Week one, reflections

I think the past week has been a very stressful for some, with conflicting ideas and having the whole project changed twice, it’s definite we got off to a shaky start. As the project began we were all a little too enthusiastic about all these elaborate ideas, from carnivorous plant tentacles to crazy puppet masters. The first final idea we all agreed on was a laboratory, quarantined due to an outbreak of some kind of parasitic infectious disease. It took us only a session with Mike to realise that the direction we were going in was not only ambitious but wrong. Inez mentioned from the start the whole project is based around making the queen’s building look as menacing as possible without changing much of the architecture, which is exactly what the tutors are after. It is a shame that imagineering isn’t much of a possibility for the project with the time given, but with a strong visual design we can pull this off without the need of monsters or cliche survival horror scare tactics.

Finally, after much deliberation, Inez pitched her brilliant Idea and so we settled on making the Queen’s building the ‘monster’ itself. As part of the design process we all began to create some concept artwork for the level design, that way we illustrate our visual perceptions of what Inez described the building to be. Mainly, rust will be very common throughout the level, dirt and grime also. The task was to create a really sinister, gritty environment through the use of colours, textures and most importantly lighting. Here’s what we came up with so far.

 

We’ve sat and talked about what we like, what we don’t like about each concept and whether we should pursue with some of the ideas people have visualised. There’s a few more concepts to be drawn up this week such as the heart of the building and maybe a few more environmental art pieces to further illustrate the level. Our next step is to decide on what layout we all want, which rooms, corridors etc...hopefully over the next few days we should have the level white-boxed. Then we can begin to start writing up an asset sheet ready for the production phase.