Week Twenty One

We have decided to go for an early evening look for our level rather than a stormy night, as it will leave the assets better lit and could better serve the ambiance of the beach scene when you emerge from the ship. This I got the chance to move onto characters, but first we needed to decide which ones we were planning to use! The idea that we eventually settled on was that you would play as Ferdinand (the king's son) and be lead through the level by a distant glowing figure, who mysteriously disappears when approached - this would be Ariel. You would then encounter Caliban in the cave, and the level would end where you meet Prospero - it's a nice little condensed visualisation of a section from the play.

Above you will see that I assembled a "feature pool", which is basically a group of images and ideas to help us conceptualise what our versions of the characters could look like. By taking these "features" out of context with their original designs and mixing them with others along with entirely new ones, I was able to play around with fleshed-out, albeit hypothetical designs for each of the heroes/villains. You will also see that each character has been readily assigned to a team member as well, though this is purely referring to who will model the character - I will still be concepting them all.

I asked for Caliban because I felt more confident with a personality who was more on the "ugly" side, as I am very much at home designing grotesque creatures. It's a little bit of a shame that throughout this course we haven't had a single "creature" project, and that humanoid characters are the closest thing we've had to organisms, but I'm sure there'll be room for that sort of thing in the third year. Still, sketching creatures remains one of strongest suits that I haven't yet been able to apply to the course.

Before you ask, no, that amazing photo bash on the left isn't mine! Quite unexpectedly, Brandon has decided to go ahead and concept Prospero, regardless of the fact that he isn't in a concepting position. Nevertheless I did not let this get in the way - they were some fine pieces of work as you can see. The only problem was that our style guide was aiming for semi-stylised, and these designs were more on the realistic side (naturally, as I'm assuming the images had been sourced from photos), so I suggested that I take Brandon's design, which more than sufficed in the design aspect, and recreate it in our level's intended style (that being games such as Dishonored and Bioshock Infinite). And that's just what I did! Centre stage is my stylised redesign of Prospero, complete with flashy green lighting effects, which would be used as our definitive design guideline for the character. As the week came to a close I also produced a reference plane for Brandon in Adobe Illustrator, for when he needed to start sculpting him.