Easter Review

   Halfway.

   A sobering, if not quite frightening a notion. So where are we? Simply put it feels like the bulk of the concept and design work is out of the way, the industrial retro-90’s sci-fi aesthetic language is now fairly formed in my mind and is beginning to be fleshed out in the assets I am creating. As, the dedicated reader I’m sure you are, you will have been seen develop over the past ten weeks. But let’s take a step back and let’s look at what it was I set myself to do for the FMP and see where I stand against it. The brief I submitted to the course team states that I’ll be creating a sci-fi environment featuring two rooms and adjoining corridors which will be submitted as an interactive .exe alongside supporting documentation, imagery and film.

   Am I on track for that? I think so… he says oh so confidently, I mean I don’t feel behind in any sense, inso far I’ve been pretty flexible with my timeframe and getting stuff done and in my mind, yeah, I can get everything I need done it’s the quality of that submission up in the air and I'm struggling to judge how long assets need vs how much time I can give them.

   So far though, as I said, I think it’s going ok. There were some initial wobbles over the first few weeks that are well documented on here but as I’ve cultivated the foundation and direction of the project I found my feet with it. Concepting was always a major worry for me going in to this, perhaps the biggest, as I’ve always been comfortable using it as a problem solving tool for very specific problems, what does this asset look like or a basic paint over of an established environment whereas starting from scratch is completely out of my comfort zone. However by breaking down the design challenges I had to smaller and smaller chunks it became much easier to deal with. And playing to my strengths really helped to, using a lot of 3D to block out shapes and iterations early on helped me a lot to get a sense of presence from the designs I was working on. Whilst concepting there’s also been a constant worry of straying too close to existing franchises and while I want emulate what made the sets of Alien or Star Wars so effective and believable I don’t simply want to recreate them and that’s a fine balancing act although one I feel I’ve mostly achieved up to this point. I think key to that has been referencing almost exclusively real objects, cargo planes, the ISS, oil rigs, to inform the design language and decisions I’ve made. This has helped to create, what I hope are, unique designs as well as give the illusion of functionality.
 

 

   An important factor through the design development process has been keeping in mind the thematic context that I want to create as well as the functional and technical contexts. I’ve touched on this before back at the beginning of February but in short it means designing assets, mood or lighting to push the theme of a film say or a game level. Something I’ve tried to lace through the level is a unsettling feeling, a sense of dread or being near death that’s perhaps most visible in the coffin design of the corridor but I’ve used that same notion in the design of the holo-table, inspired by surgical tables, a lot of early designs were very much inspired by aeroplanes, the claustrophobic nature of the space are all elements that can create a lot of fear in people. My hope has always been that people can pick up on this subconsciously and project their own insecurities or phobias of those elements into the level and the assets that populate it.

 

   Most of those assets have been fleshed out pretty solidly by now with their design locked in but as I’m writing there’s a couple minor ones that remain to be completed. My aim has been to get the level to a “playable” state, so while it’s incredibly rough my hope is that someone could play it and get a “full” experience without my guidance or interference. From here it’s mostly gonna be refining those assets to a final level, i.e. the bread and butter trinity of modelling, unwrapping and texturing. I want to do things fast and efficiently so I’m creating models and materials with modularity in mind which will speed up the process of asset creation and any iteration required. I’m hoping to avoid anything high poly rather stick to an average normal pipeline and use the geometry to drive the model’s normal rather than unique normal maps. Of course the hero assets will probably deviate from that notion a little but for the most part I think I can stick to what I said and still produce quality assets for Unreal.    

   Unreal has been an interesting software to play around in over the past term and I feel I’ve made some great progress with it since sorta starting with it in September. I’m making my own particle systems, however basic, I’m emulating and beginning to create my own blueprints, however primitive, and I’ve gotten my head around the lighting system in the engine. So in short it’s been really cool and actually pretty fun to just play within it. Going forward while I feel I’ve got the lighting and mood in a good position, especially in the corridors, there’s still a lot of work and iteration needed with them. A big bit of feedback I’ve got is the colour scheme and that it’s too saturated and once this was mentioned I can’t unsee the cacophony of colours that inhabit the level. The intentions in the right place but the execution needs a lot more work. Comparing it to Alien: Isolation, which I’m using as a technical benchmark, I feel I’m picking up on the colour differences if not quite fully understanding them so I’m planning to look more into them colour and lighting wise and push more to emulate the palette and look that Creative Assembly pulled off with the game.

   There was a couple other things alongside the over saturation that were brought up when I spoke to Mike yesterday, player direction, space uniqueness and variety among them but something that could turn into something major if I follow through with it. Mike felt that the current layout of the command module offered both a constricted flow for the player and poor initial viewpoints for the player to get a sense of the space. As we discussed the idea, and I lean towards agreeing with him, we gravitated towards altering the space to an L shaped room rather than the | it currently is. The L would also offer more exploration for the player as they would have a little more breathing space to explore and break up the A to B experience of the level, something I had hoped to avoid. So I would like to do it but I’m conscious of the time so right now I’m probably gonna leave it to the end if I have time but over the holidays I’m gonna knock out a quick experiment to see what it would be like and get a better sense of what needs to be done if I decide to do it. 

   At this point though I don’t to start adding more jobs that need doing then I already have. I’m planning on using Easter as a time to catch up on the elements I let slip under the radar during this term but mostly to evaluate and plan for the coming one. It’s gonna be tight, stressful and all the usual good stuff but the end is beginning to feel in sight, way more than it did ten weeks ago. It’s encouraging to look back on the blog and see from nothing the idea grow into the level as it is and even though I’m not a 100% convinced it feels like it’s in a good spot at the moment but it would be a lie to hide the fact I’m beginning to feel the anxiety over getting it finished build up. It was all too easy to fall into partial complacency over the course of last term with final submission being near five months away, now only a little over two. It feels a little hard to relax going into Easter, to me the feeling is definitely one of the job being half done and in that state of mind  I'm struggling to switch off and drop the worries and anxieties this project brings with it. 

   Halfway, a sobering thought indeed.