Week 7 – Reconsidering the project take two:

Over the end of Week 6 and start of week 7, I went over the advice given in the 2nd presentation. Several elements of the project needed reconsideration, including a new main character to replace the phased out girl design. I was also strongly encouraged to explore alternatives to a cartoon-based art style, which may feared would detract from the serious political message the game was trying to convey. I therefore looked back over my ideas and considered alternatives to the unlinked aspects.

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A possibility put forward by a colleague was to design the assets as children’s toys, making the city out to be an imaginary world created by a child. The player would likely explore the world omni presently, observing and interacting with characters as opposed to being a character themselves. This would allow the innocence and non-understanding I had been originally seeking to remain, without the need for the young girl character I was originally using. Considering the art style I was going for of simple shapes and bright colour palette, I deemed the best approach to applying such an idea would be in the form of traditional block sets for pre-school children; which usually consisted of wood carved into geometric shapes and painted in a series of bright colours (normally red, blue, yellow and green).

Examples of modern and traditional young children's toys. Traditional wooden building blocks [right] were a focal point of my ideas in this area.

The political extremists, meanwhile, could be represented in game either in their current form as wooden puppets, or alternatively as plastic toy soldiers. My main inspiration for the latter was the soldiers seen in the movie Toy Story. As the traditional moulding method for the models left a solid plastic base on their feet, Toy Story has the soldiers semi-hopping as they walk, as if they were moving their legs and so pulling the base up and down with them. It’s an interesting, and overall, easily animated effect, and the aesthetic of toy soldiers would fit into both the new idea of children’s toys, and the older ‘brainwashed slaves to propaganda’ idea well.

Clip from "Toy Story" of the plastic toy soldiers.

An advantage to using this aesthetic is the ease of which it can be applied. Both make use of a single high-key colour over a model. The wood texture on the blocks can be applied through the addition of a bump map (a special black and white overlay which is used to simulate changes of depth on a flat surface texture).

A series of experimental wood textures made using photoshop. A wood texture from the internet was converted to black and white and then overlayed over a solid colour layer.

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Another avenue I considered for restyling the project was moving deeper into the propaganda idea, and opting for a highly simplified human form, but in a different way to the 2D cartoon style I had studied before. I was suddenly reminded of the old TV Claymation show “Morph” by Tony Hart, which revolved around a character who could morph his shape, but was normally in a vague humanoid form; instantly recognisable, but lacking in many detailed features (with only a nose, mouth and ears). Looking at video and pictures of the character design, I decided to explore the possibility of using a similar character style in my project, though I would obviously vary the design in several ways so as to avoid copying Hart’s designs. Like the toy soldier idea above, these characters would be easy to model and texture, and would fit in well with the traditional environment design if I decide not to go with the wooden toy idea above.

An image of the "Morph" characters designed my Tony Hart. The body shape is incredibly simple and mostly a single colour, yet is instantly recognisable as a human form.