Building Alliance - Plans, Art Styles and Aesthetics (03/10/24)

This session, we spent conversing with our teams to discuss our plans and come up with the art style and general aesthetic we wished to have for our game.

Plans

To make sure we all as individuals participated in each area of the project, we decided to assign a character, environment, model and area of research for each of us to do. We mentioned creating a checklist and having leads set work and deadlines to ensure none of us fall behind with our workflow. 

Here's a list of plans we discussed during this time

• Character/ Boss , Environment, Research and Prop/Model per individual
• Case Study on a game of choice relating to the aesthetics/ vibes of our game
• Each do 5 thumbnails for every character to get a range of designs (then individual in charge of that character can implement some of the thumbnailed suggestions in their final design)
• For environment concept art do Interior, Lower Establishing and Establishing shots

After further discussion, we made a list of various natural disasters that would have been effected by microplastics taking over. This would allow us to cover a range of different species and the possibility of certain species mutating due to the environment changes and how this would effect the food chain. We made a list of different disasters to research and microplastic effects. We then assigned these topics of research to each individual in the team.

• Forest fires + global temps rising due to microplastics effecting carbon emissions (Sasha)
• Flooding + effects of microplastics on ocean and sea life (Evie)
• Overpopulation + production of microplastics and synthetic materials (Nathan)
• Microplastic eating fungi + cave erosion (Holly)
• Junk + result of waste and microplastic over usage (Me)

Art Styles and Aesthetics

We each suggested games that we thought would fit the aesthetics of our game. Here are some of the suggestions

• Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2023)
• Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2010)
• Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster, 2022)
• Bioshock (2K, 2007)

We talked about how we didn't want our game to be too realistic or detailed as we weren't too comfortable with that and we were conscious of the time limit we have on this project. 

We decided our game wanted to focus more on the theme of nature reclaiming the earth and this links to our disaster ideas listed above. We discussed the possibility of creatures mutating to be bigger to ingest the high concentration of microplastics in food. We also discussed the idea of creatures going extinct. This led us to the idea that perhaps most of humanity have either died out or have become terrible monsters with few survivors left. We discussed the idea that the player character (protagonist) could be partially mutated and is consuming microplastic eating mushrooms to help slow down/ limit the effects they're suffering from.

We then discussed what environments we wanted to include for the player to explore. We made a list of different areas and then decided that we should link these environments to our topics of research listed above.

• Forests - Sasha
• Flooded Area - Evie
• Cave/ Safe Area - Holly
• Abandoned City - Nathan
• Junkyard - Me

I decided to make a general aesthetics Pinterest board that includes ideas that I personally wanted to include in my designs as well as ideas that would be better suited towards my teammates. This is linked below.

General Aesthetics Pinterest Board

We plan to discuss this in more depth in a meeting we've planned for Tuesday (08/10/24) to make sure we are all on the same page with the direction we wished to take in this project.

Reference List

2K Boston, 2K Australia, 2007. Bioshock [online]. PC. California: 2K. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7670/BioShock/ [Accessed 3 October 2024].

Massive Monster, 2022. Cult of the Lamb [online]. PC. Texas: Devolver Digital. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1313140/Cult_of_the_Lamb/ [Accessed 3 October 2024].

Naughty Dog LLC, Iron Galaxy Studios, 2023. The Last of Us Part 1 [online]. PC. California: Playstation Publishing LLC. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Part_I/ [Accessed 3 October 2024].

Rockstar Games, Double Eleven, 2010. Red Dead Redemption [online]. PC. New York: Rockstar Games. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption [Accessed 3 October 2024].