I did some more character silhouettes after i enjoyed doing the other ones so much, these took less time, there is one less of them but still. I will analyse them in more depth wen i get round to developing them but i am liking the look of 2,6 and 8.
So earlier in the week we had a guest
lecturer, Shaun Mooney, a concept artist, he talked through his work,
experiences and processes and then did a workshop showing his process
from silhouettes to finished concept, this was mostly with guns but also
did a quick character. I decided to do the same, though this is later in the
week and I've kind of forgotten what his process was after
drawing the silhouettes. Regardless I was in the mood to do some character work
as I've gotten bored of doing environments and needed a change or I’ll
just be dragging myself through work I don't want to do and just half arsing
it. So here are some character thumbnails that I will be able to use for the
character portion of my project.
These took me
a surprisingly long time to do, longer than they should have but I
enjoyed doing them and I think they came out well. When I get round to focusing
on my characters which I think I might change up so that I’m mixing in stuff I
like doing with stuff I don't so neither gets stale, I will do more of these
and eventually pick the ones I like to develop. I also did a gun but only got
part way through it and then forgot how to finish it.
So I've been continuing my environment work and have gone in a new direction, I've been trying to paint for a while now and i'm pretty much coming to the end of what i can do in the time i have. I cannot paint, that is a fact, i do not have the skill for it and it was stupid of me to try and include it in my honour project of all places. I have instead been looking into other alternatives, frankly i like working with line art, it's what i'm good at and it's what i enjoy, it is time consuming but it at least gets me somewhere, I've been looking at environmental artists for weeks now and have gotten nowhere so i'm moving on. One other method i found was to mock up the scene in a 3d program, the person i looked at used Google sketch up but i don't like that, the interface is terrible so i'm using 3ds max. My plan is to do some light sketching to get out some rough ideas of what this arena is going to look like and then model it as best i can so that i can work over renders with accurate perspectives and lighting.
So far i have drawn this.
It's a mixture of natural and mechanical, the way i wanted it, i tired to mix in some architectural elements too but it's kinda hard from this angle and it's only a rough sketch. I started modeling the arena and the mountains around the edge of the arena. I found mountains and terrain are hard to block model, i instead went into mudbox and tried to sculpt the terrain from a plane, this was the result.
The terrain itself seemd to work out ok but i have no idea what happened with all those patches when i imported it into 3ds max. In order to get the right shape i had to use subdivision which vastly increases the poly count and in 3ds max there were just far too many polys and vertices to actually see anything which would make placing things kind of hard. I either need to find a way to use less subdivision or just try and complete the block model 3ds max version.
Now that i have my arena map created i attempted to do some environmental artwork. I don't really know how to do environmental artwork though, I've never been able to do it and i can't really paint to save my life.
I've watched a bunch of videos of people doing environmental artwork and some other videos of techniques and tried to apply them to artwork.
I watch a lot of Feng Zhu's tutorial videos.
I also watched this video of one of my favourite artists, Luke Mancini. He currently works for Blizzard.
This is one of his images that recently caught my eye, it's very simple and predominantly uses a simple square brush. It has great composition but uses very simple and subtle shapes.
I tried to do use a similar technique and it really didn't work. I really don't like painting and even less without line art, line art is my bread and butter, it's what i like doing and it's what i'm good at. This piece is all around bad, the composition is bad, the perspective is bad. I need to find a better way of working that i'm comfortable with. I have also done a sketchy environment piece.
But this one isn't much better. I think i need to look are more basic tutorials, find out the rules and guidelines to doing environmental art. Without understanding i'm just not going to be able to grasp this, i don't have long to do these environment pieces either.
This is Garbage city, near Cairo in Egypt.
Garbage city is an extremely large collection of low grade buildings without
any real info structure, the people there have no way of disposing of their
garbage so the city just piles up. The citizens of the city have made their own
jobs out of the mess, they sift through the piles of garbage to find anything
they can repair, reuse or sell.
This scene reminds me of the chase scene in
The Incredible Hulk movie, running across buildings to flee the pursuing
agents. This is a wild idea that I don’t see panning out but in my mind I
thought of having the map as rooftops and what would usually be walls in a
regular MOBA map would be gaps in the buildings. These could obviously be
jumped over using blink abilities like In other MOBA games.
Beijing
Beijing city in
China, this city is highly industrialised city with some truly interesting
building design. One that caught my eye was the Sofitel Wanda hotel which looks
like it’s ripped right out of a sci-fi movie city. For my arena theme these
kinds of futuristic looking structures will fit right in.
New York
New York City, the well-known
sky scraper skyline has been used as a jumping off point for many science
fiction cities. The high-rise buildings a mixture of both old and new, neon
lights and signs at night all add to the overwhelming sight. I know of two
examples of New York itself being updated in media to be futuristic versions of
its current self. The movie the Fifth Element and Doctor Who both have their
own iterations of the city. I will research them both in my next stage of research.
Castle Cities
This is the Castle city from the Disney movie
Tangled, the modern remake of Rapunzel. I looked into a bunch of real world
castles and didn’t find the kind of thing I was looking for. After this I decided
to look into fictional castles, this was the best image I could get of the
castle. This castle city is built up an island hill and the city itself kind of
winds up and around the hill up to the castle. I think that the castle cities
won’t feature too prominently in the arena design but may come into some of the
later work for character lore.
This is Kings Landing from the Game of Thrones TV
show. Another fictional walled castle city, this city is well designed to withstand
sieges. Looking at the layout of the city in this image I think the castles may
work as the bases at each end the map.
This is the White City
from Lord of the Rings, a highly built up city in the side of a mountain face.
It has a very imposing look, I think this too will be more of a character lore related
reference.
I spent a large portion of today getting my map mock up for my game created. I need to start my environment sketches now so i needed to have a sort of lay of the land down so that i know what i'm drawing, the map is pretty basic and just used to show the layout of everything, i will need to do some preliminary sketches to decide how the map will look visually. some details i have already decided. I want the map to be on a gradient going from top to bottom lane down the river, it will go from a kind of mountainous area at the top will a river/stream running down. Once it reaches the mid and bot part of the map it will become more marsh like and becomes mud. I had the idea to have the mud as an environmental hazard and slow the players but i don't think i really need to get into that much depth with it.
I started out on some square grid paper i had, one i had half of the map mocked up i too a photograph of it with my phone, i would have scanned it but my printer has gone the way of every other printer I've ever had and broken.
I only created half of the map as they are always mirrored to create an even playing field for both teams.
I then went over it and created it again in Photoshop with more detail.
The map is fairly similar to the League of Legends map and uses a lot of the same gameplay features. The standard lanes, bases, river and towers are all the same. I have changed the jungle layout and added some of my own features such as bridges across the river and both ends to provide some interesting structural elements and what could potentially be interesting gameplay features.
Okay so i've gotten a bit behind and i've still got some research to do but if i keep going at the rate i'm going at the moment and keep forgetting things which is a bit scary (should totally get myself checked), then i'm just going to keep getting further and further behind and i'm not the fastest worker anyway and i'm slower when i'm doing something i don't like i.e. research and slower still when i'm down in the dumps. Therefore i'm just going to jump ahead and kick off this week as it should be according to the schedule and catch up with my research when i have time and or when my work calls for some research on the subject i'm working on, whether that be character design ideas for a character inspired by some form of animal or maybe by some historical period.
So according to my schedule i should now be brainstorming and sketching game ideas so here is my first mind map of ideas i've had about what my MOBA game could be. Some of them i have talked about previously when talking about my research. I have decided and decided quite early on that i didn't really want to restrict myself to designing a game based on one theme, what would be the point of me doing all this research and not having at least most of it influence design in some way.
Melikhov, L. (2012). Smite Beta Preview: The new contender in the DotA genre. Retrieved from
SMITE, a MOBA game still in the public beta stage is a game themed around gods and deities, i feel that due to this it has a poor art style and really kind of lacks it's own identity.
The ideas i've been favouring have been to do with mixing in multiple areas, i also like the ideas to make the map an incline of different areas and the rooftops idea, though these will need some sketching and design though put into them before i can either take them forward or drop them as they are both gameplay related. Although have said i don't intend to fully develop this game and it's mechanics i still feel compelled to create something i see as functional and well designed.
My favourite idea at the moment is to have some kind of world that is inhabited by all sorts of characters from monsters to men to entities and everything in between. They would all be character moved to this world by some kind of being that has drawn then together from their own worlds, times and dimensions. These champions would then be pit against each other in a specially crafted arena on the planets moon. This idea would allow me to utilize lots of themes and craft my own unique characters.
