I am Already here

Recently i am increasing the amount of writing in existing universes that i am doing. one in particular is in the star wars and dragon age series. As a writer i feel that this is something that i need to improve since it is going to be very rare to make an original idea it seems likely that i will need to write in an existing universe but also make it my own. this was something that susan mentioned is quite a good skill to gain in.

The idea's for my stories are gonna have to be researched while writing them since the amount of info is really detailed and expansive. i will be using my friends as characters so i will need to somehow put words in their mouth which will be an interesting challenge but also quite enjoyable.

I will be doing another piece from D.C over the summer holidays which i think i may get others to help me turn it into a short film which i would also write and direct for.

Scripts

Recently i have gotten into writing more scripts and also i was looking in to how to lay it out in a more professional fashion and how to write it in a easy to understand way

I was using D.C characters for this script so it helped to be trying to write something based on an existing franchise and having a more professional feel on how it actually is for a script writer. I had a hard time with trying to write a lot of detail without revealing too much since it isn't my job to write camera angles or set designs. i only wanted to do a short script which would last a few minutes which i think i was able to do.

Next year i will be doing scripts which hopefully will be influenced by people in the course but time will tell due to the length of certain sections of the course next year i think i will do my own filming of shorts and will write the script and film with other people in the course.

Republic Commando

Let me just say i love this game not just because its a star wars game but just because of the game looking very gritty and how the mechanics though very similar to every other first person shooter these days it is a old game but it was really enjoyable and did very well at expanding the universe and also changing some of star wars elements star wars. I would suggest to anyone to play the game it also next year i will be do these as vlog formed review. As you progress the gameplay and how much you immerse yourself into the characters is the selling point and that is why i recommend it.

Anno 2070

Around Christmas i bought Anno 2070 which is a city creation simulator.

 Anno is very similar to sim city but instead is a island/ colony style game instead, it is a very fun, difficult and complex game. the objective of the game is creating thriving colony using different islands for resources and deciding if you are gonna go for the environmentalist approach or the money grabbing tychoon path. i would suggest if you can give it a go since even if it takes  forever just to get the basic stuff it is enjoyable. Now it is just a pc game which has allowed it to have beautiful graphics so most of the time while waiting you can enjoy looking at it :3.  I would like to do a real time strategy in the future so we will see what happens in the future.

SWOT analysis

I decided to do a basic swot analysis

Strengths:
Story creation
Creativity
character design
Modelling

Weakness:
drawing
Lazy
Can be easily distracted
texturing

Opportunities:
Writing guilds
Competitions
Briefs
college resources

Threats:
other script writers
other modellers
cost of software.

Anthony Ward

This is from his website: 
My name is Antony Ward and I am a freelance digital artist, animator and writer. I have over 18 years experience within the games development industry, working for some of the biggest companies at a senior level. During this time, I have grown as both an artist & animator as well as a manager. My senior positions within the art departments have enabled me to develop my skills in not only managing my own time and workload but also that of a team. I have proven myself adaptable, tough under pressure and a good team player. My understanding of the industry, having worked from the bottom up to leading on a big budget project, has allowed me to be confident in my own abilities. I have been able to pass on the skills I have learnt effectively through both my in-house roles and my books.

I am the author of three successful technical manuals, Game Character Development in Maya (2004), Game Character Development (2008) and 3D Modeling in Silo (2010). These have been popular and have been translated into many different languages including Chinese.

I have also written numerous tutorials for 3DArtist and 3DWorld magazine, as well as creating video tutorials for Digital Tutors.

As Featured In - Digital Tutors, 3DArtist Magazine, 3DWorld Magazine, Exotique by Ballistic, PixelArts Magazine, 3DMag Magazine.

My Specialities – High and low resolution 3D Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, MEL Scripting, Maya Tool Development, Tutorial Writing.

I really enjoyed this talk but not as much as the one by susan. I am not a character modelling but i appreciated his input and the advice he gave us.

Susan Everett

Susan Everett was a script writer who came in for a talk An spoke about being a script writer, for me this talk was exactly what i needed since it is what i want to go into. Susan won the Carl Foreman Screenwriting award which she said really helped here to get more work. she used the reward to get a job for 18 months at the California state university which led to her first short film. Her next project was a novel called Crazy Horse which ended up in the final of a competition.

Her stories have ended up in multiple literacy magazines which later she directed multiple short films and she showed us Mother, Mine (2008)  which i really enjoyed. The style of Mother, Mine was the sort of writing i really enjoy doing myself so it was good to see an example. 

BAF

I did not take as much out of Baf this year as i did in the first year which i think proves i am growing and learning new things. My favourite talk was the talk from Neil Thompson who is the director of art and animation at bioware. What the talk was about i show he went from doing 2d games in the 1980'w and now working at a industry giant, he also went into talking about creating an interactive experience in dragon age and mass effect.

Besides from the baf game topic i enjoyed the student films from the animated section since i feel it is always better to see people who are like you and comparing your skills to them rather than giants of the industry since it feels overwhelming. I wanted to just get the tickets for Baf game but didn't but i will next year just go to the game one since i felt that some of the things spoken about in BAF would be wasted on me.

I did enjoy the paranorman talk and watching the film since it isn't something i would normally put effort into seeing.

Competition brief_finished and input

This was the finished piece and when i look back on it there are a lot of things i would change and improve. The leg design was horribly designed which didn't help that the uv's for the texture editor was done really badly. The only thing i liked in the end was the design of the head which i would slightly tweak and put on my show reel. The texture was too shiny in the end so that is another thing i would change.

In the end i got some good advice on how to make improvement on cghub when i submitted it but in the end i didn't win. I didn't expect to win but it was a nice experience and a learning curve for me which i would do again if it helped me to improve in the future.

Competition brief_ Creation

I really enjoyed creating the piece but the main problem i had was trying to create the model in a way which makes it flow but also look rigid in certain sections. The concept i had was a creature that lived underground in the mountains in the dragon age universe. The design was suppose to be a blind creature that is flowing with magic and never approaches the surface. the design was very insect based and was supposed to be thrice the size of a human male. He was supposed to live of spiders and creatures of the sort so i made him have teeth for gripping and teeth for crushing. The headdess is for show and the armour on the creature was all salvaged.

I had major problems with scale so i have tried to get better since this design.

Competition brief _ brief

The brief i decided to do for my competition brief is a bioware modelling competition that was hosted on cghub and the deadline was for February and started in november so there were four months to get it done.

The idea of the brief was to create a character to fit into either the dragon age or mass effect universe and either create a character from an existing race or design you own race with information on that race submitted as well.

I want to improve my modelling so i jumped at the chance for this one.

Unity

it felt weird going back to unity after so long especially getting used to some of the features i used to know. the hardest part for me in this section is getting the scripting done since though i looked online for a guide as i was doing the code it wasn't matching with the bloke i was watching on the tutorial. I finally got the script working but i couldn't do the advance version to stop the voices talking over each other. This is definitely something i will need to go back to do.

Crit

At the end of the crit i was told the parts i needed to look into were:
Sound Design
Small Assets completion
Textures
Lighting
Puzzle needs to be completed
I started working on all these issues except for the puzzle since at the point of the crit the amount of time it would take to get it right would cause problems when it comes to building the final piece.
I will be honest the puzzle should of been tested earlier

Maya

It's been awhile since i have had a modelling session on maya since the last time when i didn't need to animate was a bioware competition that i entered which was around christmas so i enjoy just sitting and modelling. The problem i did have was working out which side the normals were when importing to unity but when i figured it out it was a lot easier to sort it out. It took awhile to get used to laying out the UV textures properly and making the textures look how it is needed and high quality enough to be able to see the details.

The bad guys

i created 2 gang bosses to:
1. Improve skill at character creation and design
2. To have an extra element which makes the game world feel more expansive
I used a 100 question system for creating the characters called Anthony Faraday And Samuel Anders Brian Roth, which was really enjoyable but also time consuming.
I would put it up on here but due to the size the document i would not be able to show it but with the construction of the characters i was able to come up with more designs for the artefacts.

I can talk

I decided to record my own voice as a narration which was interesting and a lot easier due to me being able to know how i want it said without having to explain to others. As I progressed i realised the difficulty with sounding convincing while reading it. It was fun to mess with different styles to get what i wanted. i would next time like to set it up in soundtrack pro so i can experiment with sound effects. i only wrote one script and it was the one i used in the end.

Mansion floor plan

This is the bottom floor plan for the mansion layout i decided on using as you can see the different rooms which uses the idea of storage spaces in the eastern side of the house. I decided to make the building seem it was functional. 

I wanted to just have two liveable floors and the last as a form of attic space which leads to the room at this point the only way to get in the house is on the bottom floor.

This is the top floor this is the part that has the door leading to the trophy room. the room is very blocky but the idea is the main mansion is made of wood and the tower is made of stone.

City

The idea for this city is that the city is full of vice and sin which has lead to it being a criminal run city were no proper form of justice system exists in the city. The idea is it is a dark and grubby world which gives the darker tone to the stories.The city will be divided into districts which has the slums separated from the rest of the city which causes the divide and poverty.

The idea is the sin of the casinos and such buildings being the centre of certain districts and the idea of the powerful ruling the weak.

The skyscrapers is what i want to incorporate but i would not want the buildings to be too high since if the buildings it will make the slums seem even lower.

The tower shows the style of buildings were they are not majorly futuristic skyscrapers 

I well have the city as a city of lights since it is stereotyped with sin these day, exhibit A las vegas.

The Ancients

The main origins for the artefacts is the ancient civilisation that was dominate a long time before the story begins. The main influences for the civilisation is looking into ancient civilisations such as the greeks the egyptians and the aztecs. As i looked more into each i decided,

out of all three the ones i decided to use was the Egyptians due to there style and culture really suit the visual style i want and they feel more like the type of race that would create some weird puppet. When looking into the hieroglyphs it's understandable by the masks that the idea of a demonic puppet with a weird appearance would fit in and not spread suspicion in the ancient world.

Star Wars

I decided for the transmedia element i would look into an existing series and the first and favourite that comes to mind is the universe of George Lucas' Star Wars. I remember watching star wars as a five year old with my dad and after that i was captivated in the universe and although i get called out because of my fandom you can't deny how well designed the universe is. Personally what i think makes star wars a great universe is that it can be added to by anyone and in any format and it has been since the 1990's. As a gamer i have 15+ star wars video games and due to the design team of each it feels that they are on their own but as well are in the universe together be it at the same time as the movies or before and after, the universe has expanding in comics as well which is a very powerful medium since most people who read comics as a kid may pick one after it getting their attention this has allowed alot of dark scenes in star wars which at the time wouldn't be able to be seen on screen but now that games and tv are more open star wars has started to use their good writing to create something memorable.

I will talk about a game example for transmedia in star wars which is republic commando. republic commando is set after attack of the clones and before revenge of the sith it follows your squadron of clones which must go though perils and disasters during the missions. the game is very nitty gritty in appearance and unlike the movies it does not focus on the jedi/sith and brings it down to a more realistic story which we connect with, that is war and the plight of a soldier. this story gave a new experience to the player and gives you a new feel of the universe.

Recently an animated series has been created which bridges the same gap that republic commandos does but instead of following the spec ops group it follows a mess of characters as the war progresses. As the popularity of this series has increased it has allowed fans new experiences in the world or seeing an expansion on what the comics have mentioned. i really enjoy the series and i feel it delivers the idea of transmedia well, the universe will expand in multiple different mediums but still will be interconnected.

It's a Puppet

One of my favourite assets i wanted to create was the puppet that was frozen solid.

The thought process behind the puppet is that he is a puppet made by an ancient civilisation and over time has gained a soul which was full of hate, as you look into the creatures backstory you see that he mercilessly slaughtered people but this was to be his downfall since it caused his joints to stop working and seize up.

As with the mansion the points are split into numbers
1.for this i looked into number of eyes to give an unsettling feel since i don't want people to sympathise with this thing and i looked into a major fear of a friend of mine which is spiders so i am using spiders as a reference to my design.
2. I decided to look into kankuro's puppet from naruto which is a well known design. The thing i love about the head of this thing is that although it has three eyes it feels menacing but not always threatening in appearance. the jaw is exactly what i imagine for my character but i think only one row of teeth will make him more threatening in my final design. The arms feel very clockwork and pieced together which is how i see the civilisation that created this, that being they design very advanced things but at a unrealistic time period to build these things.
3. Colour is the deciding factor, i like the off putting colour of the eyes since it makes you fell like the thing isn't from this world. Another element i like is that neither of them have legs which like kankuro's puppet means they stand in different ways which is more menacing than using normal legs
4.The sharpness and the ornamental appearance of this mandalorian makes me think of making the puppet seem decorated since it feels like a rank of authority or belief system when you see something like this. that may be how i interpret it but it seems very prominent with religions/ancient civilisations.
5.Egyptians are a major part of the research for me due to them fitting the appearance and ideals i am feeling for the civilisation. The point of interest here is the headdress and the gold colouring since it feels regal and feels that that person is dominate. the idea of the puppet is to show power but also feel you with fear.
6.Gilding is connected to the gold colouring since it makes the piece feel like it was designed for greater things than murder and gets you intrigued with it's backstory and the worlds backstory.
7. Now since this thing is stationary i decided to look into marble statues since they feel sort of common place but would feel out of place in a rundown mansion. the idea of combining the gold and marble gives a classic appearance of the egyptians which is what i want.

Thought the pic isn't great quality these are the concepts i narrowed down to and decided on the top left.

mansion

Above is basically what i want in my mansion, the idea is a museum/trophy room that all the asserts will be placed. the mansion is also a really important component in the design of the level.

1. The plan for the trophy room is making it the top room of a tower which is why i looked into real world examples and into fiction based pieces. the fictional examples placed above are cirith ungol from lord of the rings and the wharf from dishonoured, others i looked into were fairy tales but i thought that the towers were too stylised to medieval castles. In the end though i wanted it to stand out against the rest of the mansion and also appear like it has been there longer i kept the style of the mansion into the design of the tower so it didn't seem too out of place.
2. This number represents the idea of how to get to the tower now i really like the idea of using a outdoor ledge to get to the trophy room since it gives the trophy a separate room and lets you enjoy the erie feel of the environment.
3.The mansion is supposed to have been abandoned and left ransacked so it will have damage so i looked into ruins in video games to get some idea of what is too much and what is the right amount for the task at hand.
4.Now as the trophy room i loved the idea of being behind a clock so though this image is from gargoyles i decided the simplistic version that this is gives a better feel for it's goal rather than proper clock towers such as big ben in real life or the version in basil the great mouse detective. In the end it isn't the room you are supposed to be paying attention to so the simpler design the better but i will give it a distinct and nice appearance.
5.This is looking at the style of mansion exterior i want or elements i would like to work into it the use of arches is an interesting aspect but i do not know if it will suit i will need to make a final decision. Certain parts like the stairs style and the amount of floors in the mansion i will definitely be using since i think having three floors has the feel of a mansion but not to extravagant.
6.this is just the idea of the world being more advanced than it looks.

My idea

For my responsive brief i decided on a game space which would work as a game hub as well as a game level. The idea itself is a museum that will show assets which would be related to the world and will also have their own backstory. The world, story and narration have been created by myself.

You will play as a homeless male in a city overrun with sin and crime and while you were in the slums originally you have found this rundown mansion which is difficult to get to due to the water as you have made a place to stay in the derelict house you find a trophy room with all these artefacts and decide to live in there due to the safety of the room.

I will be offering my help to anyone who needs a script so for now i will focus on my own stuff. My main area of stuff i want to improve is hardline modelling, world creation and improve my abilities in unity.

Cry of Fear

Recently i have been playing a standalone mod of half life 1. Originally you needed half life to play it but now you do not need any base game, while this helps people to be able to play it easier this also affects the bugs in the game which makes it difficult to play due to glitches.

    Cry of Fear is the mod and it is a horror game which has a single and multiplayer campaign below is a picture of the multiplayer campaign.

The game uses very well done story arcs to create sections that generally makes you throw the controller down and take off your headphones. the game visually is old in graphics but it definitely makes up for it in gameplay.

The reason i like this game enough to make a post is because it was made by students from the base game half life and made a story of there own and gave the feel of a individual game which just shows the other possibility for modding and how being a game developer does not just stop the games changing as long as there are fans that will put in the effort to make new sections for games.

You Have My Sword

Modding... ok well every gamer has used a mod of some kind in this day and age be it a game fixing mod to a expansive mod that expands the game quite a bit. The world of mods live mostly on Pc games but in this day an age it can happen on consoles if you know how.
 
   Main culprits of this is bethesda and bioware games in acclaim but there are a lot more i own skyrim, fallout new vegas and dragon age which all together have had 40+ mods installed and removed from them but now it seems that developers like with map editing software are releasing creation kits which make it easier to mod the game.

One kit that had a lot of hype was the redkit which made it easier for amateurs to still make good expansions for the the witcher 2 and is still being developed for the next game release.

Why are mods so good?
Well i think the only way you can describe it is that while the developers might make a great game they will stop making stuff for it at some point though with mods it allows the world to continue due to the love of and the creativity of the fans.

Form The Line!

The Screenshot above is of Shogun 2 which is a acclaimed rts game that has many players online such as myself but this post isn't about shogun 2 this post is on Shogun 2 map editor. Total War the designers of the game had released a map editor for free with the game which is downloaded on steam. Unfortunately they didn't grace us with instructions so you will be watching a lot of youtube videos like i did to work it out. This is one of those things that will take awhile to get good at but when you do i think it will really help environment designers in video games. Now the main reason i have decided to talk about this is that games are setting up map editors ranging from really basic fps games to advanced rpg games. I used to play a lot of forge on halo but due to it being console based it was limited but the map editor on shoguns was so much more expansive.

So why am i talking about all this well it seems that developers understand that some of us don't have the capacity to create mods so with this very basic program they have given out they have allowed fans to immerse themselves on a whole new level of gameplay in the game, for example the player can set the level up to a siege battle and make it exceptionally difficult for yourself so unlike you improving the enemy you are making the game more difficult in a more basic war problem being terrain. Now that sounds like rubbish but the thought of a level were you can be attacked by archers from a cliff to the west unless you catch he point yourself and set you archers up it will change the gameplay and the thought needed during the battle. now this is very case specific but it shows that developers are doing more for there fans which is appreciated and also has allowed fans to make amazing scenes. If you have Shogun 2 i suggest giving it a go.

Christmas Expo

Now while this was quite awhile ago i need to really write this up. apart from my expo at the end of show i have never had my work up to show the public. So what do i think about how the show went well i felt that the location we had was quite hard to get to unless you knew were it is due to it being a deceptive set of corners which i think puts people off when coming to the show. The amount of time we had to set this up was too small i found and though we talked about it a month before we didn't start doing stuff till like a week before so it felt a bit rushed or less organised in my eyes.
      Well the negatives are out now for the positives. As for actually having my work shown it felt good and though you noticed little mistakes with your work on the big screen there is always going to be that element since as "artists" we are always progressing so what you may once be proud of can nose dive quite quickly when you improve your skills.

I look forward to doing another expo in the future since it is nice to have others looking at out work outside the course.

AOI Book

Recently i have been using a book called
      The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design
written by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
This book has really helped improve my writing and story telling by helping me work in a more professional layout. The main problem i had was trying to set it up into chapters when i am writing or arcs since like any story, games are set up the same but unlike other stories there is an interactive element that i knew i lacked in when writing the script. As i progress in the book i start to do the exercises it suggests and i have found that it has really helped me with writing scripts and being able to get the character's action across in written form. Another part in the book that is enlightening is the legal and financial side of the job since most books wouldn't go that far when it comes down to it. I have gotten the book out of the library many times but i will buy it other the summer.