Week Five: SO MUCH FREEDOM!

    I always feel like I’m completely weird when it comes to working. I don’t like working with people I live with, there’s too much freedom in a project! But I do feel I have proper reasons. With too much freedom, I struggle to find a foundation to build upon. When given a brief in industry, there would be at least some structural start such as ‘Sci-fi’ or ‘80s’. With a project where we can run free, it terrifies me! Where do I start? What can look impressive? What’s original, believable? Brief starts like this tend to set me back due to the amount of research I had to amass and the topics I have to cover, this often involves looking at how something works in real life and apply the physics and mechanics to the game asset. For this project I looked into understanding how a machine gun and Gatling guns fires. Understanding this mechanic allows me to break it down and replace it with objects, materials or other suitable systems from that time period. This gives the asset a more realistic feel and look which keeps the immersion for the player.
    The breaking of immersion can be a sign of poor game development, on both the artistic side and the developer, so understanding physics and laws in the real world can allow us to break and bend some of these rules without the destruction of immersion occurring.
    This start has affected the flow of my work, with a lot of time spent on just research. This ate into my time for iterations and has set me back. I’ll have less time to model and texture, which is an issue for me as I’m not too good at texturing and wish to improve.

    Outside of University work, I managed to do a study of Feng Zhu’s work which I’m quite happy about. I mainly focused on understanding how to make an interesting picture via composition and being able to break down the piece into simplistic forms. I also learnt a lot from his usage of values, where minimum amounts of black and white are used and a heavy focus on the greyscale colours. I did add some colour afterwards just to tidy up the piece, but I feel I need to get my greyscale foundations correct before I push into colour.