Laurie's MA Games Design Blog

Following up on my previous post, I began this week by moving onto developing the armoury from my thumbnail concepts sheet. Aside from producing the result, my aim for this task was to dig into photobashing for the first time. Photobashing is an industry standard practice for concept art, particularly within the Triple A space, as it enables artists to produce results quickly and to a desired level of realism, making it an essential skill for me to learn as an aspiring concept artist. The photo above is one that I took, and it served as the base image for this concept. I found that working closely from a pre-apocalypse reference photo really helped me to envision the decay that occurred beyond that point. Overall I spent around two days on the piece, although I'd say the bulk of the piece was done on the first day. That said, I still need to be much faster and my aim is to be able to produce a piece like this in a matter of a few hours, so I still have a lot of streamlining to do i...

 This week I've been diving into some environment design for my Last of Us style survivor settlement, the P.M.A Compound. As I mentioned in my previous posts, first spending some time designing its inhabitants helped me in developing a strong sense of the camp, so I jumped straight in after that. First, I collected reference images together to create myself a mood board. Unsurprisingly, about half of these images are concept art from The Last of Us series, but I've also pulled images from other similarly apocalyptic worlds to broaden my range of inspiration. A few of the pieces are concepts from Days Gone, an open-world, zombie apocalypse game that came out a couple years ago. I also included some images from the Rage franchise as well as Mad Max, mainly for their mechanical monstrosities and structures. These two worlds have a significantly less grounded take on the apocalypse than that of TLOU, but I thought it would be interesting to maybe explore aspects of their 'diese...

 After my last post, I decided to play around with prowler concepts some more, since I was both really enjoying it and learning a lot in the process. Human anatomy is definitely not my strong suit when it comes to drawing so it was really helpful to get the practice in, even if my current aim is to go into environment art. I’ve also found that creating these character concepts has been oddly helpful in immersing myself in the world I’m trying to develop, as in the process of imagining things like the methods they’d use to quietly stalk the streets surrounding the HQ, I’m simultaneously developing a stronger image of the environment surrounding them.  I'm still working on stripping back unnecessary illustration in my workflow so that I can convey ideas more efficiently without all of the time consuming fluff. I'm still not there yet and find myself getting carried away with pointless details and corrections, but I'd say it's at least an improvement over the piece...

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, my next step was to draft up some concepts for the Puma 'officers', and here's what I've come up with for now. I chose to work in black and white for this piece because I wanted to focus on working at my textures and value ranges. Most of the PMA equipment would be black or grey anyway so I figured it would be a good occasion for it. I'm also trying to work on my speed, and I'm aware that these are far from perfect illustrations but I'm trying to draw slightly rougher and avoid zooming in to a pointless degree as I have a tendency to do (though I still did far too much of that here).  It might be hard to tell from the image quality on this post, but I've also managed to incorporate the PMA badge (2. from my PMA banner concepts sheet) in the designs. It can be found on both shoulder straps of example 1 and the chest of example 2. My main goal with these character designs was to achieve an intimidating and disturb...

Going into this project, I knew that I wanted the settlement to be based in the Adelphi Square on the UCLan campus (UCLan's renovations render below is a good showcase of the layout). Before getting started on drafting up a concept piece for the settlement though, I needed to decide on the nature of its inhabitants, as this would heavily inform its appearance. Inspiration From The Game Universe The world of the Last of Us is filled with a rich diversity of survivor communities. At one end of the spectrum exist the exceptionally well equipped and organised groups such as the WLF of Seattle, operating from the Soundview Stadium (see Zak Oliver's official concept art for The Last of Us Part 2 below), as well as various forward bases across the city. Conversely, many smaller communities live in brutal conditions and are lucky to survive day by day, taking up residence in gloomy sewers and other unfavourable locations in oder to stay out of harm's way.  Alongside settlement size...

 For my first project I have decided to develop a concept of the UCLan campus functioning as a survivor settlement in the world of The Last of Us. For anybody unfamiliar with the franchise, The Last of Us is a third-person, stealth-action series set around three decades after an apocalyptic outbreak of cordyceps—a parasitic fungus that usually affects ants and other small bugs in the real world, but has here been imagined targeting humans. I thought this would be an interesting project to begin with because three decades of post-apocalypse provides plenty of room to imagine backstories for the inhabitants of the world, which I hope to be able to convey in my work. We also haven’t seen any of the UK so far in the Last of Us games, so this is an interesting opportunity to consider how things might look different compared to the US. Given that I’m based in Preston, and can easily explore and imagine what my surroundings might look like, I’m also expecting this project to encourage me ...

 Hello! I'm Laurie and welcome to my blog. I'll be using this to document progress throughout my MA Games Design course at UCLan this year. In this first post, I'd like to tell you a bit about myself and my background, before I get started. I previously studied Ancient History in Exeter, so both living in Preston and studying Games Design are new experiences to me, which is equal parts daunting and exciting. Focusing on history at undergraduate level was great for the development of my analytical skills and it provided me with quite the range of exciting material to explore and draw upon down the line. Ultimately though, the main thing i missed during my time in Exeter was the opportunity to lean into my more creative side, especially since my time at school was heavily punctuated by my art studies - hence the change of direction now. I've been playing games since before i can remember, with some of my earliest influences coming from my older cousins, who got me into Po...