Developing Drawing Skills

As part of this unit we need to draw some concept art. To practice drawing we all took the same picture and used lots of construction lines to aid the drawing. And then shaded it in for full effect. This helps in future drawings as i would be able to add construction lines and shade more efficiently. This is different to my previous drawing of the bar as that was done in Photoshop using a guideline to draw over, similar to tracing. The drawing below has been done totally freehand using no tracing at all.


I drew the picture above free hand using construction lines. and shaded it in according to the source picture.


In this picture i traced over a sheet full of emotional faces. There are all sorts of emotions displayed such as anger, happiness and sadness. I used pastels to colour in the picture on the right as i feel they have a better effect than using pencil colours.



This is a free hand drawing of the character Gohan from Dragonball Z. I made one copy and then traced over it to remove the smudges from rubbing out previous mistakes. My final copy turned out fairly well for a first year sketch.

Storyboard

This is my original storyboard i produced while doing a different unit. It's the plan for a games trailer for an FPS game like the one we are planning on making now. The main difference is that it is set in the middle east and takes after games like Call of Duty. It doesnt have aliens in it and is more of a real life scenario. Since then we have been asked to make a games trailer and we have changed the idea, it's still a shoot em up but instead has aliens and begins in a bar. This is the image you see below.




This is the storyboard for the current games trailer. It is only a short one to describe the general idea of the game, I did it in very little detail hence the stickfigures. I could use photoshop to enhance it but for now i will upload the rough sketch. I have enhanced one scene of the bar below the storyboard using a template of an existing bar.






This is a scene from the storyboard of our trailer. The bar is a main part of our game as this is where it all starts out and all hell breaks loose. I took the image below and put it in photoshop and used the zoom/brush tools to redraw the scene to give it a sketched look. This also makes it look slightly proffesional as this is what was required in the unit.

Merchandise

We came up with the idea of some merchandise for our game. I chose some of the most simple forms of merchandise. I stuck with the same kind of effect i used on my CD case with the font and green colours.


Mug


Mousemat


T-Shirt

Game Covers

We have just started producing ideas for game case covers. They are not yet all complete but here are my ideas so far.





The general idea of all the above photos was to include a pulse heartbeat line since the game is called Pulse. I implemented a zombie head because our game was about aliens and creep y monsters. The writing i used represents blood and gore and the background looks a bit like bloody tendons.

I changed my mind on these ideas and decided that it looked a bit to cheesy for a shooting game, unless we were aiming for this game to be brought out for the Nintendo Wii i needed to change the style.




I then opened up Photoshop and decided to go for the complete product. I feel the bright green represents infection and gore quite well. The text is spooky and shows the game isn't going to be funny. I've added the pegi symbol and our team logo to the case along with the Xbox 360 title. This leaves us open to creating more cases for other platforms like the PS3.

I will complete this post with the rest of my teams ideas for game covers once they are completed.

Ethical Issues - Libel/Acts

Libel

This is the law put in place to make sure you don’t miss represent something or someone. For example if a football player like David Beckham was put in a football game, but his character acted like an idiot and missed every kick and fell over all the time this wouldn’t be right. Another example of this is if it came on the news that Peter Sutcliffe said that he hadn’t ever paid his TV license in his life, this isn’t going to effect his reputation because he is known for being a mass murderer. However if this was said about the BBC boss Greg Dyke this could seriously effect his reputation and even loose him his job working for a famous TV company.

http://www.urban75.org/info/libel.html

Race Relations Act

The race relations act was put in place by the British parliament in 1976 to prevent racial discrimination. This is put in place to prevent discrimination against race, colour, education and work. This is basically to say no matter where you come from or what colour your skin is we should all be treated equally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Relations_Act

Obscene Publications Act

The obscene publications act has been in place since 1857 in Britain, since then there were two more acts put in place, one in 1959 and one in 1964. Only the 1959 and 1964 laws are still in place today. This law is about criminal obscenity, an example of this is in 2009 a man posted on the internet about the band Girls Aloud. He claimed they had been kidnapped, raped and murdered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscene_Publications_Act

Computer Misuse Act

The computer misuse act was put in place by the UK parliament in 1990. This act is what you would be convicted under if you used your PC for something illegal. A great example of this is R v Gold & Schifreen. These two people used their home PC’s and Modems in 1984/85 to obtain the password and login name of a BT employee which was 22222222 and the password being 1234.They were able to browse the BT files and even view the private messages of Prince Phillip. This sparked another conflict with BT and they were said to be not taking their security seriously enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Misuse_Act

Ethical Issues - Representation/Religion

Ethical Issues are becoming more serious every day. Games Developers have to be very careful when creating their content these days. Simple things such as saying “Oh my God” can be regarded as blasphemes.

Representation is also a serious issue when creating a game, an example of representation is where you would create something that exists in real life but your creation portrays the real life version into something that it’s not i.e. if you created the city of Leeds in your game but made everybody hillbillies that would be bad representation of what Leeds is really like.

Another issue that has to be taken into great consideration is how appropriate your game is for the audience that you have made it for. A game like grand theft auto couldn’t be created for children or teenagers under the age of 18 as it isn’t suitable. Also if you created a game revolved around religion you would have to be careful on whom you advertised it to and make sure that it isn’t too offensive.

Religion takes a huge part in making a game, Religion is a very touchy topic on what you can and can’t do because different religions believe in different things. An example of this would be Christians may find any reference to God or Jesus in a game offensive.

This image is a copy of an old picture of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress but instead includes Asian women in her black robes. Asian women aren’t allowed to show skin and this picture portrays them as sex objects.

Source :

Maryln Monroe

Persian Maryln Monroe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

+ PPT Presentation

Ethical Issues - Copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a law put in place by most governments to make sure the creator of the original work has the rights to decide who gets to use the content and benefit financially.

This is a very serious issue within the games industry because if you put something that doesn’t belong to you or that you haven’t bought or asked for the permission to use in your game, you could be sued for a lot of money. An example of this is a small town in India which created a replica of Hogwarts School in their town without asking for permission from the author of Harry Potter. JK Rowling sued the town for a fairly small amount of money in her eyes, but for the town it was a very large amount.

If you are going to create a game with lots of real life objects in them there is lots of copyright issues you have to come by. Games such as Formula One have to get permission from all the different car companies to use their names logos and car designs in the game. If they can’t get this permission they would have to create it as close as possible but change some detail i.e. If Ferrari refused to give permission to use their name in your game you would have to create your own and name it something like Farreri, by changing around the a and e it is no longer Ferrari and cannot be classed as copyrighted.

Source :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

+PPT Presentation

Job Roles

Each member of the group had to decide upon a job role. As we don't have anyone who can program and nobody knows what their true strengths are in modelling/animation we are just going to share at the jobs.

The roles we could of considered were:

Concept artist - Drawings to be sent of to modeller.

Modeller - Model from concept art ideas.

Animator - Animates models created from concept art.

Programmer - Programs AI's and Interface.

Game Influences

We had to look at other games on the market and look at how the creators influenced thier games. We looked at how they used different sounds and effects in the trailers to get across what the game was about. For example a shooting game isn't going to have happy people in it and fun music, it will be more serious and some form of spooky/upbeat music.

The games i looked at were:

Call of Duty 4

World of Warcraft

Medal of Honor:Pacific Assault

Two of theese trailers are FPS games and both trailers for start of with introducing the situation, almost like a mission brief. And then it shoots of into action scenes and some actual gameplay. The MMORPG game (Wow) starts of with a narrator and a shot of a character looking at the view of snowy mountains with his pet bear. It gives the impression that the character has a very long journey ahead of him and has alot to see.

The influence behind medal of honour pacific assault was based around the fight at Perl harbour. To create the game they would have looked at Perl harbour and re designed the game around it and modelled all the aeroplanes, boats and guns around the ones they would of used in those times.

They would have listened to radios and sounds from movies from those times and re created them for the game. This makes the game feel like it is set in that time and not just looks like it is.

Film Influences

We looked up alot of film influences to see which type of art styles they used and how they get thier films across. The films we chose were

Robocop
Judge Dread
Pitchblack
Chronicles of Riddick
Starship Troopers
Alien
Jason X
Doom

All theese films fit the common idea of our game in the sense that they have industrial scenes and aliens all along with the "Superhero" who saves the day. Alot of theese type of films start out the same way that our games trailer is going to. The start of the trailer is all peacefull/happy and the people have no idea what is about to hit them, then suddenly all hell breaks loose.

Game Name

The next stage of our planning was to create some CD covers. To do this we first needed to decide upon a name for the game itself

The names put forward for a class vote were :

Pulse
Genecide
Rapture
Fade


Pulse was the chosen name of our trailer as we felt it best represented an alien shoot em up.

Team Meeting Four

Team Meeting 4

Attending: Danny Missing: Jack

James Chris

Adam

Point of Discussion

Work completed: Team names

Logo

Narrative

Story boarding

Brain storm

Plot

Things to do: Update our blog regularly.

Gain copyright on our work and our ideas by sending a letter via post with the contents of our work.

Game name: Rapture

Genecide

Pulse – chosen

Fade

Photograph: Buildings (exterior and interior)

People, to then digitally manipulate in photoshop

Textures

Things to be looking at: Work on a cover design for our game (Pulse).

Figure out how to do our pulsating splash screen in

Flash (ask Mark or Rob for assistance).

Team Meeting Three

Minutes of meeting 3 – Start 9:45 14.01.2009

All present

Panda } Teapot Tanks

Chris } Exodus – Vote Winner

James } Team A - Ninja Vs. Pirate Production

Danny } Flying Donkey

Jack } Hadoken Studio’s

Infected Design

Blood Brothers

Team B - Mango Mango

Refraction Studio

EvilOution Studios - Vote Winner

I Have An Idea

Team A – Exodus Logo Selected, Sepia change suggested

Team B – Eviloution – Redesign all together happening

Team A – Changed mind with art style, Rococo to Industrial

Team A – Working on the plot now

As a group we discussed

• What influenced us
• Company Names
• Company Logo’s
• Improvements on voted logo
• Plot suggestions added
• Working on brain storm
• Work on plan, beginning, middle and end for next meeting
• Identify film/game influences
• Discussed our main characters past/life/influences
• Weapon Influences
• Story, Underdog or Superhero

Next meeting – 28^th of January 9:30 in SF04

Meeting Finished 10:10

Art Movments

We looked at a few art movements to decide what we were going to base our game on. We chose Rococco/Cyberpunk and more of an industrial look. We were going for something similar to the picture below.



Another example of an art movement would be graffiti. Many people see graffiti as vandalism buy when you take an artist like banksy it suddenly turns into art. Here are a couple of pictures to show you what type of work he does.

Company Names

After the planning had been completed we needed to decide on some company names.

The following names were put forward for a class vote:

Flying Donkey
Exodus
A Ninja vs Pirate Production
Teapot Tanks



Exodus being the winner.

Company Logo's

The next phase of planning was to create some company logo's. We each made a logo each and made a vote for the one we were going to use in the trailer.

The game being based around aliens and blood/gore had to either had a comedy icon representing the humour of the developers who like to blast zombies heads off untill their hearts are content. Or a serious icon that looks "Cool" and Represents a shoot em up.

This image was created by me (James Graham) I used a series of brushes in photoshop to see what i could make. I used the name flying donkey for a comedy effect. I have made a fairly serious image and put a picture of a donkey ontop of it to represent both serious and funny.

This image was created by Chris peters. His team name was "A Ninja Vs Pirates Production" so his image includes a ninja and a pirate with a font to fit the style of the images.



This image was created by Adam Parker (aka Panda). In his image he experimented with lots of different brushes and colour styles. It was decided black and white suited the image best. The gask mask represents some form of contamination (Aliens) and the buildings look almost deserted when coloured in black and white. This is the image that won the class vote and will be used as our company logo.

This image was created by Danny Walsh using 3D studio max rather than photoshop. He created a teapot using the default shapes and then added some of his own extra ideas to turn it into a tank. The Tank represents some form of warfare will be in the game.

Team Meeting Two

Present:

James

Danny

Jack

Panda

Last Meeting: Brainstorm

Teams have been picked

Record of events: Collected research on live and competition briefs

Client: Bmedi@ and Maggie Robson

Primary Objective: To make a games trailer

Research 3 different trailers:

Little Big Planet

Red Alert 3

Assassins Creed

Dead Space

Mirrors Edge

Gears of War 2

Viewtiful Joe

MGS 3+4

COD 4

Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault

World of Warcraft

Final Fantasy 13

Fable 2

Farcry 2

Patapon 2

Resistance 2

Street Fighter 4

Bioshock

Art deco: Rococco

Cyber Punk

Graffiti

Sumi-e

Manga

Minimalist

Surealism

Theme selection: Rococco

Cyber Punk

Industrial

Need company name and logo, each member of group will produce one, vote taken after Christmas – 14^th January

Team Meeting One

First Meeting: 9^th October Games Year 2

Present: Panda, Chris, Danny, Jack, James

Time: 9:10 – 9:35

Agenda:

We discussed ideas of which we could input into the development of our games trailer. We have yet to come to a final decision onto our trailer; the foundation of this plan will start at the decision of our genre for our game.

In our team we created a brainstorm of ideas onto an A3 paper format that has to be enhanced digitally using various programs. The reason for doing this is that we need an individual source of information to add to our portfolio of work.

It is our delegation as a group to contribute to ideas and work on the project week by week and also in spare time

Ideas

We made a spider diagram to show what we needed to research and include in the planning and production of our trailer. We had to look at the following:

Other games already on the market.

Art styles and themes.

Characters and emotions.

Genre.

Time Frame.

Enviroments.

Gender

Age Range.

Initial Brief.

The current project we are working on in college is to create a games trailer using a a series of programs such as 3d studio max and photoshop. First of all we needed to do some planning.

The games trailer planning started off with a brainstorm. We discussed all aspects of our games trailer such as Influences.

This then lead to discussing what sort of weapons, characters, UI and special effects we were going to include in our game aswell as the trailer.