Damian Street: Games Art 2024 - 25

Nightstalker Sketch I started off by using one of the thumbnails and reducing the opacity. I then started to sketch the specifics and fix the anatomy. I wanted to show off the spoon tail but with how the thumbnail was positioned, showing it was really awkward and it looked like the tail was broken. I decided to scrap this composition in favour of one that showed the Nightstalker's entire body. I decided that I was going to pose the Nightstalker first and create the background around it. I started off by sketching the basics of the pose and reducing the opacity. I then did another rough sketch to put everything into place. I then sketched in a rough background surrounding the Nightstalker. I wasn't sure where I wanted the main light source to be so I asked Sam for feedback. Sam suggested I didn't make the forest pitch black but instead have a moon somewhere above creating light rays over the forest. He also suggested that to make the Nightstalker 'pop', I could have ...

  I have completed the final illustration for my Nightstalker and I'm currently cleaning up the sketch for my Enforcer illustration. I have completed majority of my art studies and I just need to fully document my research. I plan to make sure I have this all completed and written out before easter break ends. I need to do some studies on the plague factions weapons and fix my enforcer's anatomy as this is the last part of the feedback I need to respond to. I am currently completing the backstories for both my characters. I have finished the Enforcers but I'm still deciding on how I want the Nightstalker to have survived on this dead planet. These will be completed and posted before easter break as I plan to keep these quite brief.  Reflection I started this project off quite well and I was on target up until just after the first formative. I had everything I needed completed aside from the Enforcer's weaponry. After the formative, I allowed myself to get overwhelmed wi...

Initial Thumbnails Feedback I sent some screenshots of the thumbnails above to my friends to see what they liked, disliked and their reasonings. A lot of my feedback complimented various cloak designs whilst the negative feedback criticized some designs for being too simple. I did some more thumbnails below responding to this feedback. I experimented mainly with planning the outfits around the cloaks this time as that was what was best with my previous iterations. An issue I faced, was that some of my feedback criticized the tank top which is an element I quite liked. I didn't want to fully abandon this idea so I included in these thumbnails and focused on trying to make it fir in more with the design which worked successfully as I got some more feedback saying that the middle one was the best. (I had sent them a picture without the numbers which explains why the numbers are different in the screenshots below). Face, Mask and Hair Thumbnails Mask Thumbnail Feedback At this point, I...

I scrapped my original plan of modelling a jester. I really liked the idea at the start but I quickly lost interest in it. I don't want to model a design that I dislike as I'd find it difficult to motivate myself. I know that starting again will put me behind so I'll have to alter my plan accordingly. Once I've thumbnailed and designed my character, I plan on creating a gantt chart or a similar way of project managing to help me plan around the time I have left for this project. New Character Concept I can't really afford to make up a concept and discard it again like my last one. As a result, I decided to create a new outfit and appearance for a pre -existing character of mine that I very much enjoy drawing. He was designed for a dungeons and dragons campaign initially so his original design focuses on that fantasy setting. This is the original appearance and mood board I used to design his current appearance. Here's his original reference. The outfit and appea...

This is the original character that I was going to design for my project. I created a pinterest board which can be found here. I originally wanted to design a silly jester/clown type character. Here are some of the thumbnails I did before I made the decision to scrap it.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to create a more modern, fantasy or medieval jester so I attempted to explore each concept in these 3 thumbnails.

In this lesson, we learnt how to retopologize our model using quad draw. For this exercise, I used the base male ZBrush head. I deleted all subdivision levels and dynameshed it to a resolution of 512. I then exported it as an fbx and put it into Maya. Unfortunately, this example didn't save and I didn't take screenshots. An example of me using quad draw is in this blog https://damianstreetgamesartsecondyear.blogspot.com/2025/05/3d-toolkit-retopology-process.html To save the progress you made it quad draw, you can just exit the tool and it will finalise. To go back and edit it, simply go back onto the tool. Shortcuts Tab - Extrude Edges of an Existing Quad Shift + Left Mouse Button - Relax rough topology Ctrl + Left Mouse Button - Create an Edge Loop Ctrl + Shift + Left Mouse Button - Delete Clicking + Dragging Vertices - Auto Weld

Enforcer Key Art Thumbnails I had a lot of ideas when it came to thumbnailing for my enforcer. I wanted to either explore the environment in it a little, or include a little hint of the Nightstalker in it. I did 7 thumbnails when I asked Sam for feedback. He commented that all of thumbnails so far shared the same camera angle so for the last 2, I tried to go for a worms eye view. Nightstalker Key Art Thumbnails Keeping Sam's feedback in mind, I made sure to explore different camera angles in my thumbnails. I attempted various bird's eye view camera angles since I didn't do any for my Enforcer. I tried to do a worm's eye view in 8 but I feel like it didn't fully come across that way. I struggled a little more when it came to coming up with ideas for this thumbnail. This is because I wanted to showcase each part of the Nightstalker's methods of attacks without making the victim the main focus. I struggled with this quite a bit before realising that I was trying to...

Meeting Date:  21/03/25 In Attendance:  Me, Sam and Faye Meeting Agenda & My Role:  To check up on where everyone is at and discuss our next steps. Decisions and/or Actions & Deadlines:  I showed the progress I've made with coding the game. We discussed how we wanted the pause screen to look. I suggested using a notebook with the pause menu options on the left side and patient info on the right side. Sam started to work on this in more detail and we offered feedback throughout.  Reflections: I need to catch up on a lot of my assets. Currently, I am waiting for sprites, ui and background art from my teammates so it isn't worth it at this stage to continue focussing on ren'py. Right now I need to put my focus on creating my own sprites and thumbnail some environment art and ui designs.

I decided to revisit my patient question tree! I thought that some of the choices were too similar and it was difficult to tell which one was better. Some of these choices went down similar routes where the only difference was that the 'worse' option would offer less conversation from the patient. I changed the middle section and right section of the tree so there was more variety in the choices and replies. Here are the screenshots of the changes! Middle Tree Right Tree

Trigger Warning Screen We haven't designed the final design for this screen but I wanted to get the code in ready to test if it worked. For this test, I created a placeholder trigger warning image to use. Here is the code I used to create the screen. During this, I encountered many problems when it came to viewing the screen in game. The code above is designed to display the image using the dissolve transition. It will pause for 8 seconds before returning to the main menu screen. When the screen was displayed, it was a black screen and my placeholder wasn't there. This showed me that the code was working but there was an issue with the image. I recreated this and replaced it with a hound sprite and it worked with no issues. After a while of basic troubleshooting, I realised that it had an issue with the size of the image. I changed it to be the same size as the hound file and it worked. The Doctor Using the dialogue tree I made, I coded out the doctors story with some minor cha...

I didn't fully understand the process of weight painting. I know that it's used to fix the way a limb bends but I wasn't entirely sure how to execute it. For this lesson I focussed on making notes on Simon's demonstrations. Checking the Rig Works animation to check if rig works use rotate tool click on elbow right click on rotate y - Key selected click 10 ahead in timeline make rotate y - 80  then 10 ahead rotate y to 0 repeat for shoulder, wrist, each finger thumb rotates on x axis Method 1 Skin menu Select joint and skin Bind skin (does it automatically, works better with T poses over A poses) can alter options to reduce this such as changing the max influence Skin Menu Paint Skin Weight Options b changes size of brush lock all joints ur not working on flood it set value to 0.5 switch to add, paint around elbow switch to 0.25 on value, paint them further from elbow joint, be careful not to go over twice because theyll add change to 0.75 and paint on the side of the jo...

 In response to Mantic's feedback, I did a quick study on the anatomy of bat wings for my Nightstalker. I gathered a bunch of references of bat wings and included a diagram of the anatomy to help me understand how they work. I then traced over an image (this is the red boxed off in the top right corner) to study the basic shapes inside of the wings. I then attempted to draw it myself. Finally, I attempted to attach it to a humanoid figure to see how I'd fit it on my Nightstalker.

Team Meeting Date:  14/03/25 In Attendance:  Me, Faye, Sam, Katie Meeting Agenda and My Role: I had recently added the game to our joint onedrive to allow my teammates to access it. This allowed me to show them my current progress so far so we could discuss changes and future steps. Decisions and/or Actions & Deadlines: We decided that it's easier to keep the character sprites in the middle of the screen rather then move them to the left. Bigger sprites like the hound and the jester look and fit better in the middle. This also helps us when it comes to the backgrounds as we won't have to overcomplicate them too much. I brought up the previous idea of having the backgrounds monochrome in the characters associated colour similar to a lot of backgrounds in Hollow Knight. This has led me to ask my team if they thought it would be a good idea for me to add Hollow Knight to out benchmark game and they said that sounded good! For character transitions, Sam suggested using a bounc...

Responding to Mantic's Feedback I spent my time going through the feedback I received in yesterday's meeting. I got a lot of design feedback and wanted to start off exploring the suggestions made for my Nightstalker! I spent today exploring pterodactyl anatomy and how to apply it to my Nightstalker. I started off by doing a simple shape study looking mainly at a model to see the head at different angles as well as looking up the skeletal structure of it. I then traced over to look at the simple shape and eye placements on the head. I then attempted to draw this without tracing and attempted to get the proportions correct using guidelines. I had some difficulty trying to fit the eyeball into this structure without it looking off or stiff. I did multiple sketches exploring where and how it would sit in the head. I copy and pasted my quick sketches of the head at different angles and then continued to explore how the eye would fit inside the head. I also briefly experiment with th...