FMP Digital Reflective Journal #3

This week I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked. This was mainly due to the fact that UCA of Rochester suddenly without warning cancelled both the course that I had applied to and the one that I was thinking of switching to. This led to a lot of additional stress for me and bunch of other students who now had to take time out of our FMPs to look into new universities, and in my case, student accommodation. Because of this, not only did I find it difficult to concentrate on work during the second half of the week, I also ended up feeling a bit behind in my project.

Outside of this however, I did make some progress on my project this week. To start the week of we did a perspective drawing workshop. Whilst I had various technical difficulties when trying to push myself to use photoshop, I was able to take the techniques after the workshop to create environmental concept art for my project as a way to catch up. I was also able to finalise a design for the main antagonist of my narrative, which I used as inspiration for constructing the completed story for my project. I decided that the antagonist would be the ‘Dream of human potential’ who I have named Adam. His design would be based of the biblical version if they had become an old man. As for motivation, he is seeking to overcome God and become real as a way of dealing with his abandonment when he rejected the change of God seeing him as a nightmare. This development allowed me to more clearly demonstrate the themes of my project, with Adam’s narrative centring around both his relationship with his dreamer and his desire to become real. It would also reflect in the players narrative as they would be interacting with God who is now their dreamer, allowing the player to make their own decisions about the relationship and their characters own importance in it. A final change that I added to the narrative was that the player character isn’t solely the ‘Nightmare of human potential’, but instead a developing concept that absorbed the nightmare when it was rejected by Adam. This provides a further connection between the player and Adam, whilst also functioning as a narrative explanation for the character creator.

The fact that I have character creation in the game concept does provide certain challenges for character design. Namely on how to represent a customisable character in the final outcome without making multiple models. In the end I created a player pre-set concept that I will use, however I still think that the design could use some refinement. This was a major weakness of this week as, whilst I have a decent number of rough sketches for my project, I don’t have any refined outcomes. This is partly because 2d digital art is a major weakness of mine. This also comes into the fact that whilst I do still have time to create refined concept outcomes, my time has been spread much thinner due to the extra load of sorting out my university application. This consigns with a major problem that my project is facing. After I had a 1 to 1 session with my tutor, they recommended that I try and make a trailer for my final outcome as my project has a heavy narrative focus. Personally, I agree with this, however a specific part of my game concept is making the idea very challenging. Whilst starting to produce a storyboard I realised that since my game had a party mechanic, it should be present in the trailer as it is a major aspect of the game. However, this means that I need multiple animatable assets that fit the tone of my game to be used in the trailer. Whilst I am confident that I can create compelling environments using 3rd party models to save time, I don’t think that I can as easily do the same for the main character models. This is because many of the free character rigs that I have found are either not high enough quality to use, or have too distinct visuals to not be distracting when on screen with each other. Because of this I have two options. Firstly, I could try and kit bash the character models together using different 3rd party models. This would hopefully allow me to save time on UV, however I would have to rig the models afterwards. The problem with this though is that it may give the visual design an uncanny vibe which isn’t what I am going for. The other option is that I downsize the trailer/game concept so that I don’t have to show full player parties on screen. Whilst I think that this would take away from it, the final outcome would be much more feasible for the amount of time that I have. Outside of this I could also try and find a way to reuse the same asset for all of the party members, which would save me enough time. This however may make the trailer look much less developed and take away from the idea of the party members having unique storylines tied to the worlds premise.

Based on these options I think that the best choice may be to downsize the trailer concept, going for more of a teaser trailer rather than a gameplay trailer. However, if I was to do this then I would have to go for a much more cinematic approach, meaning that I can’t take advantage of the zoomed out CRPG camera to hide mistakes in the animation and models. It will also be less representative of the game concept, functioning more to set the tone and world that the game inhabits.

Based on this, whilst I do feel a bit behind in pre-production, I think that I should be able to catch up next week. For this I will need to start again on my storyboard and shift my outcome to a more cinematic direction. I will then be able to use the storyboard to compile a list of the assets that I will need to either find or create for the project. Unfortunately, this will mean that I will be behind for the animatic feedback session next week as I am starting my storyboard again. Hopefully however I will have something to present in time to make the most use out of the session. I will also need to produce test renders to see the viability of creating a blur effect as a part of the main character’s design.

First Version of Storyboard: