Week Nineteen: Another group project!

So it might not be obvious that I haven’t updated my blog in… a few weeks. 

I’ll be posting the previous weeks blogs up while uploading these.

       A lot of projects happened in these unposted weeks, I finished my sentry turret project, designed my character dichotomy, and completed the container city project where I worked with people I had barely spoken to but I wouldn’t trade the experience in for anything… well. Maybe Feng Zhu’s skill. And now I’ve started my last project of the year, Off the Map.

       For those who don’t know, Off the Map is a competition held each year by the British library where universities across the UK participate in a recreation of a task. This this was first held three years ago, and now I have the chance to participate. The first year the competition was held De Montford University came first and third place, the second year we came second place, and this year were going to reclaim the title back… Hopefully.

        So let’s start from Tuesday this week, as Monday was devoted to giving our presentation for the Container City project, and so will be spoken about in week 18’s post instead.
        11 o clock, Tuesday morning, our brief was presented to us. Alice’s Adventures Underground was our theme for this project, and our task was to create a side scroller. This for some reason provoked a lot of negative response from other members of the year. I was indifferent to this whole thing for reasons I’ll talk about later on. Also unlike the previous projects where we got to choose groups, this time we were placed by the tutors hoping to create more balanced groups. Although, it does seem slightly suspicious that the best people in year have then put into a group together.
       But the whole not being able to choose your group was something that people in the year moaned about as well. My opinion on this and having to do a side scroller is that people shouldn’t really moan about this. This will happen in industry, and I consider university to be practice for industry. You can’t turn around to your boss and say “I don’t want to make a side scroller, I want to make a 3-D exploration game and I don’t want to work with that person because I don’t like them! I want to work with my friends.” I believe that acting this way will hurt your chance of continual employment. 

Being able to work in a group of people you might not like as well as someone you haven’t spoken to before, is something I see as an amazing trait to have. You’re able to control your feelings for that certain person, as well as being able to communicate to someone you haven’t worked with before which will show you’re a good team player. In the group I placed in, there’s only really one person I’ve spoken to and even then, we haven’t really spoken much this year because we haven’t shared any classes together.
       I feel there is a drawback though, with working with people you don’t really know is where to draw the line. How do you say to someone that their idea might just not suit the overall theme and not offend them? You could say it in the niceness way, but a person ego might get hit by it, and so the person will not work as well with you. Right now I do feel that’s an issue in our group but hopefully as the weeks go on this will become less of an issue as I can tell that my teammates don’t really have an ego.

        As a group, we decided to work from the original manuscript created by Lewis Carroll as a Christmas gift to Alice Liddell. The story was called ‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ the basis for ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The original doesn’t differed that much from the finished book to my knowledge, but lacks some of the most iconic characters and scenes from that franchise, the Mad Hatter and the tea party seen and the magnificent Cheshire Cat. So as a group we’ve decided to make references to these characters through the adventure. We’ve also decided to base the character designs of the original illustrations by Lewis Carroll. With the architecture in the level based on the British library and Christ Church. The building where Caroll was matriculated and met the Liddell siblings in the deanery. ORIGINAL IDEA DON’T STEAL!!!1! This was inspired by the BBC’s documentary, ‘The Secret World of Lewis Carroll’.

So the work we did as a group this week in a nut shell. Half of the group was experimenting with the unreal engine trying to make blueprints for the mechanics were going to use in game, this involved producing double jumping, and the big and small mechanic. While the other half including me was concepting the numerous areas in the underground and character concepting. 

My Forest moodboard, looking at
british plants
and victorian lanterns

The games I looked mostly at side scroller,
such as Child of Light for the overall art
style, and Limbo for mechanics.

      The moodboards are open to everyone in the group to use in photobashing and idea generation. 

Another poor attempt at photobashing,
this time the garden

Down the rabbit hole,
also I'm bad at photobashing

The garden was to become more dreamlike, with bits of floating oxford architecture in the background, as well as me trying to get across the watercolour and illustrative style I wanted to use.

But I have yet to speak about the best part of this whole project. It’s that I get to design the Caterpillar.