Lab II- group project- game

Lab II Group project- 2D platformer/puzzle game

I am in charge of creating the Environment and aesthetics of the level design for our game, which will likely include creating a mix of 2D and 3D assets, and deciding the general visual style of the game. I'm not entirerly sure where to start with this project, since I've not really done anything like this before, but I'm excited to get started and give it a go.

The first thing I did was figure out the vague colour palettes for the project, including the colours for the environments and the main character- Lelf. My initial drawings for this project were, arguably, some of the worst I've ever made, but they served their purpose.

for example-

These first drawings were just very quick sketches that were to help initially conceptualise the game and make sure that my groupmates and I were on roughly the same page regarding the layout and  overall visual aesthetic of the game. That first drawing was done with my non-dominant hand and a mouse also, which is why it is so terrible. Very early in the project it was decided that the main character's colour palette would be predominantly warm oranges and peachy colours, since it was also decided that the environment would be predominantly cool blues and greens, and these are complementary colours- it would help Lelf stand out against his surroundings and play into the idea that he is "lost"and out of place. I also decided that elements that could be interacted with- such as creatures, fruit trees and mushrooms- would include a bright pink in their design, to act as a visual indicator that they are interactable and set these elements apart from their environment, while also keeping the colour closer to the cool tones of the environment and notably distinctive from the player as well.

Refined Concept Art and Level Design

Next I took the rough level designs created by another team member and turned it into much more refined concept art meant to show off what the game itself would theoretically end up looking like. This, combined with the fact that I had to do a lot of level design myself- which is not one of my strongsuits- ended up taking a lot longer than I expected it to

This first artwork was very important, since it informed most of the major elements of the game's design, and pretty much all of the elements pictured here would be carried over into the rest of the levels moving forward. no other concept arts were finished to this level after this moving forward, since this artwork informed the vast majority of my decisions

Level 2

Level 2 added a whole new layer of difficulty to the design process, since we needed to try and take all the elements we had introduced in the first three sections and turn them into a somewhat challenging puzzle, and I have no experience in making puzzles. At this point I pivoted slightly from just making concept art and interpreting the levels my groupmate had designed- to designing the levels myself, and it was very challenging for me. And then we scrapped that level anyway because we realised we were being too ambitious given the timeframe :')

It was very important when designing levels to consider the isometric view, since it was easy to forget when working from a 2D, bird's eye view, that some things could then become hidden or obstructed by terrain and other elements.

And then we scrapped the level so it became considerably less important and I spent several weeks trying to figure this out for no good reason lmao

Entering the Third Dimension

Next it was finally time to do what I was recruited into the group to do in the first place- Make the 3D assets that would comprise the environment of the game. At first I tried using NomadSculpt - an excellent 3D modelling software recommended to me by my supervisor which worked great - at first.

I had some issues with the topology of these models, since they were really high resolution and not at all game-ready, so I ended up remaking all of the models I initially created in this software in Maya, since it is very straightforward to make simplistic models in Maya for me. The Nomad models were a great starting point, though.

This was my first attempt at a tree- as you can see it's pretty bad, so I gave up half way through

My next attempt was not perfect, but was much better over all. I was pretty happy with it, but as I mentioned previously, the poly count was ridiculously high and the mesh was not optimised for a game even remotely, which meant this model was also scrapped

Problem solving- Asset design

Up until this point, I had essentially just jumped straight into making assets, but when I decided to make the move over to modelling in Maya, I took the step first to make little plans for all the models (the plan for the ramp was included in an earlier level design image- I just drew it on that layer since there was space there)

and that brings us to...

The Models

As seen in the game