FMP Digital Reflective Journal #2

This week I finalised my main research and began working in my idea generation. For this I took multiple visual reference for both environment and character design and started to implement them into my design process. I also attended multiple workshops to develop my skills and project.

First, at the start of the week we did a drawing workshop where we focused on shading by looking at high contrast photographers. For this we were encouraged to try different medians so I used water colour, and eventually water colour and pen. I found this workshop to be fun as it was mainly rough sketches, however it did further highlight that a major weakness of mine in creating refined sketches, especially during workshops where my focus is divided.

After this we did a pier feedback session based on last weeks work. From this most of the feedback that I received was compliments on the detail and direction of my research, with the added addition of other sources that I could look into. This overall, shows that I am on the right track for my research. As for the other sources that I could look at, most of them were sources that I was planning to look into during the character design part of my project.

After my feedback session I moved on to working on my project by gathering visual research. At the beginning of creating the concept for my project I was met with a decision. I already knew from my research that I wanted to personify dreams, and that the best way to do this would be to create a dream world for them to inhabit. However, I was unsure on whether to set the game in both the real and dream worlds, or to focus solely on the dream world for the narrative. Both had advantages, with the real and dream combo othering interesting gameplay mechanics and the ability for two-way conversation between the dreamer and their dream. Ultimately however, I decided to go for the dream only route. This was because of two factors. Firstly, was that the narrative would have a much better focused by being set in just one world. Secondly, was that the exploration of the relationships between dreams and their dreamers would be much more nuanced if the dreams can’t communicate with their dreamers. I felt that by isolating the dreams, not only would they feel more real as there is no comparison with people in the real world, but they would present their dreamers and storylines in a much more focused way as it would only focus on the dream characters themselves.

After I had made this decision, I started working on the world building of the dream world. I already had a basic narrative in mind. This would be the idea that God was the first dream created by humans which, as a result, manifested itself as a deity and placed a barrier to prevent future dreams doing the same. God then dreamed of humanities potential, manifesting the ‘Dream of human potential’ as the ruler of the dream world. However, as humans developed and the dreams that they produced became more and more powerful, God’s hope for their potential turned into fear. This resulted in the manifestation of the player character as the ‘Nightmare of human potential’, although this would be unknown to them at the time. From this point there are multiple places I could take it, with the antagonist either being God, the ‘Dream of human potential’, or a third party in the form of the ‘Nightmare of the void’ which would function as a sibling to the player character. However, from this point I decided to add concrete rules to my would to make it feel more real. From this I developed two major rules. One is that dreams of a similar type are attracted to each other. This would allow me to make themed environments and give a solution to death, with the fact that if a dream dies then their energy is spread out and absorbed by dreams of a similar type. The second rule was that dreams who have a dreamer only have contact with them when the dreamer is dreaming about them. This rule allows me to isolate dreams from their dreamers. It also gives me the narrative device of dreams losing what little interaction that they have with their dreamers, due to them forgetting about them.

After this I developed four dream archetypes for the type of inhabitants that would populate the world, using my rules and visual research as reference. From this I created Concepts, Primals, Dreams, and Nightmares. Each of these races took inspiration from different research, with Dreams being inspired by interpretations of imaginary friends and Nightmares taking reference from ‘Little Nightmare’. Out of these races however the one that I am most proud of are the Concepts, which are blurry undefined entities that are built up of various stray thoughts that had enough in similarity to form a personality. I felt that this one was the most interesting as a concept, as there are a variety of ways to interoperate their out look on their own existence.

Once I had reached this point in the project, I attended a narrative workshop. From this I didn’t feel like I got much off value that I didn’t already know, with the exception of the seven basic story types. We were however, able to create elevator pitches for our projects which we gave to each other for feedback. The main point of feedback that I got from this was that I need to cement my ideas so that I could communicate them more easily in a pitch. Whilst this was helpful it was also something that I would have done naturally over the course of the project.

To end the week, I attended a Maya animation workshop. Out of all of the workshop’s, this was the most relevant to my project as my final outcome is going to be CGI. However, despite this I still don’t really enjoy using Maya as despite having a lot of time clocked in it already, the program still feels very clunky to work with when compared to Blender. I did however think that the animation function was pretty good, although I don’t have anything to compare it to due to this being my first time experimenting properly with 3d animation. I did however find the process of rendering out the animation to video to be extremely frustrating, turning a 30 min task into a 4 hour one due to technical difficulties. Hopefully though, it will be an easier process for the final outcome. I do however still need to explore animating in blender, just so I have a reference point for which is the best program to use for my project’s animation.

Overall though this week has been very successful, with me making lot of progress on the world building. I did have slight concerns that spending too much time on the world building may eat up too much time, however the world will inform the narrative so I think that it is justified to spend this amount of time on it. I do have to make sure however that by the end of next week I have started working on the core characters and story beats, so that on the final week of pre-production I will have time to plan out story boards for my final outcome.