Winter Submission: Milestone 2 - Digital Art

Our second milestone, for our Winter Submission, was to have a working 'prototype' build and all the main concept art complete. Below are my central digital art pieces to help aid our group's team members with their individual job roles.

Above is a final view for one of the camera perspective shots in our game. I used a simple grayscale tone to help place the dimensions and interior space for our environment artist to model in Maya.

Furthermore, I made sure to create both a church and a catacomb environment piece, as they are the two locations in our game. I also labelled (in white) potential objects and their locations that the player would collect or use to advance forward in the level.

For our character artist, I created two model sheets with the features and general build of the protagonist and enemy; with a portrait profile and short back stories.

Something I enjoyed solving for the character artist, was the size and proportions of our games protagonist (William) facial features. In the previous image, the portrait angles were off centre and not aligned. So to help the character artist when it came to modelling, I made three perspective views aligned horizontally and vertically using rulers in Photoshop.

Below is an object sheet I made to help our team decide on ideas of what the player could pick up throughout the game. Certain items such as the medication and documents, you would pick up and take with you. However, something like a photograph or the audio tapes would be observable only and placed down again after interacting with it.

Underneath is a concept, I quickly made for our UI artist, of what are our games main menu layout could look like. After clicking on one of the options on the menu, the camera position would pan and move from one spot to another.

After going through several name ideas for our game, we as a team, settled on the title, MISSING IN ACTION. I felt that the name suited the story's features really well and in addition, the term M.I.A (Missing In Action) was used back in the Second World War. 

Winter Submission: Milestone 1 - Concept Art

For our Year 2 Winter Submission, we were asked to work in a team of five and create a vertical slice of a game with two random themes; ours being World War II & Hospital. We also were given individual roles in the team, a Game Designer, Concept Artist, Environment Artist, Character Artist and a GUI/UI Artist.

There was quite some time spent relaying ideas on trench warfare (as the main aspect of our game) but I later informed the team that ground combat had changed substantially since the First World War. This left us with the familiar (often quite repeated) locations in history of World War II as our setting. As the concept artist of our group, I proposed three interesting unusual-in-game environments; Italy, Japan & Russia.

For the three settings, I made some Reference Material Sheets (as seen here) for the team to come to an agreement on just one.

While researching the countries, I found out quite a bit of history I didn't know about the Allies and Axis powers. This helped massively to generate story and plot ideas.

While looking at the environments, we had several things to take into perspective, such as the genre we all chose; horror. Finding what worked best was essential, as the atmosphere to horror has to be decent in order for it to pay off, especially with the audience and gameplay feel.

Out of nowhere, I had a eureka moment and knew where a great setting would be for our horror game. The Catacombs of Rome. In June 1944, Rome was liberated by the Allies. This gave us the opportunity to perhaps set the scene the month before in May. In addition, a fantastic idea we as a team thought of was the Nazi's had occupied the catacombs to hide secret experiments and weapons.

After more discussions, we finally went with the idea of the game set in Italy. Above is my brief character concepts I sketched of a medic soldier and objects you could possibly pick up along the way for the Point & Click aspect. 

Something I wanted to get sorted from the beginning was the storyline. As I am a massive fan for accuracy, I opted to help as the historical researcher. Although our game will be following fictional underground Nazi experiments/weapons, in order to give a good sense of believability, there needs to be a touch of realism like including the events of the Italian Campaign.