Where do we go from here?

Senior Studio is finally over for myself and the rest of Team Grind. After wandering in the desert for 40 years we finally found our destination. We were able to pull together all our hard work and implement it in a build. The game shows a lot of promise and with a little more work it could finally be the game we intended it to be. As the Art Director I now have the time to sit down and look at ways to improve the visuals of The Grind. 

Having already briefly spoken to the team on the subject, we've all agreed the characters need to be reworked. We had effectively 8 weeks to churn out 4 characters and 4 enemies. This is quite the task for a two man character modeling team. The characters are pretty rough and need some more polish. Some of the characters even need to be redesigned. But for once I finally have the time to show these characters the love they deserve. 

Once the characters have been reworked I will move on to the environments and then the UI. It's important to get this game looking spectacular as we move forward on it. Currently we are aiming to enter The Grind into next years E3 Student games competition, as well as any other indie/student games competitions that pop up in between that time. 

Now I leave you with the fruits of our labor. The Grind!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxTOY6iAT-o

A New Direction

     It's been a while since my last post. I've been working diligently on The Grind. Over the last 10 weeks The Grind has gone through numerous changes, including a complete rework of the art direction. We've decided on going for a more stylized cartoon/illustration inspired look. Our new direction not only goes better with the comedic theme of our game but also looks a lot better at the average view distance. We've also decided to scrap the use of normal maps.
     Overall our new direction has received mostly positive feedback and for the first time the whole art team has a clear idea of where we are going. I will be posting more often in the next few weeks, and will have numerous art samples to share. Until next time!

-James

The Grind - End of Quarter Postmortem

The quarter has finally come to end, and with it so has Senior Studio I. However for myself the job never stops. The feedback on the early art samples has been overwhelmingly negative, and being the Art Director the blame lays in my corner. Over the next few weeks I will begin re-evaluating our direction for the Grind and begin producing more art samples for the team to discuss. We have to have this ironed out before we begin Senior Studio II, as it's focus is more heavily based on the visual side of the game. This week I will leave you with a few of our art samples. I'm gonna go take a long overdue nap. Until next time!

-James

Character Art Sample

The Grind - Weekly Update

      2 weeks and counting until the release of our alpha. We have all been working tirelessly to reach this milestone. Overall we seem to be in good shape. We plan on having 6 levels implemented in time for the alpha. Currently we have the base meshes finished and UV Mapped. Over the next week I will be getting the assets textured and get a test render finished for the first level. Meanwhile the rest of my team are working on characters, animations, and the GUI.

      I apologize for the lack of visuals the last couple of blogs. In the coming weeks we will have a video of the core-playable up as well as an increasing number of screenshots as we get more and more assets finished and in the game. I will leave you this week with a lovely enemy concept by our character artist Hank Silman (Go check out his amazing work here: http://hanksilmanmedia.blogspot.com/). This concept was for a small annoying creature similar to a goblin or imp. Until next week!

-James

Getting A Consistent Look

    Early last week I wrote about our team's process for deciding on an art style for The Grind. In that blog I mentioned the transition from research to concept art. This transition did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. With this project being done in an educational environment we had a very short amount of time to spend in the concept phase. Due to this we knew we had to crank out concepts at a rapid pace and would have to utilize the entire Art Team.
     I produced the first pieces of concept work: one environment concept, and one character concept. The rest of the Art Team would then try to replicate my style for future concepts. The Art Team consisted of five people all of which had varying skill levels with drawing. So unsurprisingly the concepts being produced were far from identical, and not the most cohesive. While not completely cohesive the character concepts fit together fairly well. All of the characters had the exaggerated proportions but some were much more stylized than others. But overall it felt that with slight modification the characters could easily belong in the same world.
     The environment concepts however were all over the place. There were very few consistent elements in the environment pieces. A lot of this was due to the fact that we were drawing concepts for multiple worlds at the same time. Something that in hindsight was very foolish. One week done in the conceptual phase and we had the same questions still in front of us. The only element we had truly ironed out was with the character designs. In the end it was our project manager who finally presented me with an answer to the environment issue. Due to time constraints for this project we decided to temporarily cut the multiple worlds instead focusing on one (The subject of my last blog). With this oddly depressing yet reassuring piece of news we set out to establish the look of this lone world. At this point we also split the team up so we weren't all working on concepts. Some began assisting the programmers with creating prototype assets for the core playable, while the rest stayed on concepts. In the coming weeks this topic will resurface and once we have more finished concepts I will do a postmortem on the subject of how we finally got that desired cohesion. Until then I have concept art to do (among other things)!

-James

The Grind - Weekly Update

          Another week done, and one step closer to beginning asset production for The Grind. This week the Art team have cranked out more concepts and have been working closely with our level designers planning our first few levels for the alpha build. Over this last week we have been working overtime on concepts as our game goes through a few growing pains. We decided to cut back from 4 unique worlds to 1 for the sake of scope. We couldn't decide on just one of the 4 worlds so we've had to create a hybrid world. This has lead to a huge queue for environment concepts. Due to this the whole Art team will have to work double time the next two weeks.
          On the bright side our programming/design team are making really good progress and are on track to have our core-playable in good shape by next week. Overall though The Grind is moving along nicely and should be in much better shape down the road with the decision to scale back the number of worlds. I leave you this week with a memorial for the dearly departed.

-James

RIP Hell level, you will be missed.

The Blank Canvas - Developing an Art Style

                After what has felt like an eternity, we are finally beginning work on our Senior Studio projects. I've always enjoyed starting new projects because nothing has been solidified yet. I have a fresh block of clay to mold into whatever I desire (to a certain extent). The Senior Studio project that I am apart of is a multi-player isometric dungeon crawler called The Grind. However The Grind doesn't take itself quite as serious as many games of the genre. In fact The Grind is a parody of the RPG/dungeon crawler genre, with which the goal is to reach level 10 before the other players. Players will be competing with each other to land the killing blow on an enemy so they can get the most experience. While players will be competing with one another they do not directly fight each other. Instead players use items to wreck havoc on one another, such as inverting controls for a short period.  Some situations may require the players to temporarily work together such as if a boss monster were to show up. The Grind is intended to be a party game, where friends can cause mayhem on each other in one sitting. Each time through the players will have a different experience as levels and spawns are randomized.

                When I took the role of Art Director on The Grind I knew instantly we'd need to have the art style add to the comedic tones of the game. For example ultra realism wouldn't quite fit here. It wouldn't be very cohesive to the game play. This led to a whole bunch of research. I found inspiration from all kinds of media. Be it from film, illustrations, paintings, and of course other games. I cannot stress the importance of looking into other media for inspiration. Our most influential pieces of inspiration came from illustrations and paintings. It would be hard to create a truly memorable art style if you only look at what games have already done. 

                   The one game that stood out to me, which had an art style that aided the comedic elements of the game all the while creating a visually stunning world was Lionhead Studio's Fable. Fable had a very charming fairy tale art style, all the while lambasting the player with crude humor, but it didn't feel out of place.It had a very consistent art style, which helped make the world so memorable.

Concept exploring disproportion

                     I was also heavily inspired by the Don Quixote illustrations of Gustave Dore. The element from these illustrations that stood out to me was the comically disproportioned characters. In most RPG's the main character is the ideal hero with a chiseled physique. By using exaggerated proportions we can continue to poke fun at the RPG along with creating both humorous and memorable characters. Another inspiration from traditional media were several Arthurian paintings. All of these paintings had vibrant landscape backdrops with idealistic characters cast in heroic poses. Inspired by these paintings our team decided that for The Grind we will emulate the classic fantasy illustrations. These paintings were possibly the biggest inspiration for us as it not only cemented the basis for our art style but also influenced the game narrative which had been barren up to that point. Armed with a rough idea for a theme we then set off to define it with concept art.This led to a little issue that was briefly mentioned before: consistency. Next week I will delve further into this topic.

-James