Entertainment Design

Entertainment Design was the module i worked on the most at the start of the semester. For this module, we were arranged into groups comprising of computer arts students, visual communications students and computer games production management students alike, and were tasked with creating a game in the group. My group were down a member from the start, which posed us little problems, as we already had enough artists as it was! And we had little problems with effort and turning up at all, in the beginning. We all got on together very well, making me really enthusiastic to work for them, and produce the best that i could.

Our game concept is called "Gods" (which is still a working title, i believe ^^)
It involves a tribe of african/south american-like tikki people with problems in their lives, that can only be solved by praying to the gods for their help. It is a mini-game based game where the player has to work their way through all the mini-games to please the chosen god and fix whatever problem they have chosen to fix.
My role within my group was mainly concept design. I produced multiple sketches and paintings for the aspects of the games that i chose/was tasked with creating, and had a really good time doing it. The first character that was finalized was the main protagonist of the game, who will be the player's avatar through the mini-games.

His name is Ikki ^^

He came to life through a series of sketches that my group caught me doodling, and instantly liked, so i decided to develop him, and this is how he turned out!

The next character that i designed was one of the Gods, shown only as a picture in the menu/loading screens (and represented during gameplay as a hand in the sky). To create the Goddess of the Harvest, i continued with the concept that all the characters in the game are wearing masks (a concept that was my own :) and built her a costume with the themes of nature and feminine charm. The rest just seemed to fall into place, and i had a finished concept in no time, which the group approved of greatly.

This is how she evolved, near the end of her creation, the last image is to be used in-game.

A character that i was asked to design, but sadly never made it into the actual game concept, was an angry bear that Ikki would have to face to prove his courage. Bears being one of my favourite animals, i was happy to delve into this and make a lot of sketches into how the character would operate. When this was dropped i held my chin up and moved onto the aspects that were going to be implemented ^^

One good thing that did come out of our bear was our group logo xD Still to be finalised.

The last character, and easily my favourite, was the character of the Demigod of Mischief - the trickster who would try to sabotage Ikki's rituals and prevent the tribe from recieving the help it requires. I went through many different initial designs for him, using research that both myself and my manager Bill had found from the deepest depths of google. When i finally settled on a style, i became very excited and produced a number of paintings featuring him, trying to get his look just right. What i ended up with was a very sinister looking, imp-like character, with a mask like the other gods, created with a coyote skull, but which he seldom wears (rebellion!). I decided to try and get the right balance of cute and evil, and will admit that maybe the final design is slightly too far on the evil side of the scale, but i think it works well, as did the others, so here he is!

He's aaaaaaawesome :D

So that's it for the concept design, mostly. There were a few other little things i contributed to, but these are my babies. More recently i've been trying to get some animations done for the gameplay, and they are scattered all over the place, but most can be found on the group blog here .

One of them, featuring the Trickster sabotaging the first mini-game, is this here. Still under development, the character is far to tall, for example, but gives a good idea of the kind of style i've had to go for ^^

External files: Sketchbook work

Next steps are: finishing animations and bulking up portfolio of work for submission