BA2b - Week 3 Summary

This week, after a presentation of our Fine Art collaboration film with our groups, we got back to our collaborative game jam. We started off the week with a tutorial in our groups about our trello board, and we got some good feedback on how to improve it with different areas for work to go in such as in progress and to be verified. 

I started working on more pixels for the human exhibit, thinking about the digestive system and human anatomy as a basis. I decided to recreate Michelangelo's David statue in pixels, adding some pants to make the game PG. I liked how it turned out, considering that I'm making the pixels very low res for the doom affect in our game, so I decided to do another statue of Aphrodite of Cnidus giving her a two piece for the same reason. The two statues are essentially 3D studies of the human anatomy, which helped me in making these pixel sprites and also challenged my anatomy skills. 

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We needed a sprite animation of blood spouting from the finger getting cut off, so I did the small animation seen below. I really enjoy simple pixel animations like this, and seeing them in action in the game as seen below is really a nice push to improve my skills.

As you're sawing the blood spouts out in the mini game.

For more decoration of the rooms I made some plant designs that would sit in 3D pots. These were somewhat more difficult then the other pixels I have made as they require more patience and detail, things I can sometimes try to rush thus making them messier than I would have wanted. I'm proud of how they look but could have spent more time on some parts of them. I may make more plants to decorate the museum later on.

As I felt like I had a good amount for the human room, I started working on the space exhibits. The space mini-game will be a Space Invaders spin off game, so I started working on a pixel arcade machine like the original Space Invaders arcade machine.

I'm proud of how it turned out, as I managed to get a good amount of detail into it whilst still being low res pixels. It also has some blood covering the name, leaving the audience wondering what they're playing in reality. 

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BA2b - Week 2 Summary

This week we had the Cross-Collaboration project with Fine art, where we were put into groups with some Games students and Fine Art students and given a word which we had to use as inspiration and make a film with. It had to be focused around an object that we make/ acquire and have it be part of the narrative of the film. We got the word cube, and the photo below as inspiration -

In our group, we started by going to the castle museum, taking note of the fact that its a massive cube itself. Our first idea came from that, making a 3D model of the castle and then have someone pick it up, working with perspectives. The castle had some interesting things related to cube, but not anything that really shook us. After a tutorial with the fine art tutors, we decided on a more solid idea of having a film ABOUT making a film, involving rolling some dice (the cube element) to see which idea would win. We would make it similar to a spaghetti western with close up eye shots and dramatic music. I bought some large styrofoam dice and on the day we had set to film, we decided on a new idea - an actual spaghetti western involving the cube dice instead of guns. This idea made the cube elements more prominent in the film, and added more elements of humour as we all wanted it to be an entertaining film. I'm proud of what we achieved in such short time, as we only had under a week to make this, taking into account that the interchange week was the same week.
Below is the final film, which I was the camerawoman for.

This week was also interchange week, and I chose to go to the Electromagnetic Sound Worlds as I've been interested in digital sound for a while but never gotten round to working with it. It was a whole day session where we learnt about Electromagnetic sounds and that they're all around us, we just need the software the record them. We were then given some recording appliances in groups, and given time to explore Norwich finding interesting sounds. We had some technical difficulties with our device, and had to use a different one which recorded sounds with vibrations instead so in the end we had less sounds than I would have wanted, but it was a fun experience nonetheless. In the afternoon we were shown the basics of the Adobe Audition and then allowed to edit our sounds how we wanted.  

BA2b - Week 1 Summary

This week we started a new term, and with that a new brief. Our next task is Collaboration Game production, where we have to get into teams of five and make a game that works with the theme 'Escape'. The game has to be based on gameplay, aesthetics and 'feels' and not based on narrative, so the mechanics are more important and we should limit any story based areas.

We decided that we wanted to make an escape the museum game, where you have 4 rooms that have 4 mini-games that you have to complete in order to get the keys/etc to the main door to escape. It will be a horror game based around the graphics of games like classic Doom and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor with its 2.5D pixel aesthetics. What I want to try out in this game jam is the same aesthetic of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor where they have pixels on a billboard so that it turns and seems 3D when its actually just a sprite. This is something that I really liked about the game and wanted to incorporate it into my next project,

I wanted to focus mainly on the 2D aspects of the game, and also help with any coding needed. As we needed to prove we could make this game in the given time, we decided to firstly focus on one of the rooms, the human anatomy exhibit. So far I have made a number of sprites for this room.

These are the images I used to help me with some of the pixel sprites:

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I wanted to make them small and detailed, similarly to much of the Doom sprite art. The skull, spaceship, dinosaur footprint and anubis head are icons for the UI on the left of the screen displaying what rooms you've completed. The key, keycard, number and finger are the 'keys' for opening the locks on the large door. 

I was trying to keep the same resolution as the pixel art from the original Doom, which is very low so the pixels are very small and yet very detailed.

Also below is an early screenshot of the game with my UI pixels on the left side. 

We were also told to make a trello board to keep it all organised.

We were also told that next week we are doing a collaboration project with Fine Art to make a video, and also to do one of the interchange workshops. I chose to do the Electromagnetic Sound Worlds full day workshop.