Grace Collas

In the beginning of this project I must admit I felt very lost and confused. The little feedback I received in the previous project completely contradicted everything i’d been told my lecturers leading up to the hand in deadline. I had no real direction to go in. The majority of the feedback was targeted at issues I’d spoken about in my blog and had been trying to solve from the beginning. I just felt completely lost and upside down, should I listen to the advice from my tutors just to be told the complete opposite? (not an exaggeration, this is what happened word for word contradicting what aspects of the project I was told to focus on) Either way, from there I had a very rocky start, my confidence was knocked, I was going through personal issues and I must say through out it all, Becky was amazing. We both looked back on the past projects and just, decided we didn’t want to do that again. We were not going to touch narrative but aim for a easy to digest, easy to understand experience.   Becky’s organisation and attitude really helped me to come back to myself and complete the work when I needed to. Overall, I’m proud of what Becky and I achieved. We created exactly what we set out to in the beginning. I remember being a few weeks in and panicking that I wouldn’t have enough work to show, that my art wouldn’t be good enough and that i’d disappoint Becky but I’m very happy to say, I’ve completely turned around that mentality. I look back at the work I’ve done to compile it into a PDF and I’ve made way more work than I realized. I not only have I improved so much since first year, but in the past few months alone I’ve noticed great improvement, I attribute most of that to being in an art positive environment, both inside my own head, and from the words coming from those around me.

I really enjoy the work and painting style I chose for this game. Becky was a perfect person to work along side. Becky’s constant enthusiasm and excitement for the game kept me wanting to create better and more polished work, aiming to constantly out do myself and improve. In past games it’s always felt like I was putting my energy into motivating others and getting nothing in return, but working with Becky everything was natural, the correct balance of work and joking. We’d joke to work off the pressure but it’d never hinder or get in the way of work. This is a skill i always appreciate, someone that can sense when you’re starting to get burnt out, takes a moment to re-configure things then move on positively. I very rarely felt overworked or exhausted of this game whilst working on it. The only issues we encountered were road blocks with our own work, which we fixed by talking to lecturers. I set out to try incorporate the sublime into an endless runner, to some extent I captured this, but with more time i’d know what aspects I’d push further. I’d love to have different locations to run past, like lakes and ruined castles. I’d also love to include the aging deer, from faun to dust, with difficulty changing with the age of the deer. This is an idea that i think would really solidify that feeling of flow and bring the game together as a single experience. I think if i were to reproach this, i’d put more time into considering the scenery and feel of the game rather than focusing on the characters (the deer and fire) although I still feel that the scenery captures the feeling I wanted, i know i could push this further.  Adding more aspects of the sublime, and maybe some direct references to some of my favorite works.

I accidentally deleted this blog post, and now i’m trying to remember what I did this week!

I combined all of Becky’s favorite parts from the designs we had. Sharon told us that we should focus on having the deer chunkier and more natural looking, because stags tend to be chunky. The natural look is to go along with the feeling of Sublime.

Essentially because my work for the game was mostly done I took this time to focus on doing work I enjoyed. 

It might sound silly but I took this very seriously, I don’t want anyone in this category that might possibly see this to feel comfortable or accepted. It was an easy fix and honestly it’s very important to me to remain relevant to current issues and things going on.

I still felt like our lineart was missing something, something extra. Something deer-y

Yes, perfect. Drawing figures in this style is something I can always do quickly. 

Here we are! I wanted to capture the sorts of clothes Becky and I both wear, also Becky is a cutie and I had a great time drawing her. 

I also created a very quick drawing for Becca, as shes been an amazing help for creating our game!

After creating this I then went on to create the UI

In Becky’s UI sketch the information was on a bush but when it came to making it that way, it just didn’t have the correct feeling or depth, it didn’t mesh well with the feeling. Also the brush I was using just didn’t look good, so instead I thought to try it the other way around, and I think it worked perfectly!

I then created the rest of the UI based off of becky’s sketches.

I really struggle with layout for type face, but after getting feedback from those in an art critique chat Sam set up for some of us on the course, I was able to get a lot of help and it ended up coming out much better than I had it originally. 

I’ve really enjoyed having access to a space where I know I can always get helpful critique on my work. We even have a space for those who are not looking for critique but want to share their work still, it’s a really positive constructive space and the feedback has really helped me to improve my painting skills.

It’s just been a very relaxed art space where we’re all focused on improving our skills.

I started this week by revisiting the tile sets Becky and I made. I darkened the colours and brought things back a few stages. In engine it appears darker than it does here.

To make my tile-able textures sets in photoshop i first sketched up the shape and then pulled it into another file. This file i’d set up with photoshops’ grid system so each tile space fit inside each segment. 

This is the final look for the cave sections, I designed them in such a way that each tile can can connect to the other, so they can be arranged in anyway they’re not limited to having to be next to each other in this same way. I wanted Becky or myself to have freedom to arrange them however.

how the titles get separated in engine!

I also got the bramble collapse animation done, when the player dashes through the brambles we wanted a signifier to the player that they’d destroyed it by dashing. Becky and I wanted the player experience to be HUD-less with them gaining information from playing it and the feedback from the game. To go along with this Becky asked for me to make some sets of the deer animation with glowing blue horns so I threw them together quite quickly.

I decided I would render the concept sketch to be the start menu based off of Becky’s menu UI designs. 

I looked back at how this piece used colour and shape and tried to incorporate that into my work. 

I also looked to this piece of work of how they used lighting and the twisted trees.

I tried to capture the beauty and terror in my painting for the main menu, I hope my sublime influence is as clear to others as it appears to me. 

Becky asked me to do a simple animation for a bird in the game. For this animation I did as Kaleigh suggested for the fire, I just focused on the movement and rough form. I’m happy with the outcome!

I noticed the only thing i had left was the splash screen to the to do list. I thought it would be cute to draw Becky and I!

This week I had a very stressful meeting, but it went okay, i only had two swear words shouted in my face. After hand in i’m planning to go to student support because this has really hindered my work and got me in a funk. 

On a brighter note, I decided I wanted to see if I could sort out the issue with the asset brightness.

I darkened everything by 40% unfortunately the parallax layer didn’t get darkened, also the floor texture i’d made  was now way too bright, I wanted it to have near black values and it was blending into the background. i needed to do more jigging around. 

Becky sent me the above concept work for platforms, it was really useful and I was easily able to understand what she was thinking/ wanting from the game.

I rendered some version for the final game in the art style we were using.  She also asked me to create a wide platform for players to jump over, we decided to go for the same tree stump motif.

I was concerned about scale for Becky’s big tree idea for the platforms, so instead I asked her if she’s rather I make some tile-able cave like structures instead. 

I edited the assets for the game further, i looked at them all together in black and white to see the values we were working with, i messed around with the Brightness and contrast to makesure the deer, thorns and butterflies stood out against the background.

I couldn’t help but notice the thorns were still getting a little lost, I thought back to Merlin telling us that red should be a motif for danger, so i tried changing the thorns to red to indicate to the player that they are dangerous. 

I didn’t get any screenshots of my process, because I didn’t realise Becky was going to keep it in, I sort’ve was just doing things to show her what kind of thing I was thinking. I only have these screen shots from when Becky was working and I was left alone with the UE4 file, they tell the story of my experience pretty well. 

Over the Easter break I decided to take part in the Vampire Game Jam, a game jam hosted by the creators of Bloodlines 2. I’m a huge VTM/ whitewolf fan so though it’d be good to hop into a team and give help where I could. First thing I did when I joined the team was to tell them I’d also be working on some uni work as I had to keep on track with animations and assets. 

For the games jam I did some very fast and loose silhouette work for the main character. My team then informed me that they only needed me to do background work, which i dont mind, I think they were a group of friends because the work was being done in private chats rather than in the group chat. I was only doing this for a bit of fun, but it would’ve been nice to be able to critique others work and have that open discussion about the game. 

As this was only a week long games jam, i just wanted to get assets out quickly. One of the main feedbacks we received in comments were people saying the visuals for this game were lovely. 

Overall in the game jam we came 9th out of 29 entries, with us scoring higher in the other areas. I wanted to use the backgrounds to make the game feel mysterious and dark. The people I worked with let me do what I wanted as long as it was a forest or an apartment. I wanted to include little bits of story telling. I knew the main character was a witch who would end up cursing her partner into being a vampire, so i wanted to include small friendly witch motif’s within the apartment area, hence the flowers on the window and crystals in the book case.

I loaded the woods up with twisted trees and purple smoke, drawing trees was nothing new to me at this point. it’s the main thing i’d been doing for the deer game.

Going back to the deer game, I’d managed to make my own special brush for creating vines, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be and it used techniques i’d used before. You just change the brush to follow the direction of the stroke and line up with itself and instant vines!

I finally began to render the deer, now all the other asset for the game seem to be in a place I am happy with, i’m moving on to rendering the deer nicely. With the side by side i can agree it stands out way more with a lighter outline. 

I also made some trees to be used in if we needed any areas padding out. 

Over Easter i was able to finish painting all the deer sprites, with an issue being it now was the same value as the background and was getting lost. I’d have to go in at some point and darken all the asset to the point where I was happy with them.

I also created a very basic animation of two butterflies flying around one another to be used as a collectible, Becky said we needed one so I just threw this together. I thought this figure of eight movement was correct for butterfly that needed to be in the same place and also that by having two of them doing a fast movement it would attract the players attention. I made them blue/teal to contrast against the fire. I wanted the player to associate blue with good and orange/ red with bad.

This week I was reminded my George that it’s best to work in the power of two. I can’t believe i’d completely forgotten this, I made one 3D game and my brain just vanishes. Either way, I doubt i’ll forget now. Also we were told it’s better to have animation sprites in a square shape to be exported rather than in a line. We’d been doing them in a line because it’s easier for us, it’s important to learn and remember what’s easy for us might not be what’s best for the game in the long run. Cutting corners is never the right way to do something.

After showing my rendering concepts for my deer to Kaleigh she said she wanted to see what the outline from the water colour deer would look like on the other deer, so i just moved the line art over. Her response was “I don’t normally like lineart work, but i really, really like that.”

I showed it to Becky and she said that the pencil sketch was her favorite version of the deer. She also agreed with Kaliegh that the linework helped define it more. So this is the one i’m going to render going forward.

Kayliegh also gave me a better starting off point for my fire animation. She told me to look at how fire actually behaves when it’s in a tornado, she also told me to stop being so hung up on following the line art and just get a feel for the movement by blocking out areas of value. I was trying to follow the animators survival guide for something that doesn't have that much of a solid form or well documented movement. Fire tornadoes only really happen when there is a lot of wind or matter to burn up, thats why they happen in forest fires but not in camp fires.

This week I was attempting to animate the fire, and i’d really hit a wall with it. 

This animation was taking a long time but it wasn’t giving me the results I wanted. I wanted a spiral type effect almost like a cyclone or tornado? This was looking more like a soft fire, slightly jiggling and wobbling, it was giving me wet jelly vibes rather than fire vibes. It’d taken me almost all week to get this far, so on the sunday I decided to email Kaliegh to get a better understanding of how to animate the fire.

I was trying to use the ball/ lines to show movement. I even tried the onionskin method my friend Izzy told me about, but it wasn’t going well. Izzy was trying to be polite but even she agreed this fire wasn't very intimidating. 

This week Becky and I arranged a meeting with William Taitt from the Ideas factory. We’d been asking those we know we can work with if they’d want to work with us after uni in an indie studio. Those that were interested but on the fence we told to come along to see if it was for them, and if it was a risk they were willing to take. Taitt told us about the options available to us, we learned about taxes, roles, how much we’d need to earn for the amount of people in the company. We told everyone that the decision to actually go forward with it will come after hand in, we’d need to know for sure who wanted to work with us around then, then we’d get back in touch with William Taitt.  Becky and I had been attending his Platform sessions, they had some useful aspects, but truthfully the beginning sessions seemed more for those that were unsure of how starting a company works. 

Becky and I still had some idea on how and what steps we needed to take, where the sessions were more “What is a product” we’ll we knew what product we were making and selling. Even if Becky and I were at a more advanced stage, it was really nice to talk to people from other courses and work alongside them.  I think i’ve realised one of the most important traits for me colleague wise, is someone who never says no to ideas, someone who rolls with them and elaborates on them no matter how silly they are. It’s important for me that they never try assert authority over others as a means to quieten them. Those that know when being serious is needed and when it’s okay to let loose a little and have a laugh. If I worked with people that don’t aline themselves with this and see this as childish, I don’t think i’d be able to produce work or work for a long time. 

This time around we were tasked to design a new service for right move to offer, we worked with a very lovely second year photography student named David, he seemed to enjoy mine and Becky’s energy and work flow, we ended up all exchanging social media to keep up with the work we create. (he also reminded us to document the work we’ve been doing for the platform meetings)

This week I started doing all the skyboxes and mountains, I wanted each season to have a completely different colour feel for sky and mountains.

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Becky also told me we needed a sprint animation, to show when the player had activated the sprint that the speed is intended. 

I painted the scenery as a test to see what kind of thing we could use for parallax. Mountains seemed like an ideal situation as it could fill a lot of the background in a nice way, that way we wouldn’t need to rely on a sky box or lots of trees to fill the space. When creating it I wanted to make sure the background kept to midtones and the foreground values black. If this doesn't work in game of course i’ll change it. 

I’ve also started painting new flowers, trees, and bushes for the summer season to replace the temporary very cartoony ones.

Since i had a silhouette planned for the deer, I could move on to fleshing it out. but first I needed to work on the jumping animation. 

The jumping animation was harder to find references for so i looked at what i could find from Muybridge, the jump is made up of deer and horse movements, more so horse as it’s the kind of fluid movement I was going for.

Deers tend to spring themselves into the air, I wanted it to be able to seamlessly match up with the running animation, so I did some tests to see before i proceeded any further with rendering the animation for the deer run.

This jump seems to work, and it matches with the deer becoming very small as it jumps. After Becky gave her feedback i was able to move on to fleshing out the deer to have a more realistic form.

I tried to keep in with a hand painted theme for these, each representing a different medium.

The white deer was meant to look like watercolor. 

The green deer was meant to look like oil paint. 

Finally the brown deer was meant to look like colour pencil. 

Out of all of them the brown deer was my favorite visually but I feel he would end up getting a little lost against the backgrounds. I intend on showing the lecturers at some point and getting their feedback. The white and the brown have the strongest values. I still want to keep the deer as the lightest value thing within the game composition. 

This month I focused my time on animation of the deer, I wanted to get started on even just a skeleton of the deer so becky would be able to figure out satisfying running speeds and such. 

I looked at these two animations of deer skeletons to start making my base for my deer. The first one had the right level of airy and weightlessness I was going for, I wanted the deer to feel like it was making an effort to run but it was beautiful in it’s attempt. Going back to the beauty and terror.  Above my two references and below my base sketch animation, the leg colours and body show the seporation of legs and limbs so when it comes to colouring I wont get lost.

To create this i referenced the animator's survival guide a book lent to me by Izzy, a second year animation student. She also gave me a lot of useful tips and advice going forward. She told me about balls to show movement, using basic shapes and keeping an eye on the fluidity of the moment rather than looking at the small detail work.

Ron also told me about Muybridge, who has a lot of useful tools to create run cycles with. Muybridge photographed movement, which really helped give me a point of reference for how deer’s move. In Ron’s wax sessions I’m currently looking into deer leg anatomy with my sculpture. Having an understanding of how deers muscles work in a 3D space and move was really helping me with my animation. Where my Muybridge reference imagines were blurry and undefined I was able to use what I learned in Ron’s sessions to fill in the blanks, also since I had originally been referencing a deer skeleton. 

When I went on an anniversary date with my partner, we noticed the restaurant was decorated with lots of taxidermy deer heads, I was able to stealth around and get some good photographs to reference my deer faces later.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734‑1797), Vesuvius in Eruption

Taking colour inspiration from this piece I started blocking out colours onto the quick sketch. I wanted to try get a feel for the visuals of the game as soon as possible. I know I want to steer away from the hard black line sketchy style i’ve been experimenting with in earlier projects.

I wanted to take the deer’s Becky had sketched and apply them to some ideas for the deer for the game. 

Sharon told us to stay true to the sublime we need to keep the deer looking very natural. Steering away from the idea of a mystic/ magical deer. With this feedback going forward I will choose the more natural looking deer to work with.

We had to pitch our game this week, between Becky and I we had 2 slides each, since our game is simple in concept we didn’t need many slides to convey what we wanted/needed to. 

We were given great feedback and a lot of “if you have time ideas” Doak liked the idea of time as another factor, seasons changing, the deer aging as it runs. Another idea he had was animals running/ flying to indicate the fire coming closer. We’ve made a note and will definitely attempt to add these in the future.

Merlin told us that to keep the Sublime feeling we’d need to walk the fine line between beauty and fear. Which is the experience we want for our players.  Becky and I have agreed we want a relaxing yet tense game, the kind of game someone can switch off their brains on the way to work on the bus.  From our feedback from Doak and Merlin I generated more ideas, Merlin told us to look into the Book, End of man, return to nature, from which i created a few ideas.

The first week, I spent my time thinking about what direction I wanted to go in.  Unfortunately the last group project put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth for group work.  I generated some ideas for solo game projects, I wanted to try learn from the last group project.  [insert pictures from sam sketchbook] But Becky and I were still wanting to work together. So we got together to discuss ideas. After last game we didn't get to do much playtesting so we wanted to have a game idea that was simple so we could start play testing as early and as often as possible. We very quickly bounced multiple ideas of one another. I shared the idea for my solo project idea.  We then started thinking of making a game to help soothe players when they feel an anxiety attack happening. Something to occupy the player but not completely distract them.  When doing research into those kinds of games we started talking about the flow state, and how simple games tend to induce the flow state. We exchanged stories about the games in our lives that cause us to enter flow. Very simple games with few buttons. For me it was super hexagon for Becky a game named Dino run.  Endless runners seemed to be the kind of games we were aiming for making. One thing Becky and I have in common is our love for nature, animals and the natural world. We’ve both already done games with cute cats, as much as we wanted to we agreed no more cats. That's when the idea hit up, running from something, in nature? A forest fire? A deer just running from a forest fire, perhaps a spirit forest guardian? The destruction of nature and the natural world made me think of the The Romantic sublime. Doing more research into the Sublime it really helped shape the direction of the art style and game. 

As the game is a platformer I really wanted to make sure the player character didn't get lost against the forest background. 

I’m amazed and impressed with how quickly we recovered as a group. In week ten we had nothing and no communication since week seven from a third of the team. As soon as the gears shifted and we changed the team’s work order we were working smoothly and quickly. I took on a role as Art Director again, as it’s something I wish to do in the future and wanted more expirience with. With this role I tried to keep the artist motivated and organised. I realise through taking on this role for a larger group that it’s not my responsibility to make sure others do work and have work to do. You can bring a horse to water, as they say. Towards the end of the project I was more focused on creating spreadsheets for others to look at the work that needs doing and fill those holes rather than me saying “Hey I have this task, can someone do it?” getting no feedback and ultimately doing it myself or waiting five weeks for someone else to do it. I was more focused on making sure everyone felt included in the project than I was getting my own work done.  When I shifted attitudes and focused more on what it was I was doing, rather than trying to find tasks that suited my teammates work styles. I was much happier and engaged with the project. I must say telling the narative team in week six that all work is going to be collaborative and a majority rule and they can’t dictate and control all of the designs, really changed the feel of the group. There was a direct shift and more optimism with Becca and Mia really coming into their own with the level design. I was able to hear everyone being creative and laughing, it was a lovelier team atmosphere.  I’m impressed with how responsive team members were to the artstyle and how easily it was followed, I love the look of the final game but can’t help but be aware we could’ve done more if we addressed the groups issues sooner. I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help but put some blame on myself for this. I spent too much of the early part of the project making tasks that relied on information from others. I wish I said to the concept artists to go away and just create and we’ll all decide later what goes in and which races there are, rather than waiting for feedback from one person before we could do this task. I think there was a lot of fear from myself at the start of the project. Seeing how Morgan and Becca were treated when they tried to come up with narrative ideas made me scared to deviate from what narrative had decided and when I made one suggestion that wasn't pre decided by the narrative team, I was met with sulking, and left to overhear whispers about how terrible I was. 

Tribulant. I think that word best sums up this group project experience. This has been the largest team I’d worked with and that being the case I knew it would be harder. But I was not expecting what happened in this project.I won’t go into detail here but i’ve experienced so much immaturity that I am so shocked to have gone through it.

First going to big up the teammates that really made sure we actually had a game to show. Sorry if this is really long, i’m just worried they don’t realise how great they are to work alongside. That being said I must give credit to those that continued to work in spite of what was going on around them. Becky and Mia were strong pillars in keeping me going during this project.  The two of them always keeping positive and optimistic outlooks. They were always friendly talking about other members of the group. Both of them took up new tasks and helped where every they could. They wanted to work as part of the team to actively get the game created. The same could be said of Sam, Morgan and Becca honestly.

Sam left their comfort zone and really applied themselves to every task set. Going above and beyond in the concept art stage, they knew when it was time to move on from concept art and and start helping in other areas, such as texturing the 3D assets and helping me make the character models. I’d ask sam for one concept art piece and they’d give me three. Asking constantly on where they could improve and what they could change. Sam wasn’t afraid to put their own ideas out for everyone to see whilst also listening to feedback and adjusting it for the team. Sam have proven time and time again that they are creative and have a keen eye for concept art and responds so well to critique. They see others ideas as a tool for improvement rather than a personal attack on their work. Always professional, kind, and really helped keep the team together. They kept reminding everyone that their personal health is more important than this project and had strong empathy for everyone within the group.

Morgan quickly resolved the issues that faced them in the group. They kept themselves solution minded, they responded well to critique and feedback. Once they got settled into the project they became a lot calmer and accepting of others ideas, working alongside others just enjoying creating work again. They created so many assets for the game although 3D isn’t their strong suit and took that momentum into painting the models. Throughout the project they knew when to pass on a task to someone else and not have a “but that's MY job” attitude. Often really wanting to do a task but knowing it'd be a benefit the team just to work together to get the work done, Morgan wasn’t precious about what work they did as long as they were doing work and helping the game improve. Their focus wasn't on having pretty portfolio work it was being part of the team.

Becca, I can’t express how thankful I am to work with Becca. Honestly they are the most professional person I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. I know whoever they end up working with in the future are going to be the luckiest people out there. She is always open minded, hard working, and creative. Becca took over and got the work done with minimal resources and time. Without Becca’s support i don’t think we’d have anything to show. After this team was dropped by another team member without any communication, Becca took charge and rebuilt everything themselves with just a “yep” they were straight to work. They never complained about having to do the work, only that they were told two weeks prior when the person had decided to stop working on his game, and that was because they wished they had more time to get more work done.  Becca have proven time and time again, that they can problem solve, work well in a team and respect other team members. I honestly wish I could work with Becca forever and know where ever they end up after this course they will succeed and create amazing work to a high standard.

Becky, She worked hard on making sure we were all organised and aware with what was happening and when. She arranged all of our weekly powerpoints and meetings, when a task needed doing she’d do it without needing to be asked. She kept a professional attitude throughout the project putting in so much work whilst working on her own project. She never let her work on this project be compromised by her other one. She worked incredibly quickly and had her priorities in the right place the whole time during this project. I can’t commend her enough. Without her I feel like this project and myself would’ve stayed a broken mess. Becky challenges themselves and does anything that they can to help. Every task they do they complete with a professional attitude and friendly demeanor. Eager to finish it and move onto the next thing. Every team needs someone like Becky, she is the perfect teammate, checking up and constantly keeping communication going between team members. She is great at communicating ideas to those outside of the team also, I believe her role as Creative Director really suited her this project.

Mia, when I work with Mia I am always left with a huge smile on my face. They bring something very important with them, their humor. It might seem like something that doesn’t need to be mentioned but to me it is. Mia keeps everyone engaged with the work they’re doing by being so friendly and funny. When you’re working for hours at a time having someone like Mia on your team makes it not feel like work at all. Now, their level design, Mia’s created level’s with what little information they had from the first blueprinter and created an engaging visually interesting level. Along with Becca, they added in some visual storytelling and turned what was going to be a normal warehouse into a humorous, magic filled area. Mia will do the work and constantly ask for peer feedback, this is a skill that’s really amazing. They’re constantly trying to improve and it shows in their dedication to the work, another person that isn’t precious and just wants a quality product.