A New Project Comes into the Fray (Turret Saga Part 1)

With the group fun of the toy story project behind, the new project has started which this time is a one man project so its time for some good old fashioned "lone wolf" game art. I was quite excited for the change of pace this new project has brought. While there is still lots of work involved it definitely doesn't have the same vibe as the group projects, where you have to communicate with the other people of the group and spend more of your time working on the social and group dynamics/workflow of the project to make sure it gets done.

This project is a 3 week long task to design and create a turret for a game that will track and shoot at you in engine. The tri budget is 5000 so its a nice medium size portion for this sort of project and there is only one 1024 texture sheet allowed for the asset with 512 alphas for the bullets and particle effects. This timescale gave me one week for concepting, one week for asset creation and one week for engine stuff including the inevitable battle with the blueprint system in Unreal 4. There will be some overlap in the creation and engine stage as tests will be made for the textures in engine and tweaks to pivot points and other such things will become apparent as the engine reveals such problems.

This week has been dedicated entirely to the concept creation stage and has been an absolute blast. One of the lecturers suggested creative games to start the creative juices flowing and it worked a treat. I decided to use a dice to decide the paths I might travel down so I can get some interesting themes into my work. I first created a word generator composed of two lists of cultures, styles and themes which could be combined when a two dice were rolled showing the numbers of the possible route to go down. The first word generator was pretty limited and the answers I was getting weren't to my liking so I decided to go back and iterate on the list so I could generate some really random and interesting topics to go down. My final list were very long and when the dice started rollign I started to generate some very interesting topics to develop further.

I then started cutting ideas from the generated list and took some to the research and moodboard stage where I could start exploring the combinations and find out which ideas had running power. After creating 6 moodboards and one turret moodboard which would be universal I decided to randomly choose from my favorite choices by throwing a piece of paper at my computer screen when all the moodboards were gathered together.

Here are my many moodboards

Desert Dieselpunk (basically Mad Max)

Homeless/homemade Noire (had no clue where this was going)

Contemporary Knights

Musical 50's Futurism

Tropical Pirates

Turrest (universal moodboard)

Cyberpunk afterlife/underworld (I really liked this one circuit board day of the dead came to mind)

Cute Victorian (hence the top hat kitten)

And my chosen topic was...

Modern Knights (contemporary design)

This was quite an interesting idea which was what if classic fantasy knights were still around how would they guard their treasure and keeps, what would these sentry turrets be like? I started exploring further and creating a bask kit from the silhouettes of gathered images on pinterest. Through research I found out about orders and conclaves the knights gathered in and thought about how modern equivalents of this would be corporation and companies like facebook and twitter. This corporate warfare would be something I would like to put into effect with the detailing and textures of the design.

Throughout the project I have been constantly going back and iterating on what I have done. I learnt the true importance of this from the design part of the last project and I do not want the mistake of having an idea or a theme which i wasn't happy with because it would either wind up just being a terrible design or I would run out of steam and not enjoy the project. Because of my revising and updating to all the work though it meant that I could go back and take a closer look at things. I have done this with the moodboard quite a few times as with every stage I have refined and explored what it is I am looking for while also seeing if there are any new directions to go in. This helped during the bask kit stage where I didn't like many of the silhouettes I was getting out and thought I would go back update the moodboard and the bask kit to get some more interesting shapes which I can combine.

Original bash kit and resulting thumbs

Updated bash kit and resulting thumbs

Viola! I took some design which I liked and started developing them. I thought the first step would be to see why it was I actually liked these designs and de-constructed them into their basic shapes and silhouettes which I then changed and tweaked not worrying acknowledging that it was necessarily to do with a turret. I found some basic shapes I liked and I took my favorite into 3DS Max and tweaked it as well as testing that it was still and interesting shape from multiple angles in a 3D environment.

I then added these shapes and favourite bashes into my moodboard to keep me up to date with what I wanted. I expanded the moodboard with more pictures yet again and started drawing more detailed thumbs. These thumbs had 5 main families that were inspired by my favourite bashes. I took my favourite thumbs and started dissecting what made them good or bad. I then developed my favourite one which was the family consisting of humanoid turrets that would look like charging knights. Leaning forward with gleaming Armour engraved with their parent company order and protecting their lieges lands.

Now just to catch up on other things, this Sunday's project was supposed to be Bradgate Park however because it rained I decided I would go to the Guild Hall and repeat that project.... It turns out that the Guild Hall is now closed for winter (just my luck) so I went into the cathedral next door and made this my guild hall type project.

I actually got caught in an evening mass which was quite funny topping off an odd day for me.