for women to not complain that companies are sexist. However, two games that I enjoy have females as the leading character, Heavenly Sword and Tomb Raider. Both women are extremely attractive, with strong feisty personalities, but also show sensitivity and vulnerability and aren't butch and lacking in femininity. This pleases men and women, as the men (and some women) get to lust over the character whilst the women have a character they can be proud of representing their sex.
In Heavenly Sword, the main character is called Nariko, a female warrior, whose clan shun her and blame their misfortune on her because she was not born a boy like a phrophecy stated. After an evil King makes it his mission to steal a mystic sword her clan protect, Nariko takes the sword to avenge the people who died trying to protect it. The character design is very realistic, and although we spoke as a group of trying to get more realistic characteristics into our work, we don't want it as ultra-realistic as this- more stylised, firstly as we probably wont have enough time to create something this detailed, secondly because we would like something that looks different from all the other games on the market. The actual sword Nariko uses is an extremely cool weapon as it can change into one of three forms depending how the player wants to attack. This is a useful idea for our game if we are to design weapons, as average guns are very predictable,
The Tomb Raider games have Lara Croft as the main character, an archaeologist travelling the world Indiana Jones style. Lara is posh and fights gracefully like Nariko, although her fighting style is limited to mainly jumps and rolls whereas Narikos is much more full of martial arts and extensive. Lara also uses guns alot, which I feel, like with most games on the market is a very typical weapon, and hopefully our game can produce something more original.
After we completed our individual research we returned as a group to show what we had found. When the group started, I went first, and showed everyone the above. I stated that if I was going to design a character I wanted to design a cool female that was pretty, feisty and intelligent. However, Dan Ryan interrupted me saying that this was the kind of character he wanted in the game too, then Dan C agreed, and so did Jake. So very easily we came to the group decision that our lead character would be female. We also decided that we would design a boss level, as showing a normal level would be boring for an audience to watch for two minutes as the brief stated. A boss level would also allow us to only have to create two characters which is about all we feel we would be able to create in our time space, if we are to texture and animate as well etc. As we were only going to design a boss level, we wouldn't need to work out the complete concept of the game, although we decided to work out a vague story for our own sakes so that we could get to know the characters we were going to design and how they would react to different situations etc. The problem was, we didn't have a story or characters yet, we just knew that the lead character would be female. Dan R showed us some images of a Pakistani bus, which was really interesting as they are so colourful and bright and we thought of maybe designing cars that were like their owners and involving different cultures, but we couldn't seem to get a storyline worked out. Dan C showed us some footage from an old game with a blue zombie he really liked, but again we couldn't make up any storylines. After looking at more 'Youtube' videos of games we all liked etc we decided to go home. As we were walking to our cars Dan R pointed out a tall tree with all its branches cut off. I commented and said it looked like a totem pole and maybe we should make a zombie Pocahontas, laughed then went home.
The next day, Dans approached myself and Jake, seriously wanting to follow up the Native American zombie idea. I wasn't sure at first because it had been a silly joke but after discussing it, it sounded like a really good idea. We decided that we would have a good female character and a bad female character. The bad would be an undead zombie who was slow as was typical of horror movie type zombies but could also move really fast when she wanted and was super strong. We decided that the setting would be in a deserted camp that hadn't been disturbed since it was abandoned for whatever reason and was in traditional Native American village camp style. Together we wrote a list of items we wished to include in our village, that has been posted onto our group blog.
We also decided that our game would be in third person style as this was our favourite way of playing and that there would be cut scenes involved so that a story was conveyed, to keep a watching audiences attention.
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