Building Alliances: Final Concept Work

 Building Alliances: Final Concept Work

For the final concept work I, as the director, will be creating a creature character sheet, a character sheet for my existing character and an environment. It is good to know to be realistic, and with the amount of research work and 3D work I want to do, I won't be as much of a contributing force to 2D for reasons previously mentioned in the Directors Responsibilities post.

To start off with, I started drawing the creature character sheet. I wanted to design a creature that is more horrific in its nature, so to do this I started with the idea generation. I wanted this creature not only to be leaning more into horror, but I want it to inhabit dark spaces, perhaps the waters in flooded buildings. This also gives me a reason to play around with negative space, which is what my plan was.

My initial design was this:

With this design, I think I did a good job using negative space. I also think I made this creature look scary, and I think it's humanoid figure gives it a level of uncanniness too. I showed this to members of other groups and my groups and got feedback regarding its look.

Most of my feedback was surrounding the age rating of the game. As previously chosen for the game, we aim for either a 16+ or 18+ age rating, since we plan to have themes of body horror, violence and other themes that aren't suitable for anything below these age ratings. I'm pretty happy with the design I made, but I still wanted to make some variations of it to see what is preferred and why. Also, if I lean too much into the horror side then the creature I'm designing may look out of place.

These are the thumbnail variations I made. I wanted to see what people think about all the different designs after creating them.

The overwhelming majority of people thought that the last variation was the best. I agree with this, since I think it still retains elements of horror and intimidation as an enemy, but not enough to warrant a higher age rating on it's own. With this being chosen, I began drawing the final design, starting with the orthographic view, and then drawing it in an action pose.

And here is the timelapse:

Overall I'm really happy with this design. The Suffocated as a creature has a unique silhouette, and my idea was to have the coral grow from it and the blades formed on its arms. I'm still making the description for the creature, which will be found in the final presentation.

Now moving onto the character I previously designed. I wanted to create the full character sheet. Because of this, I didn't begin with a thumbnailing phase, instead moving onto the front and back view immediately.

Here is the timelapse:

Once again I am happy with this character sheet. I followed the same format for the character sheet, so it's a recognisable format from the same game. I struggle with orthographic views for characters, but I think I did better with this one and making it more accurate.

For the environment, I wanted to create something that could show the final version of the Newton Building, which is where survivors could inhabit in-game (also which I modelled). For this, I wanted to create a small mood board to give myself ideas to work with.

I also picked an image to use as reference, since this would help tremendously with the composition. I picked the image below from Green Spaces at City Campus (Nottingham Trent University), since for a piece of concept art it'd be great, with the perspective being from a survivors.

With this being used, I began working on the environment art.

Overall, I'm not the happiest with this, since I wanted to go with a messier, more rugged look for the concept, and I don't think this turned out as good as I wanted to due to the method of drawing lines.

Here is the timelapse:

I'm happy with these concept pieces, and will speak more about them in the final overview of the project.

References:

Green Spaces at City Campus [online]. Nottingham Trent University. Available at: https://www.ntu.ac.uk/about-us/strategy/sustainability/our-community/our-campuses/city-campus [Accessed 31 January 2025]