Level design

The subject of this post is level design and in fact I'm quite happy that I'm writing it now instead of in the first term as I was supposed to do. It may sound strange, but the reason behind that is quite simple: in the second term I had the opportunity to work on a group project that was to design and create a game level. Therefore now I've got some experience to which I can relate in this post. So below I'll describe some stages that we went through, things that we had to consider and problems that have occurred along the way of creation of this level.  

The brief was to create a gothic-themed level, so the first (and as I've already said in one of the previous posts - one of the most important) step was research. We wanted to make sure that whatever we would create could be easily recognized as gothic related. Beside of historical and architectural aspects, we looked for examples of gothic themes in literature, film and other video games. After considering different types of gothic environments we could create, we decided to go with manor house. 

Having decided on that we could start doing some initial concepts. Below you can see some created by me.

 

We all agreed that one of the level aspects we wanted to emphasize was mood. So even though we didn't have final concepts ready we were playing with lighting and weather effects like rain and fog in cryengine.   

Just like it would be done in production of real game level we started 3d work with simple level block-out in engine. We decided to build our manor with modular pieces so creating this block-out helped us to estimate how big the pieces needed to be. It  also helped us to decide on overall size of the level and placement of specific elements. I believe that this was the most important step level design-wise as here we decided what path we wanted the player to walk through. This decision has big impact on playability of our level.

Although, at this step, one of the biggest problems we encountered during the production have occurred. We had pretty hard time trying to match what we had planned in our minds for the interior and for the exterior of the building. The interior simply didn't fit inside the exterior's shell. So we had to rearrange some things. Each one of us drew his idea for how we could fix that. This is my sketch:

After we had whole level planned out we could start working on proper assets to swap with placeholder blocks. At this stage we only had to make sure that the level looked nice as all level-design problems were already sorted. Here's some examples of assets created by me:

And here you can see our level fly-through. It's not completely finished yet, we still need to create some more assets to populate it but I guess it's finished enough to show it. Enjoy :)

Visual composition

Visual composition is the name for numerous operations, actions, and tricks that artists can use to make their work more interesting, more readable, and pleasing to look at. It's the way of placing small elements of the picture so that they look good as a whole. In the previous post I said that you can't create a good image without preparation and it's exactly the same with composition. Actually, it is one of the first things you should do when you're planning a picture. If you don't plan your composition properly there's a huge chance that your picture is going to look random and the viewer is going to have a hard time trying to figure out what is happening on that picture. 

It's quite hard for me to talk about composition without an image example, so I decided to take a picture painted by one of my favourites artists - Feng Zhu - and explain what composition tricks he  used to make it look so good. I'm not saying that I'm a composition expert. In fact, I'm far from being that, so that's only my opinion and interpretation :)

When you look at this picture, there is no doubt about what is its focus point. Your eyes unconsciously wonder towards the golden lion and that is not a coincidence. Feng made that using some composition tricks. First that is most obvious for me is using Fibonacci spiral. It is a composition technique very often used by various artists. It leads the viewer's   sight through the picture in specific way. In this case - towards the lion. 

 

Apart from the spiral, you can notice plenty of other lines that are pointing towards the beast.

Moreover, the lion is the biggest and most detailed figure on this picture, which makes your mind focusing on it. Additionally, his quite dark value contrasts with the light value of the sky creates a tension and makes it more interesting to look at. 

Another important aspect of composition is colour. It's obvious that the key colour of this picture is red. It's the complementary colour of green (which is dominant colour on this image) and it also creates tension, so by placing it on all figures on this picture (beasts and warrior), it makes them feel more important. Also, this choice supports story-telling - you unconsciously know that the warrior and cats are in some way connected. 

All elements that I described above make the right side of the picture more dominant, and Feng made sure that the left side is nicely counterbalanced. He made that by introducing the little waterfall and by giving the warrior a huge sword. Both these things have light value that contrast with the background, so again: tension = point of interest. Also the picture is nicely framed by the fragments of ruins on both sides that keep you focused on the action that is happening between them. 

Obviously, they are just a few artistic decisions that were made by Feng while creating this picture, but I hope that my analysis helped to show the importance of composition in a picture.   

Planning and concepting

In this post I intend to talk about planning and concepting, so I figured out that the best way to tackle this subject would be to describe what steps I went through whilst creating this vehicle for 2nd year visual design project.

But first let me talk a bit about how I have learnt to plan my designs properly. I believe that this was (in terms of visual design) one of the most important things that I was taught on this course, and also one of the things that had the biggest impact on quality of my works. Sure, things like good lines quality, value separation, and using right colours are important too but these are things that I've been improving by practice whereas planning is more about mind setting.   

Before university and for the most of the first year I was not planning my projects at all. When given a task I would sit and draw whatever was in my mind without doing research and often even without preparation sketches. I guess that it was caused by the fact that I didn't fully understand the purpose of these preparations. I used to think that artists do research and preparation sketches only to come up with ideas, but I already had plenty of ideas in my head, so I thought I didn't need this. I was so wrong...

Now I know that these first stages are crucial and I would even say that they are the most important as they have a great impact on quality of the final outcome. It's just like with cooking - you can't make a good dish without preparation, just by throwing all ingredients to one pot, stirring and hoping that something edible will come out of it. Actually, it's like that with every creative process. You can't create something nice without preparation and planning. Also if you're planning ahead it can help you prevent many mistakes and save some time that you would spend on trying to fix that mistakes. 

So now I'll talk a bit about planning process behind this vehicle. It was created for 2nd year visual design project. The task was to create a mean of transport that can traverse through water, air and land. First of all I started with a research. I wanted to check if there are any real world vehicles that can function in all these environments. That's how I found about flying hovercrafts and I decided that it was a good starting point for my design. Although, I didn't want to simply draw something that already existed in our world, so I decided to turn flying hovercraft into a racing vehicle! So, I started with gathering some photos of both hovercrafts and sport cars and composing them into this mood board.

Even though you can't see it on this picture, at this stage I did small research on how real world hovercrafts work to make my design more believable. Putting photos of all these vehicles against each other helped me to clarify which way I should take this design. Next, with pen and paper I created these small sketches. It allowed me to explore different possibilities and gave me some options to choose from.   

Now that I had pretty clear idea where I wanted to take this concept, I did a few experimentations with shapes in Photoshop.   

And now I was ready to create this final picture. Later on, when I decided to magnify even more the fact that it's a racing vehicle I created the version below, which shows a bit of an inside. It was also based on a real world racing vehicles' interiors. 

I hope this post helped to show the importance of planning and preparing.

Year 2

So the first two terms are over now, Easter is in few days and I still haven't posted even one note on this blog. I feel really awful that I'm really far behind with my critical studies tasks... Although, the lack of entries was not caused by laziness! I was so busy with visual design and game production projects that I haven't had time to write anything... Especially that English is not my first language and it takes me extra time to write anything coherent and readable. But I'm aware of that it's not a valid excuse and I'm supposed to write posts just like everyone else on this course. So, now that I'm quite up to date with all my visual design and game production tasks I'll try to catch up with critical studies tasks over the Easter. 

In the first post I'm supposed to write about my plans for second year but since it is almost the third term I guess it's too late to make statements like 'I'll write at least one blog entry every week'... So instead of that I think it will be more appropriate if I write a bit about my experience of the second year so far and how different it's been from year one. And there's been some significant changes!

First of all the course have now new facility and it is really great! (despite the fact that it is twice as far from my bus stop than the old one :D ). Beside of obvious pros like new hardware and extra space we have now, the location of the building is just two minutes away from Tesco, which is an extra advantage. Especially when you're working in labs from early morning till late night, it can be really handy :)       

Along with new space our course acquired some new personnel, which is my favorite change from year one. All of these new tutors are great and nice people, and most of them worked in game industry before, which means that beside of knowledge they have relevant experience. Also more staff means that they've got more time for us (which I felt was an issue in the first year).

Another difference is the kind of tasks we've been given over this year. In the first year we would draw and model mostly from observation and real life references, whereas in this year most of tasks ware to come up with original ideas, design and draw/model something from our imaginations. And I really loved that as someone who aspire to become a concept artist, because that's hopefully something that I'm going to do for living in my future. 

One more thing that I really enjoyed this year, which we didn't have a chance to experience in the first year, was the group project. Even though it took a lot of time and many times along the way I had enough of it, but at the end I've learned a lot and what is most important it allowed me to experience industry based production pipeline.

There have been many more things that I've enjoyed this year but I'll write more about it in the last post this year, after third term.