During the idea generation stage of the project, the whole team and I worked hard to gather many influences for the design of the level. This included mood-board creating , in order to identify a particular style that could be fascinating to explore. The team and I took familiar interest into the video game Ink-Quest and Su Blackwell.
Afterwards My team and I began concept production to portray our ideas even further. Throughout this process I painted a number of concepts to explore level design, colour palette, lighting and atmosphere.
When the concepts were finalised and the assets in the designs for the assets had been depicted in the concept, Amber created an asset and texture list for the team. Thus we began making our 2D world come alive in 3D.
Modelling was not too difficult a challenge. I was instructed to model the tree-stump, minecart , Cheshire Cat and the Dancing Mushroom.For the majority of my 3D models, I worked back and forth with Amber and Freddy, getting feedback to ensure that I was adhering to the style of our level.
Afterwards, I moved onto texturing, my assets, this was a challenging task and by no means easy. the assets needed to match the concepts exactly, therefore extra focus needed to be to get the desired outcome for the assets. Some of my assets, such as the Tree-stump and the Cheshire Cat were textured by Freddy. This really took the pressure off me and I am glad she could help.
When all my work was completed for the team. Amber asked me to create matinee animations for the white rabbit and dragonfly. she wanted me to design an animation for the rabbit that appeared as if the rabbit was being moved by hand.To do so, I had to take influence from shadow puppetry.
However, no team comes without its flaws and I did have minor issues working in the team., I would have liked to have more group meetings throughout the project, as they seemed to cease after the 5th week of the project. similarly, it would have been nice to have more say in the concept design ofthe level, however, in the grand scheme of things and the overall outcome of the level, it didn't seem to matter.
I had thoroughly enjoyed working on this project. Naturally, when working in a time you will experience moments of friction. Similarly, spending 14 weeks on any projects will prove to become exhausting. however, I had a great time during the project. I had been going through bouts of low self-esteem from the results of previous projects, but the final outcome of the Off The Map project is something I take great pride in.
Without further a-do here is our level: