Year 2 - Week 13 - January 23rd - 27th

Not much to say about this week honestly. We’re looking back at the 9^th floor plans, honestly I didn’t like this project that much from last month and now we are asked to further develop it.

It’s good to come up with ideas for how it’ll all plan out, it’s like going back to my college days when I was doing product design, writing ideas, specifications and illustrations etc. It’s alright but I’d rather be drawing than researching most of the time.

My ideas:

I’ve looked at what we’d need and tried to pick off the best of what I’ve seen, something’s like chairs and PC’s are way too expensive, I know the budget is there but I’m just trying to be careful because I don’t know what I’d cost to knock down and put up new walls etc in which some things don’t have a specific price. I’ve tried to cover pretty much everything and think my idea would work but it’s not up to me to decide that.

On another note, I’ve been drawing my usual weekly fruit etc. I think I’m at a point where digital painting is coming easier each time I do it, like I say I’m getting faster. I’m drawing every day, everything I draw however isn’t necessarily an attempt a ‘best’ piece of work, I just want to draw more but do them quickly to hopefully improve. I’ve drawn a lot of still life this year and haven’t really found the time for my environment stuff but feel like I’ve improved a lot more.

Please note, these are taken from FaceBook...

And FaceBook ruined them...

Life drawing this week I think went really well, I’ve got back into drawing the human figure etc and managed to produce a final piece in 40 minutes, though it took a while to work out the anatomy it I got it done. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot faster at life drawing, one thing is just trying to be more accurate in terms of not measuring with my pencil etc and get better at tone.

Not bad?

Overall it’s been a mixed bag of a week. I just want to talk about a bit of level design to finish up. Basically looking at what we’ve done in our group work, I’m not convinced everyone is on the right track; we haven’t really pulled together our ideas properly and say THIS is what we are going for.

I think levels in general are all built around what the objective/goal of the game is. For example in Grand Theft Auto (which is a good example) you would have many different objectives t complete and missions, so the entire game is based around what scenarios happen throughout the game, possibly the script plays a huge part on it but I don’t know. But the game would be filled with secrets etc that reward the user; I think that we need to straighten out some things. *please read ‘Queens Project - Week 3’ post for more* but like having some secrets is mandatory, any good level design has secrets but if we’re trying to be realistic I think that we need to make the secrets believable, but then again I come back to the fact that in any video game, no one cares about trying to be believable because it’s a video game and secrets are meant to be fun, so I don’t know, I could contradict myself for hours but based on what’s written in the brief it’s like we’re saying one thing but doing another sometimes…