Personal Proffesional development - comics

For work over the summer I shall be collaborating with my sister to create a web-comic series based upon a story she is writing. I feel like this is an opportunity to develop my own art style as well as learn more about sequential drawing and visual story telling.

I also feel I need to practice anatomy for character drawing, as well as to learn how to draw non-human creatures such as horses and dogs.

I also feel that this is an opportunity to build up a comics portfolio in order to gain work as a freelance comics artist and writer. I will also be working on a similar project with classmate Rhys Bryant.

Competition - EDGE Get into games

As part of my personal professional development, it would be a good idea for me to enter competitions and follow live briefs. To that end I wished to enter the EDGE magazine, Get into games competition, the brief was simply to create a game in the Unity game engine based around a specific theme, this year the theme was Do No Harm.

I felt that the competition would have helped further my develop my knowledge of the game engine unity as I would have to learn essential scripts in order to create a playable game. I would also have been able to work with a team as the other team members would have brought in skills I did not have in order to develop the game.

Unfortunately the game never came to fruition due to a number of reasons. First off, there was little communication between the team members and we were unable to create a plan of action beyond the initial ideas stage. Because of this lack of communication no official roles were assigned so nothing was created beyond a couple of initial concept sketches.

Secondly, the deadline was also the end of our Easter holiday break, meaning that we had the Easter holidays to produce our work, now while the free time should have been ideal, some of the team members had in fact gone to visit family over the holidays, which coupled with a lack of communication meant that no further work was produced.

Despite the final product never reaching fruition, I do intend to reuse the concepts discussed at the start of the competition, and develop them into something beyond the brief.

Resources to help aid personal proffesional growth - Unity Tutorials

From a very young age since I got my first games console, I have had a great interest in games design, but unfortunately never knew where to start to develop it, however since coming to university I have had access to the game engine unity.

Unity is an engine that I find both fun and easy to use, although I have only just started to scratch the surface with the possibilities  of what I am able to do with the software.

I have yet to learn how to create my own particles, skyboxes or scripts, the latter being essential if I wish to create playable games.

Fortunately the official Unity website has many online tutorials that I will be able to access in my free time in order to further develop my skills, something I fully intend to take advantage of.

Personal Proffesional Practice - Environmental Modelling

Over the course of my year I have struggled to find where my interests lie and what my skillset is, however the past module has made me realise that the one thing I consistently enjoyed across the various modules is the environmental modelling.

While I struggle with character modelling and concept work. I find making environmental objects, such as buildings and furniture to be quite relaxing, and also recently had to create organic structures in the form of cliffs, which itself posed a challenge I believe I easily overcame.

There are still many aspects of the Environmental Modelling that I have to improve such as my sense of scale, but I feel that I will thoroughly enjoy the practice and intend to create a cache of generic assets, possibly based around themes in order to improve both my skills and my work ethic.

I also find it fun and helpful to look at existing objects, both physical, drawn and other 3D objects in order to inform my own, as well as creating stylised pieces, such as the cartoony wonky aesthetic of my  self-set module.

I would also like to combine Environmental modelling with my story telling to tell a story through the environment, such as through the use of billboards, posters and ruins.

Power to the Pixels

As part of our coursework we produced a short machinima film made using characters placed into a game environment using the software unity. In order to showcase our productions, as a course we produced a Pop-up exhibition dubbed Power to the Pixels. With friends and family members coming over to view our work. 

Pictured: Myself and Teammate Jennifer "Jeff" Maddison showcasing the display of our work.

While setting up the work we assigned ourselves roles within the team. I took it upon myself to mount our work on the foam boards as I feel I have a knack for this sort of work, while teammates Luca Calabrese and Jeff Maddison were sorting out the projected animation and printing out booklets respectively. 

At the actual exhibition I found myself working as "Bar Man" keeping an eye on and handing out the free snacks and drinks we had available.

Visitors would occasionally ask us questions about the work, which we were all too happy to answer, while the booklets Jeff made were incredibly well received. unfortunately none of my own work on the static assets made it onto the boards, but could still be viewed on the final animation.

Cut Content

Throughout the course of developing my gamespace, many things had to be cut due to a number of reasons, mostly due to time constraints and a lack of skill. The pictures below are taken from my moodboards to represent the cut content.

Originally intended to be included were non-player characters such as guards, however due to a focus on the environmental modelling and my lack of experience in character modelling I was not able to implement these characters.








Similarly, I also intended to include a third person player character, however due to the same reasons there were no NPCs and the fact I couldn't get the 3rd person controller in the game engine to function, the player character had to be cut.

I also intended to include a hidden area, but I could not get get the model to work, similarly, I also wanted to include a menu screen but the time constraints and no prior knowledge of menu screens meant that they had to be cut from the final game.

Style Reference - Borderlands

For my current project, I am creating a fantasy style hub area/safe zone for a role-playing style video game. But the issue is, what style would the game have? To tackle this, I have decided on using a cartoon style, both because it is rarely used in a fantasy setting and because I do not feel I yet have the skill to produce highly detailed models.

For reference however I will need to look at cartoon style games. This time round, I shall look at the sci-fi RPG Borderlands.

 Whilst Borderlands is a science fiction game, with a very different setting to my own idea, it is still a very big influence on my game environment. I would like to emulate the cel-shaded style of the borderlands aesthetic.

Similar to the environment I wish to create, the city of Sanctuary in Borderlands 2 is located in a mountainous area and built around a central point.