Category: E1

Mood-Board

The first thing we were asked to do for this project was research, more specifically we were asked to create a moldboard of any sort that reflected what we thought an archway looked like.

I created a Pinterest board full of images of what an archway looked like to me. It became apparent very quickly that I had a very specific style in my head as most of the images I chose were of mosques or had a very Arab look to them, which makes sense since this is what I grew up seeing.

I knew immediately that would be the style I would be going for.

Silhouettes

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After compiling all the reference images on the Pinterest board I drew different value silhouettes with different archway designs. At this point it hadn’t been made clear yet that we needed to have a sort of door included so most of them don’t.

After having sketched these different ideas, I decided to combine two of them creating the final design and adding a door in order to fit the requirements.

Value Studies

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After that we were tasked with drawing a few value studies just in order to develop this skill and if wanted to change, redraw or improve the original archway value drawings.

Choosing the colours

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Then came the time to choose the colours for the Archway in order to draw a coloured version of it.

I really wanted to go for a very bright blue colour scheme reminiscent of the blue mosaics on the walls of many of my reference pictures as it was the one I felt fitted the best with the idea I had for the Archway.

Once the colored version of the Archway was done, I started thinking about the story behind it. Why is it broken and why is it in the middle of nowhere?

As I see it the Archway is set in post Apocalyptic world similar to that of The Last Of Us. It stands somewhere in the Sahara desert and used to be buried under it’s sand. It was just recently uncovered by a sand storm. There is no record of why and when it was built so no one knows why it’s there or where it leads or used to lead to.

Block Out

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It was then the time to start modeling the Archway. The first step being to create a block out of our Archway in order to get a better idea of what and how we’d be working on it.

Modelling

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After that came the time to actually model the Archway. It was fairly easy process overall however, I did encounter a massive roadblock with the door details.

They were a model that I created using the Create Adobe Illustrator Object option in Maya. It’s something I had already done before but for some reason the UVs and model had multiple issues that I spent days trying to fix. In the end after scouring the internet for a useful answer for days and watching countless tutorials, it turned out the cause of all of my issues was the automatic bevel that is created on these object and deactivating it fixed almost everything.

Sculpting

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Before starting to sculpt anything of mine I wanted to get familiar with blender as I had never used it before, I decided to follow youtuber Blender Guru’s donut tutorial on youtube since it seemed simple enough and the colours were pretty. I had so much fun following it and even though I couldn’t go through all of it due to the time constraints I learned so much and th eresults were incredible. I fully intend to continue it when I get the time as I feel like there is so much more I could potentionally learn from these tutorials. He is also great fun to follow along to and is extremely knowledgeable about the program and the hiccups you might encounter while working in it.

I didn’t end up using any sculpting in my final Archway as after trying I felt like it just didn’t work well with what I was going for.

Texturing

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Finally came time to texture everything, I tried multiple different textures on the walls as they are the most important and prominent part.

The textured went from carved wood to tiles but I eventually settled on a deep blue broken mosaic as it fit the best with what I had in mind.

Putting everything in Unity

It was my first time using Unity for anything but it was probably the nicest learning curve I’d ever had with a 3D software. Creating the desert environment was the hardest part of the process but even then all it took was one YouTube tutorial and a few hours.

Discussing Ideas

For this project we were collaborating with two students from the game design BA. We had our meetings over discord due to the current situation with COVID. 

For our first meeting we focused on discussing what each of us wanted to see in the game. The Game design (GD) students really wanted to include a gravity reversing mechanic into the game and to give it a bit of an unconventional take by not including a jump mechanic, we all really liked the idea so we decided to keep building around it and see where that would take us.

One of the ideas we had was inspired by the game I am fish; it would have been to have the main character be a fish in a floating magical bubble that had gravity powers. However, we decided it was just too much.

While we continued our discussion one of the GDs proposed something inspired by Portal’s white test chambers and the robots you get to control in co-op mode as well as the Pixar movie Wall-E. We built on that and decided we all liked the alien/robot idea so we chose to take a few days to sketch out ideas and to have another meeting where we would choose.

At this point we only had ideas but the one thing we all agreed on and knew we wanted was a pixel, old school art style.

Mood-board

Designing the Characters

Imaani and I being the game arts students in the group each drew some sketches for character ideas. 

She went more with the alien warrior part we had discussed while I went towards the Wall-E side of things, it was very interesting to see how different the results were even when we discussed the ideas together.

When sketching I came up with two ideas I really liked and decided to flesh them out. Since it was a side scrolling game, I decided to dram the sides of the characters as well as the front and back in order to have a better understanding of their shape and dynamics.

One part we both have in our characters was the red scarf. It came up while during our meeting and we all loved the idea of using it in order to show the way the gravity would be pulling; it was an integral part of both of our designs.

When I finished drawing the designs, I jokingly named them after people they reminded me of. Eventually after another meeting we chose to go with one of my designs as they fit the idea the GD had better, they really liked the names, so they ended up sticking.

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Originally, we were only going for a single character but after they saw the two designs the members of the team decided to change it up and to go for having the two of them and changing the way the level was designed to fit that new mechanic.

Since we went with my characters, we naturally decided I would be the character artist and Imaani would be in charge of the background.

Giving the Characters life

Once the design for the characters was set, I went online to find tutorials on pixel art as it was something I had never done before. I chose to do the work on Procreate as having two characters meant twice the work and I am more used to Procreate then photoshop so it would allow me to work faster, it also allows for the same results in the end.

I found a great tutorial by Ghost paper on YouTube, it was actually a pretty easy workflow and I got used to it pretty fast. The animation assists in Procreate is another reason why I chose it over Photoshop as it is immensely superior, it’s much simpler, user friendly and it allows the use of onionskin without any complications, a total opposite to Photoshop’s version of an animation timeline. 

I started by doing all the work on the Q98 robot as the fire would be the part that took the longest to get right, to make it look like it would actually be powering the character and allowing it to move. The most important thing for both characters was to make the animation of the scarf as organic and real as possible so that it would look like it was actually floating behind them and not look like a random pixelated blob.

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Once both robots were done, I animated the death explosion and superposed it onto the frames in order to create a death animation. 

I had created all of the animations in an HD format and given them to the GD pretty early, however there was a problem with the format, and they asked me to resize everything into a much smaller format, it took a few days to do as resizing without losing any of the cleanness of the image meant I had to basically redraw a part of it.