Laurie's MA Games Design Blog

 At the start of this new term, there was talk among my course-mates of wanting to test the waters with making a group project in the form of a playable section of game. I immediately knew that I wanted to engage with this as part of this concept art journey that I am on, as participating in a group project would allow me to see what working in a pre-production pipeline is like. It was a perfect way to gain experience of this and to test myself in being as useful as possible to other members that would be working further along the pipeline, relying on me to provide a foundation for them to work from.  To clarify, this is not going to become my main project for the term, and my historically inspired fantasy world is still very much the core of my MA work at present. However, I decided that for the first few weeks of the term I would put my personal practice work on hold so that I could focus on the group project given that my role is mainly in pre-production, and a delay in my ...

The Floating Palace As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I moved onto the Oasis city's floating palace after finishing up on its outer wall. This is an idea I've had for a while so I already had a rough idea for the silhouette in mind. I started by scribbling down these two very rough sketches: The rough form of the palace is consistent across both sketches; a large plateau seemingly held up by a massive body of water suspended in the air. The form intentionally mimics the winged disc imagery that is found across many Ancient Near Eastern mediums and represents the respective supreme god. The main difference between the two sketches is that I was playing around with the design of the irrigation system that receives the streams of water flowing down from over the plateau. In the first I opted for a fairly simple aqueduct system, with a ring structure under the plateau that catches the water, which then splits off into multiple linear aqueducts that carry the water off thro...

Moving on from the brothers' designs, I got to work on designing the 'Oasis' city that is founded by one of the brothers and expanded into a bustling desert metropolis over the next few years. I've started with the outer walls, as they are the first impression the city provides to new arrivals. Here is the initial sketch for its design.  The aim was to create something that felt massive in scale, dwarfing everything around it. At the same time, it needed to be inviting, like a sort of paradise, rather than imposing. The main aesthetic inspiration was the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, from which I decided to carry over elements such as the blue, glazed brick and the distinctly shaped crenelations in my own design.  The winged bull statues also reference the mosaic beast designs found on the historical gate, as well as various other depictions of such creatures from the Near East. As you can see from the sketch above, from the front it appears that the winged statues are pres...