BA7/8 Final year

So the final year has come around and very quickly at that. For this year our projects have been into two sections.

To better explain here is the brief that we have been given for BA7:

This project ‘Concept and Pre-production’ initiates your final year of study and helps you to deepen and refine your research skills and thoroughly understand the ‘production pipelines’ of the games sector and related creative industries. You can work individually or you may choose to work in a ‘development team’ and take on specific production roles.

Your project must be developed in one of the following categories and must be clearly identified within your learning agreement:

    • Concept Art (2D)

    • Interactive Narrative

    • Game Design and User Interface Design

    • Environment Assets

    • Character Assets

    • Team/Indie Dev.

In the early stages of the project you will be given advice on designing your learning agreement. This document will propose the direction of your study for the rest of the year and contain scheduled timetables with clear goals and deadlines designed by you (and or your team) to help structure your workflow. You will need to pay careful attention to explaining how your intended project will address the learning outcomes for the unit and for the year.

This project involves the development of a research report alongside your studio development. Your research report will be developed independently with support from your tutors and will form an investigation into an area closely related to games art and design. This could be a theoretical, technical or cultural issue or something more closely aligned to the industry practice associated with games art and design.

And the BA8 brief:

This project sees the culmination of your final year of study and allows you to work through an industry related pipeline to bring your final project/production to resolution. You will take forward the ideas developed in BA7 and use your skills and knowledge to produce an element of your design document, or other form of agreed submission. The focus is on work that demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of creative and technical processes used and emerging within the games sector or related media industries to include elements of innovation in the construction, resolution and delivery of this product.

You will consider how your work can best be publically communicated by developing a curatorial concept for display at the NUA graduation exhibition. Guidelines for the exhibition process will be given to you at the project briefing.

The research report developed in draft form in BA7 will be completed during the early stages of this project into a thoroughly researched, analysed and well-organised document that clearly communicates the issues under investigation.

This project addresses the key areas of study as follows:

Studio Practice: Working from your finalised Design Document to the timetables and schedules you have created you will engage with the necessary technical and creative processes to produce finished work. Your final project is designed to amalgamate and consolidate your previous experience, knowledge and skills both practical and theoretical to produce an original product. Making full use of your individual visual research you will demonstrate evidence of digital craftsmanship and mastering technique with an in-depth understanding of materials and processes in the development and realisation of digital assets.

Post production will come at the later stages when your work is nearing completion, this is when you will identify any ‘bugs’ or flaws in your production. You will need to record this information on test sheets and you will also articulate your findings in your critical evaluation.

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All studio production work will be organised and formatted into readable files and you will create a show reel user-ready for your blog/website and for exhibition display.

Thinking about what I want to do I have come up with a brief outline of the idea I want to proceed with (providing that it is approved by the tutors) and the kind of research I am going to delving into. 

Reasoning behind the project:

For this project I will researching into horror and fear within video games and how are these designed into them. Through research and improving my skills in weathering texture and better lighting for mood and atmosphere I hope to create an environment in which displays visually a horror scene. I want to be able to create a scene that has a character and one in which a player could walk around and feel nervous.             

To do this project I will researching into how horror is designed into video games. I will be looking into the kind of phobias that can be associated within different horror media. Other kind of material I will be researching into is how psychologically we are scared and fear different elements within horror media such a when you can’t see something scary and your mind then plays tricks on you. I will be looking at symbolism within video games and how they affect us. With the studio work in particular I want hone my skills in producing good quality textures that have been weathered to create a better scene visually. When rendering the scene also I want to learn how to visually create a better lighting system in which it can help improve the atmosphere and character of the scene. It won’t just be a case of I want to get better at doing environment assets but more a case of getting better and creating assets that look visually stunning with textures that complement the scene. 

Research in Maya to progress my skills

•   Better lighting set up and systems when rendering the scene
•   Learning how to progress my skills in texture maps such as occlusion and specular
•   Weathering texture
•   Atmosphere/mood and lighting

Possible games to research

Don’t starve – possible fear and phobias

Dead Space – Obvious horror

Slender - Subtle horror

 

This is just a short summary of where I want this project to go and some of the research I intend to do. At this current time I am also reading a few books about phobias and horror, one of which is by Stephen King; Macabre in which it has a short essay at the beginning talking about horror.

Recently I also had to create a 2 minute presentation explaining to the tutors what is it that I want to research and create for BA7/8. Below are screenshots of the 2 slide presentation.