Week 4 – Second Concept – Outline:

Having had the chance to look over the information gleamed from my research, combined with commentary from my colleagues and workmates, I began to rebuild the project’s design to take into account the new choice of art direction (propaganda posters), and reconsidered game mechanics.

As I was now going with a highly simplified art style, I decided to move away from the concept of a ruined village, and, as Dave had suggested, instead approach the town settling as a more representational environment than a true-to-life settlement. The child (unharmed this time) would remain the player character, navigating through a town environment. Perhaps the whole project would be the imagination of the child? Perhaps her nightmares? Did the project even need any logical explanation? My tendency to keep to semi-realistic boundaries in designs can at times restrict my work, so I think following a more representational aesthetic such as this would be a good development experience for me.

 The basic game mechanic is similar in some ways to my early Raijin concept; it will revolve around the player running through the environment as the child, avoiding the Extremist enemies that confront her. Originally the town would begin empty of them, but they would then begin to appear steadily, slowly taking over the town. To represent this taking over of the town, I would make use of brightly coloured lighting that would switch from blue (representing parts of the town not controlled by the extremists) to deep red (representing parts that are). The town would thus begin completely blue, but turn red piece by piece as the extremists arrived and began moving around. I was already sure of how I would go about doing this in Unreal, and so created a simple proof-of-concept map to showcase the effect.

Shots from the lighting showcase map. The block that represent the buildings each had a blue point light, which would turn red (like the light in the bottom left corner) if the player approached them on foot or in a vehicle.

One the advice of my colleagues during the presentation in week 2, I will be keeping away from an anime art style focus (though I may still refer to aspects of the style, as I will describe later), and instead adopt an approach more akin to Dimitri Moor’s works, with mostly flat colour and simplified details on objects, which is easily achievable by a team of one. His ideas of hard angles and straight lines would also be applied to buildings, and possibly the political extremist characters themselves. For normal citizens however (should any appear), I will be keeping to a soft-angled cartoony style, to help stand them out from the extremist characters.

In addition to my propaganda research, I decided to look deeper into cartoons and other simplified representations of worlds, to explore how such media successfully conveys its message despite using what are quite minimal assets.

 

A shot from the game “Noby-Noby” boy by Keita Takahashi, for the PS3. Takahashi-San’s game is a perfect example of the kind of aesthetics this project is considering; it uses extremely stylised assets and game play is generally quite unrealistic, but the two create a highly entertaining and colourful atmosphere for game play. One factor of this could be the concept of ‘finish’ I was introducing in the 1st Week; all the assets have been given the same treatment, thus keeping a sense of uniformity and completeness across the work.