Project Alpha - Milestone 1

Our Year Three Final Major Project comprises of two units; Project Alpha in the first term and Project Beta in our second. We were given the choice to either work solo and build up a portfolio of a game art bible or work in a team and make a 'substantially' sized game. Several students had already teamed up over the summer, having chosen to go solo before starting the year, so I had a limited choice of who I could join (as I know working in a team was what I wanted to do from the beginning). 

After discussing ideas with other fellow students, I settled down to work with just two other students (Prem Fatek & Peter Bedding) concentrating on game mechanics/ideas already built up by Prem. We discussed our strengths and weaknesses of roles and also what we wanted in our individual portfolios, to show off to potential employees once we had finished.

I choose the role of Concept Artist with Prem as the Game Designer and Pete as the Sound Designer/Animator. Whilst these are our main roles, we will be filling in/crossing over other roles (as there is only three of us) like UI, Character Art, Environment Art etc. Above is our initial one sheet for our game 'Crimson Kingdom' (working title). Set on earth in a dystopian future, the games genre is somewhere around post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy with a third-person view. 

With our FMP (Final Major Project) being another step up towards looking professional and like being in a small game company, I designed a logo for our team name Project Peacock. Above is the final design I quickly made in Adobe Illustrator to get a crisp vector file that I can then resale easily for later use.

Towards getting an idea of what further concepts and designs could look like, I made four thumbnail speed-painting pieces. These were mainly to help visualise what our game may look like for our presentation/first milestone; with the games level of detail to look fairly realistic. Later on, I think this will be a good challenge, potentially making both highly detailed photo bashes of the environment and other things such as paint-overs.

Here I have made a colour palette of our games overall mood/contrasts. I liked the idea of a rich sunlit saturation. As the game is set in a world where time has stopped, this gives us free reign over a broad range of aspects and factors such as day/weather/atmosphere etc.

For our games working title, I wished to use a decent font that expressed the feel of the post-apocalyptic game and that we could then use for the final name. Out of several choices, I narrowed it down to five and then as a group, we all decided on using 'Filth Of Icarus' from the free downloadable font website http://www.dafont.com/