Week 20: Idea Generation

The second week of the Off the Map has been filled with me mostly concepting. I also had a quick look into the UI part of the game and it is far more complicated than I expected but that is all to do with the blueprints behind it. I'll first go into more detail on the concepting section of the week.

A good part of the week has been filled with discussions and idea generation, as the group are still unsure about the direction of the games visual style. We all have ideas and luckily are all in the same range of thinking but without a solid art director things feel like they are still in limbo at the moment; I think someone making a few final decisions would go a long way. What would also really help is if we just began creating a small portion of our level, we could all then see art style and change it as we need.

The idea for the final level, the first area was drawn by me

Our original level plans were far too grand, so reluctantly we've had to scale down our level and we've also dropped the style transition for now but we have made progress in the level layout and the majority of my week has been doing final idea generation for the various areas. At first I made a quick block-out of the first house to speed up the perspective side of the drawing and then I went to town on it inside Photoshop. This image was a sort of proof that the visual style could work in a 3D environment.

Another team member created a rough block-out of the entire level, which I then used to concept the other areas, but just not in as much detail as the above image. As I got more into the creation of the below images I began to enjoy it more and more, to the point where I might have spent a little too long on the last few.

At the very start of the week I also dipped my toe into the world of UIs. The actual creation of the UI seems fairly straight forward with UE4's new UI widget but to actually get it to work seems like an entirely different matter and the blueprints appear to link into further blueprints like a series of unwanted chains. So for now the design of the UI can only be thought about really because there's always a chance that I will never get it to work as my blueprint understanding is really slim; hopefully my group will be able to lend a hand with it.

The next week will be me smashing my head into the UI blueprints, with the occasional quick concept for when I get really bored. Unless of course we start modelling, then I'd obviously prefer to do that instead of blueprints.