Laurie's MA Games Design Blog

 Introduction The world of concept art is a daunting one, and one that can prove very difficult to break into - or even know where to start. This term, I will be moving away from my Near Eastern concept project and will instead be starting a new blog, as a platform through which aspiring concept artists like myself can hopefully learn a thing or two about the big, bad world of concept art in the games industry. My aim is to disseminate to other beginners the knowledge that I have acquired throughout my MA course, in a clear and digestible way.  Why? I came into this course completely fresh - I had just finished a degree in Ancient History and really had no actual understanding of concept art, other than knowing I had an interest in trying it. Given where I started, I do feel that I've learnt a lot over the course of this last year (though it's still early days). The reason that I want to start this project is that I want to help other beginners to reach the point I'm curren...

 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...