Ideas Come When You Least Expect Them

Its interesting how ideas can suddenly spring to mind as soon as you stop thinking about something, first day into dedicating all my time on this research proposal and suddenly my mind starts coming up with some great thoughts on my project artifact. This will just be a short post with a bunch of the ideas that sprung to mind.

Keeping in with the symbolism of a journey through life, I could make the rooms gradually seem older as the player progresses through them, to show the passage of time. This one was sort-of unintentional, as I was simply thinking of how I envisage the rooms, and it struck me that the bell tower is very run down, which contrasts a lot with the elegance of the entrance hall. So why not simply create a gradual decline through the intermediate rooms.

Using chromatic adaptation to create a mood shift, or help Fraser trick visual perception in the end jump. This one came as I was reading over my notes on colour, it is a phenomenon whereby the brightness of the ambient light causes two different colours to reverse in brightness. I noticed an example within my flat, where my flatmate has a red Hell-Boy hand he made for a costume, sitting next to the white wood that makes up the window frame. During the day the white wood is clearly the brighter of the two, but come night time when the lights are off, the red stands out much more vividly. The opposite of this scenario is colour constancy, which is far more common. That is the way in which humans can perceive whether an object is all the same colour, despite things like shadows and coloured lights influencing it.

Meeting with Fraser

I met up with Fraser this week so we could develop the ideas we had for our project artifact, and decide upon a solid idea to take forward. As previously stated on here our original idea for the environment was a tower consisting of different rooms the player travels through, moving up, before reaching the top where the player is made to jump. After some discussion, we still want that aspect in the design, but we've decided to change the environment to be more like a house/villa in a Mediterranean setting like the South of France or Italy, where there is quite a lot of similarity in the countryside housing styles. This idea suits me nicely as one of my original ideas was to recreate my Grandfathers house in the south of France, so the style is very well known to me, at least in terms of exterior, and surrounding countryside. The interiors can be just about any style however.

We discussed more of the level design, and swapped bits of research that could be of interest to the other. For the environment design, we've been thinking it would be good to start in a nice, warm, open garden, with plenty of light - a very tranquil start to make the player feel like exploring. From there the plan is to move into a conservatory/entrance hall, which will look quite elegant, but not too ostentatious. As for lighting in this room I'm thinking it should be fairly well lit overall, shade instead of shadows, to evoke that sense of mystery and exploration described before. We want this room to feature a spiral staircase taking the player to the upper levels of the house, so i think focusing the direct light from the windows on this would be a good way of bringing the players focus in the correct direction.

From the entrance we want a couple more rooms, but are unsure about them just yet, other than they should slowly lead towards a darker, gloomier final room in an abandoned bell-tower, where the player will experience the jump. Strong contrasting light and shadow would be best used here I think, as it adds drama to the scene, so things like god rays poking through small windows in the sides of the tower. Im also thinking very de-saturated colours, with a lot more grays present.

Project Changes

Well, my project idea has undergone quite a bit of change since my last post. I am now in the process of working out the logistics of doing a group project with Fraser, a GDPM (Game Design Production Management) student I have worked with previously. We both met up with Robin separately to discuss our project, and he gave us the go ahead, and seems quite keen to see what we can accomplish.

My plan is to still focus on environmental lighting, and Robin gave me a few ideas of things to research and test out (to be posted up here very soon hopefully). One of these I have already begun to examine is the film Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick, in which Kubrick's main goal was to achieve as realistic a lighting set-up as possible, quite often using only candlelight.

Our current idea for the project is an environment which will attempt to make the player feel a range of emotions as they progress up a tower seperated into rooms. Each emotion will be specific to the room, and created with a combination of Frasers research into architecture and mine on lighting. I threw together a new mood board since the previous ones were no longer relatable.  

We're thinking quite run down and abandoned, overgrown with plants. We want an air of mystery to it, so lots of shade, rather than dark shadows, in order to make the player explore further. As to a time period we're still undecided - The content would make it easy enough to simply keep it old, possibly medieval, but It could just as easily be set in the present/future, with some nice modern lighting effects next to traditional fire-light. Another aspect of the idea is more Fraser's design than my own, where he wants to use perspective tricks from the top of the tower to create a message that can only be seen by looking down at the start location, telling the player to jump. I really like the idea, and I'm pretty sure i can come up with some ways to use lighting to help this along. The idea is still in its early infancy, so there is a lot that me and Fraser need to discuss over the next few weeks to refine it into something good.

We're now into pitch week, so iv been preparing my presentation and working on some media tests in maya. Unfortunately my attempts to render god rays have been unsuccessful for some reason, I either end up with a black render image, or it fails to render entirely. Worst case scenario, I wont have a render to show for the presentation, but I do have a nice amount of progress I think for it to be a fairly minor issue.