Yr2 Week 20: Off the Map Project

New project! Our final and longest project of the year, the Off the Map project hosted by the British Library. The university project itself lasts for 10 weeks, but the Off the Map project lasts for much longer, so we are able to carry on with our level through the summer even after handing in to University. Teams were randomly selected and contained up to six members, each of us on the course filled out a survey of what we would like to specialise on during the project and put down any preferences we had for theme or style. I am quite pleased with the group I ended up with, as I have worked with some of them in the past and found them to be hard-workers and reliable, which was a nice surprise.

Our group have selected A Midsummer Night's Dream as our story of choice, and we have chosen to go with a stylised approach which has very fable like environments and disney-esque characters. If you would like to read more about our choices as a group for the direction of the project, please visit our groups blog here: http://p13203787.wix.com/kapoks

I have so far been assigned two characters and one scene to create. The characters I have been assigned are Demetrius and Bottom, which will be quite interesting to make. Not only have I never made a character in this style, I also have not made many male characters fully, so it will be very interesting to have a go at this and I am very excited! I started to concept Demetrius and above you can see one of the designs which I was happy with.

I also have began working on my scene concept. I chose the scene where Titania falls in love with Bottom after being given the potion by Puck. I did a few value thumbnails and then moved onto a more polished concept to give an idea of the atmosphere.

Although I am not entirely happy with this painting as I do not feel my painting skills are the best, I think it helps to give a feel to the atmosphere of the scene and allows me and my group to start figuring out what we may need to create for this particular scene and the feel and arrangement of it.

Our game is going to be set on a stage as though it is a play in a theatre, so we are going to have some flat background elements to add a slight comedic and authentic theatre feel. For example, the trees in the midground and background of my concept could be flat objects, whereas the one in the foreground is more important and hence would be 3D.

Next week I plan to continue developing my characters and possibly begin to model them, I also would like to polish up my concept for my scene and begin developing some assets to go along with it.