-James
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| Character Art Sample |
Friday, November 22, 2013
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
-James
Friday, November 8, 2013
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
Friday, November 1, 2013
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
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
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