Our third milestone, for our Winter Submission was to have a working build with key user experience of the core gameplay. Here I have a selection of renders for the church in our game, as an aid for the environment artist to build from, as well as our final Art Bible and One Sheet.
Using a plugin in Maya called mental ray, I composed several shots of the church I made for our groups environment artist to go from. I had planned to digitally paint over these in Photoshop but decided to spend more time on other essential things like the 2D Intro Cut Scene. Furthermore, I would have then gone back to these afterwards, if I had time left over at the end.
Above is a shot looking down the centre aisle of the church lit up by harsh light coming through the entrance. I enjoyed experimenting with the physical sun and sky in mental ray to produce different moods which is centre to our theme of horror.
The church in our vertical slice is the last area the player can visit and expresses hope for the characters future of survival in the later of the game. I placed in quickly built scenery to help visualise the space for our environment artist to get a sense of the scale of the place which is almost a cathedral.
I quickly put this image above in Photoshop and cut out the ceiling for a pre-visualisation of where the only daylight is entering the roof.
Here is the model complete in Maya's side and top down view perspectives. I added show wire mesh to help pick out individual objects. I really enjoyed trying to match that of the architecture of the Italian renaissance and am pleased with how it turned out, knowing I only spent six hours on it. With the top down view, you can get a feel of the gameplay route I created made mainly with debris; channelling the player to the exit.
Above is a front view of the interior, using the x-ray feature, to see through the walls in a very flat like position. I highlighted the Christian cross above the centre substructure, to point out the significance of object placement in space. This can either lead your eye in the right direction or the wrong and it is a major factor to think about, especially for video games.
Part of my team role as concept artist was to create the art bible. This is a collection of art material from our game, documented in a series of pages that are easy to communicate our games visuals across to say a new member of the team or marketing.
Above is the overview contents page. This is a guide to direct the reader to an area of interest about our game.
The art style is a page describing the visuals such as in the scale, proportions, time period and environment.
Here I have presented the concepts of the character for the player and potential enemy that would be mentioned in the audio tapes.
I made sure to express things like height, stance and style in the model sheets.
In the level of detail page, I proposed to our environment artist the things to and not to detail. For example, there's no point putting loads of features on a pillar that the player does not have access to or see. The level of detail in our game is close-to life like in architectural aspects and space; although in a third person perspective.
As our camera angles are all static and triggered as the player moves about, we had to use interesting cinematography to help drive our theme of horror. One example would be that of the camera and called the 'Dutch' shot. This puts the viewer on edge and feel like something is wrong.
When the player advances up to the church (the final room in our vertical slice) the angles shift to show the grand space; as a posed to the claustrophobic space previously in the catacombs. This conveys a sense of freedom but also loneliness and emotes the hope in the characters story.
Above is a mixture of tones that we would have liked to place in our game. Due to time constraints we had to finalise our game in just monochrome and blood red (a similar visual style to the films Sin City and Schindlers List).
Here are the two atmosphere pages I made for our art bible. They describe the tones and environment ambience.
This is the centre point of our games vertical slice, leading to a large chamber which has been converted to a German Nazi lab facility.
The user interface was very important to convey several aspects of our game. The major function was the interaction of pointing and clicking objects, picking them up and then using the inventory system to unlock, navigate and escape the level.
One of the pieces I wanted to have directional control over was our intro cutscene. As I was creating the stills for it, I aided our game designer in code and the presentation of the animations using sprites in separate layers on a canvas screen in Unity.
Reference photographs from the Second World War was a key component to help make our game feel alive. Personally, I looked at dozens of war time photographers work and came across some very interesting aspects and rare photo archives, centred in the Italian Campaign; of which inspired our vertical slice.
Here are some more mood boards from our character artist of game inspirations and initial ideas. One of the influences I kept reminding the team we were going for, from the start of the concept art, is the video game Until Dawn. There are quite a few similarities in the game to ours such as the interesting cinematography like using static camera angles and glowing intractable items.
Lastly, is our final one sheet I created. We had an initial one sheet page in the first few weeks of our games idea and it is interesting to now see how it has developed since then. I made sure to include elements like the main character and the important mechanics and general information.
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