Building Alliances - Initial Moodboard and Thumbnails

  Building Alliances - Moodboard and Thumbnails

Carrying on from last week, and before the session this week, I signed the legal documents I had to sign for the group. This included the Non Disclosure Agreement, Contract of Engagement and the Environmental Impact document. This below is a snippet from the Non Disclosure Agreement.

As the director, I also set everyone the task of creating thumbnails for their initial ideas and bringing them to this session. This is so we can have an in depth discussion about what brief to pick and what our individual ideas are. These are my thumbnails, and my ideas that go alongside them.

My first idea was a survival game where you have to live through a flooded Nottingham, using a boat and rooftops of buildings to get around. I really liked this idea, as thinking of the assets we could create is easier since we have the buildings in the city as reference.

My next idea was a game where you sail through the ocean, collecting waste and plastic from the water to save the planet, whilst avoiding giant mutated microplastic monsters. This would give us a really good basis for creature and boat ideas, as well as a few interesting genres to work within.

My final game idea was a city builder, set in a desert where the objective is to regreen the area. This was restrictive in terms of the genre, and I didn't really like the idea of only really being able to model building ideas, but I drew for the idea and brought it to the discussion regardless. One of my roles as a director is to hear and see all the perspectives from my group members and discuss with everyone to see what they think is the best.

Moving on from this, we started discussing our ideas as a group and what we wanted to move forward with. We all agreed and settled on the idea of using the first brief, with survival elements and moving through a flooded Nottingham, with some ideas of the second brief, for example using plastics for tools and fighting against creatures changed by the plastic.

Now that we had decided this, we now moved onto creating our own individual mood boards so that we could have influences and inspiration for our ideas.

For this mood board, I mainly focused on environment design, since I want to help establish the setting before moving onto anything smaller scale. 

Now that I had made this mood board, the next thing was to design thumbnails. In class we decided on having everyone design thumbnails for different aspects of the game, with bits of research to back it if we didn't want to use the mood board as the main influence. As the director, I left it up to Rosie (2D lead) to decide what she wants everyone to do in terms of the subject of the thumbnails. We were to make 5 thumbnails each for people, places, and creatures, and to keep them as thumbnails, we were to spend a maximum of 5 minutes on each thumbnail.

In terms of research, we discussed with Lowenna (Research lead) and came to the agreement that everyone should mostly be in charge of their own thumbnails, and if Lowenna finds anything interesting that should be used as a reference for our thumbnails, she is free to tell us. I started with my character thumbnails, using my mood board as my main influence.

The top three were character ideas. I messed around with the ideas of survivors who spend most of their time exploring and gathering items, guards with harpoon guns, and civilians with tattered clothing. The bottom two are me experimenting with a more cartoony approach to the art style, and a more realistic approach to the features of characters.

For my place thumbnails, I focused on places in Nottingham (since I live here), and drawing a flooded, more ruined version of them. I didn't want to lean too much into human settlements on roofs just yet, since we still don't have it concrete as a studio just yet.

For my creature ideas, I wanted to carry on with the idea of infusing microplastics or in this case, Sealife with the creatures to fit the theme. The technique I used for thumbnails this time was to draw out a silhouette first, as it was much more successful drawing more creative creatures around that shape.

With these thumbnails, I am now ready for next weeks session and the next step in the project for the studio.