Games Design – Jamie's Blog

Degree Show Flyer Design Idea.

To promote the year 3 degree show that will feature the works of games design, web design and animation, the group was put into teams that were responsible for various aspects of the degree show set up. I was on the team that was responsible for branding and promotion; as well as having ideas for the logo design, I also produced two contrasting flyer designs that were to promote the event for the public showing.

First I did a simple, yet to the point design that featured mainly text and a small map to direct people to the event.

Although this design was liked by the majority of my peers that I showed it to, our tutor suggested that a more visual design that somehow promotes what we do and hopefully grabs peoples attention may be a better route to go down.

I started to do some research into flyer design on various sites; including the ones below.

During my research the design below popped up several times and really caught my eye; it was this design that inspired and influenced me to create my design.

Find this and more of their work at https://www.behance.net/andersdenkend

To get a 3D feel to the flyer I used 3DS Max to model a scene that would be familiar to video gamers as well as people who are interested in digital media.

In this scene I set up a landscape and the models that would be part of the flyer scene. Then I added a target camera and a three point lighting rig to produce a good quality render.

This is the camera view of the scene.

This is a render of the scene at 4K resolution.

This is the end result that had the logo (designed by Hayley) and text information inspired by the Lovejoy flyer added to it.

Although this flyer was not used to promote our event, it proved to be a good source of research and development for myself.

Jonah: Creating hand drawn style signage.

Through researching the signage of the period, it became clear that signs used to advertise and promote businesses where hand painted, often perhaps by the owner of the business the sign was above.

To try and recreate this feel for our signage I and others who worked on the project sketched the lettering onto paper and photographed the results. Then through a little manipulation in Photoshop were able to produce some good authentic looking signs that didn’t rely upon computer generated fonts.

Here are two of the signs that I created.

The Last Resort: TV Wall Asset

Perhaps the main feature of the Last Resort is the TV wall that is situated on the back wall. I felt that having this playing a video in real time would look really good. Originally I intended to have the actual video that featured on the screens in the movie to be playing, but I have been unable to determine what these videos were. I may create a video montage of my development work to be playing during game play.

This is my TV wall asset rendered in 3DS Max, to achieve the look of the one in the movie I created it as a multi-sub object with two material channels; this allows me to place an image or in this case an .avi movie clip on one channel to represent the screens and a gloss black on the other to represent the boarder space between the sets.

The Last Resort: Building up the area outside.

Upon my decision to build up the area directly outside of the Last Resort, I have gathered some images that show limited views of this space. Through these photos I have been able to roughly determine what some of the small stall type buildings and other structures look like and where they are situated.

Here is a render of a few of these structures that I assembled in 3DS Max.

And this picture shows the development of this area in the game engine itself.

The Last Resort: Exterior Development.

Although I wasn’t initially going to model the outside of The Last Resort, I thought that including the exterior and a small section of the street out side of the building would give a more flowing and immersive atmosphere to my project.

This screen capture shows the exterior of The Last Resort as well as showing that the town in which it is located (Venusville) is in fact in side an excavated void on Mars.

This is an in engine view of the exterior of The Last Resort which is still very much work in progress, the textures need tweaking a little but the most important thing that I need to get right is the lighting. There needs to be more of a red-orange Mars like glow to the environment, which is show in the movie.

Western Client Project. Building Progress Update.

As stated in the brief; several burnt or partially burnt buildings were required within the town. I decided to create a small generic building as well as a partially burnt version of it, these buildings were base upon the one that can be seen in the photograph below.

This is the partially burnt building rendered in 3Ds Max which shows the textures and the wire frame of the model.

This is the undamaged generic building which could be a small domicile for example.

Below is the diffuse and normal textures that I created for use in the UE4 game engine.

There is also an update of the saloon that I have been working on, all done and in our environment now, this shows the exterior of the building along with hand drawn signage that was manipulated in Photoshop to create a look that is in keeping with the period.

Experimenting with adding interactivity to the environment

Adding some form of interactivity will give our environment a feel of what could be expected from a game of this type. It will also enable the group to experiment and push our creativity to further develop our skill sets.

To start with, I added a lift type platform which is triggered to ascend when the ‘F’ key is pressed through the use of ‘Matinee’ and ‘Blueprints’.

This could be a good way of accessing upper floors of the exterior of buildings.

I also wanted to look at introducing hazards to the western town.

To demonstrate this I thought that a collapsable floor that is controlled via a trigger would give an element of danger and surprise to some of the buildings and walkways.