The Final Concept Piece

Once I had gone through the iterative process of designing the characters and assets, I planned a piece of concept art. Initially, I was going to use Photoshop to create the final piece, but I as my student verification was extremely delayed, I had to begin work on another program. I had used Setchbook Pro before, but decided against using it for the concept piece as its colour and opacity settings didn't work in a way I was used to. Instead, I began work on Gimp. This free software is extremely capable, but on my PC it is extremely buggy. I found that it was constantly crashing, and I was losing as much work as I was doing. I continued with it anyway (saving extremely regularly) but was forced to leave some elements of the picture really quite low in detail, as I was never able to get the tablet sensitivity functions to work properly. I feel that the Concept Piece showed the style of the game, but couldn't quite show the level of detail I wanted. Hopefully, when I get Photoshop up and running, I will be able to post a piece which actually shows the characters expression, and perhaps incorporate a soldier demon into it.

Project 2: Concept Visualisation

After receiving the feedback from the pitch, I began work on the next project, which is to continue with the concept of Feud through an iterative process, to a stage where it is visualised in a way in which I would picture the final game to look. I began with a stage of silhouetting. I felt that as the lead characters were going to be two men in normal dress, and two of the main enemies, the "possessed" and the "crazies" would be basic civilian models, i would not apply this stage to them, and instead began work on the demons. I made one page of silhouette ideas of different kinds of demons, including the demons worked on in my first project.

From this I chose a few different ideas, and began another stage of silhouettes to explore ideas in how each individual demon class would look best. I stuck to the most important demons, that would be most likely to appear in the final game. The first being the soldier demon, then followed by the drowned man demon (who represents a fear of water), the tree man demon (a friend of mine has an interesting fear of tree roots), and then the shadow demon (fear of the dark). I then took the soldier demon to the next stage of design, as I had found a design within the silhouettes that I thought looked suitably eye catching and memorable. I illustrated it to show details such as its size and how it would approximately look in 3d.

I then applied this later stage of development to the two main characters, I made model sheets of the antagonist, including 4 images of what kind of clothes he would wear, and once a costume was decided I created orthographic views of him (side, 3/4 angle front, 3/4 back, front and back). I then went through the same process for the protagonist, and also created some character sheets to show his expressions and poses.

 

The crucifix plays a pivotal role in the game as well, so I went through the process of narrowing down the best Gothic crucifix style.

Preparing for the Pitch

After coming up with a concept for the games mechanics, story and style, I had to create a 10 minute pitch to my tutors for assessment. For this I would need to find the most important elements of my idea, as 10 minutes is a short time to try and cover all elements of a whole game. The pitch acts as a mock pitch to companies such as publishing companies with the aim to sell the idea, and gain funding for the project. For this pitch I would (very briefly) cover; the games approximate pricing and platform (£5-£8, Onlive/Xbox Live Marketplace), the important elements of the plot (the main characters and most important events), the core mechanics, and the style of the game.
   I also had to create a sellsheet. My sellsheet acted as a poster, showing the style of the game and its potential for advertising. I learned after that more information should really have been added to the sheet, as it showed the style of the game quite strongly, and gave a rough idea of genre and target audience through the image itself, but gave no indication of how it would play.