Laurie's MA Games Design Blog

 The second term of my MA Games Design Course is now coming to an end, and so I'm presented with this opportunity to take stock and reflect on my work and progress over the last few months.  The Positives Starting with the basics, I am glad to know that I'm still as eager as ever to keep pursuing this path, and haven't had any second thoughts. This term's project work has felt very rewarding because I believe there has been visible improvement in my skills, especially in comparison to the level I was at when I first joined the course. I also feel that my path for improvement going forward is clearer than it has been in the past, largely thanks to this term's research component. The research work this term in general has proven to be a pleasant surprise compared to what I was expecting. To tell the truth, I was kind of dreading the idea of forced networking for the term 2 essay assignment, as I thought that nobody would respond and I'd just be speaking into the v...

 As planned, this week I moved away from the mountain city itself, and onto the surrounding environment. To recap, a few weeks back I decided that it would be surrounded by a vast rock formation spanning kilometres in all directions. The idea is that this formation was created by one of the two brother kings when he was creating his mountain city, with the purpose of sealing it away from the world beyond and bringing it out of reach from outsiders. My focus this week has been looking at real-world examples of formations and landscapes that can provide inspiration for this idea, and applying this research to a series of explorative concepts. Landmark/Formation Research Going into my research, I had a general idea of a densely packed, rocky environment involving a potential mixture of canyons, caves, cliffs and monuments, so I set out to explore relevant examples of these sorts of locations. Above is a sheet containing some prominent examples of the reference imagery that I ended up ...

  Cliff Embedded Colonnades This week I have been fleshing out the architecture that surrounds the district gates that I covered in my previous post. I started by expanding directly from the gate itself, designing the rest of the architectural relief of the cliff face. Cliff Colonnades Design  When working on this design, there was no shortage of reference to draw from. I was able to pull from multiple relevant ancient cultures, as you can see from the reference examples on the design sheet above. Of course, as I've mentioned quite a bit now my primary inspiration for this city concept remains the city of Petra in Jordan, but I also enjoyed looking at some other sources here. Many of the references featured distinct column layouts, leading to my decision to design this architectural feature as a vertical series of colonnades that stretches out on either side of the gate. As I showed in the turnarounds for my gate design in the previous post, it features archways on its sides a...

 As I mentioned at the end of my last post, my closer examination of the mountain city begins with an exploration of gate design. I decided to start here because I felt that coming up with an iconic design for a prominent feature such as gateways would be a good way to establish a strong architectural identity on which to base further design work for the city.  Before we dig into the design work, I've labelled the initial city concept to indicate the placement/function of these gates, for clarity:  Gates Example As you can see from the quick annotation above, the gates are situated at the ends of the bridges that extend out from the central platform. They are built from the cliff face and function as entrances to the districts that are carved in behind them. My idea from the start was that they wouldn't really be gates in the sense of movement control infrastructure, but instead more like open, processional archways, since they are already within the bounds of the city. D...

Preparation As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, I was tasked with coming up with five different mountain city concepts to present to Josh so that we could establish a direction to go ahead with. My goal was for these concepts to each be quite different takes on what it could be, within the limits of my brief of a closed off city in a rocky region. I started by making notes in a document so that I had an idea of what each concept was before starting on them: Aside from deciding on my five design variants, as you can see above, while I was making my notes I had a sudden idea for the surroundings of the city to be a vast maze of rock formations raised by the city founder around his city, rather than a naturally occurring landscape that he selected as the location for his secluded city. I have already done some rough work around this 'red forest' concept and am planning a blog post on it at some point. It also led to a chain of story related ideas that really excited me,...

 Initial Idea Since the last post on my near eastern project, I  have decided to move away from the Oasis City and onto the other major city in my game world, founded by the other of the two brothers. I knew that in contrast to the former, I wanted this second city to be closed off from the world outside as though its king had cocooned himself and his people away, in line with his inward-looking ideology. I therefore wanted to make it look and feel drastically different (within the bounds of this setting) from the oasis city, which is open and welcoming to all.  The first thing I decided was that it would be set within a different environment - whereas the oasis is located in the vast, empty sand dunes, this second city would be located in a mountainous, rocky region, which would lend itself to the city's secluded nature. For simplicity, I refer to it as the Mountain City for now. I searched online for other fantasy mountain city concepts, to see what sorts of things of h...

Mapping The Space Now that much of the work on our initial tutorial level inside the scientist's workshop has been done, we have started to think about the world outside, as we are now hoping to build a level from later on in the game that takes place in a location outside the workshop. Tristan has been doing some really good work developing our narrative/backstory so that we have a better understanding of the reasons for our world's current state, rather than just some vague industrial disaster. Broadly, we have landed on the idea that our game area is a self sustaining compound run by a scientific research corporation. The area includes living quarters for the scientists and their families, as well as research facilities and food production. Within this compound, the player will visit key locations to activate water purification devices in order to reach the final location, a massive power plant that is responsible for the toxicity. Tristan's initial sketch listing some p...

  Ziggurats Recently I've been researching types of NE architecture for inspiration within my world concept. One of the most defining structure types of this historical milieu is undoubtedly the ziggurat, a tiered, terraced structure that housed a deity within the temple that sits atop its highest layer. There are many notable ziggurats found all across Mesopotamia and built by many of its most prominent societies. Here are some examples:  The Great Ziggurat of Ur, modern day Iraq Artist's Impression of the Ziggurat of Ur Uruk Ziggurat Reconstruction Buried Ruins The first way I wanted to incorporate these structures into my world was in the form of buried ruins found across the lands that hint at the many lost civilisations previously established by former wielders of the creation power. Given that within the historical context, ziggurats would have been the largest structures, towering above the rest of their cities, it makes sense that within my game world these would be th...

 So far with this course I've been doing all of my concept work on an Ipad through the Procreate and Sketchbook apps. I recently decided I wanted to try to experiment with new workflows though, so I bought myself one of the cheaper Wacom tablets to try out photoshop on my pc.  I've also decided that I'm going to start integrating 3D block-outs within my workflow, as these are a fast and simple way to establish correct perspective and lighting for environment concepts, processes I often find quite frustrating and time consuming. To do this, I might start looking into Maya as it would be a useful software to have under my belt anyway, though at first I think I'll stick to Blender since I already have a bit of experience with it.  I'll be discussing 3D blockouts further in an upcoming post on my Near Eastern project, as I have some pieces planned for which I will be using the technique. For this post though, I'll be sharing some of my progress with learning photosh...