Side-scroller Art Dump!

Just for the sake of it, here is a load of the concept work i completed for our side-scroller project! Including the ugly stuff!

Hot air balloons anyone?

Some concepts looking into enemy plants, these were scrapped as they weren't happy.

Year 3 Side-Scroller

Side-Scroller Project

Throughout the last seven weeks we have been working on creating a four level side-scrolling game that functions well with mechanics within the UDK4 engine. Four levels split up, one level between three environment artists, one concept artist and one character artist. We looked at similar games such as Trine, Limbo, Rayman etc - we eventually decided we wanted a more realistic look with a touch of fantasy, similar to Trine. 

Happy!

Out of the four key words for each level; Hot, Cold, Happy and Scary we were given Happy. Now originally when the word came up I did scowl a small amount at the screen, I felt this would be a very difficult word to work around considering each level had to be from the same world and all had to link together in a similar style. Our group struggled through the first couple of weeks getting any basic ideas thrown out, as it seemed the information we were being given by tutors was very contradictory. Something along the lines of “Don’t just use your idea of happiness, get out there and find out what makes most people happy!” But then giving us reference images of candy and “Pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.” Now I actually wouldn't have had any problem working on a candy based level if it was separate from this project, however as all the levels had to look like one world and had to link like the environments were possible it became very stressful and most of us became quite disheartened very early into the project.

We originally were looking at zen gardens and the idea of having a resting place level after starting quite intensely with hot, however everyone kept asking "but is it happy?" and in the end we were suggested to drop it and make something more obviously happy. RIP Zen Garden.

So then we began looking into colour schemes, things more obviously happy (bubbles, dandelions, autumn etc.) But again we struggled a lot coming up with something solid we all liked. This is something we messed around with for about a week until we came to the realization that nothing we were drawing matched what the tutors really wanted from us.

 Luckily we managed to come up with a basic layout and colour scheme after realizing we had to stop listening to what we were being told to do and just take over to create something we believed would work better. After many smaller thumbnails this became the concept everything started from:

The colour palette of the sky barely changed from that of this original to our final product on hand in day.

From this point onwards our main concept artist and ourselves as a team started bashing out ideas around this skeleton until finally we settled on something we would work from.

 I personally worked more in 3d as concept art was not my strong point, even though I did a fair bit of drawing. So I took up white boxing (the original white box I created did not function as well though and was later re-made using my white boxed assets.) From there we could do some paint overs and start bashing out some smaller finished assets.

 Now note I was suppose to be an environment artist during this project it seemed that instead I worked into concepts and character artist as well, originally I just created a white box, then a hot air balloon static mesh, however I then moved onto working on Fin’s space whale design. This gave me a chance to learn some Zbrush – a bit late really but now I know how it works at least, also a chance to work with setting up bones and animations back in 3ds Max. I wasn't majorly happy with the animation but it served as basic movement for what we needed it to do.

Then towards the end I worked on a couple of smaller assets, a bonsai tree and texturing the lily-pad tree just so it had something on it (although this was also remade by another member of our team.)

Overall I feel we could have been much happier with our outcome if we weren't so stressed out trying to figured out how to make our level feel happy, I feel this project has been quite unorganized however it has also given me good experience in a project like this. Although I would suggest scrapping the word happy and using something more literal, rather than something physiological. I also feel like a lot of time was spent doing bits and pieces that I didn't have many final finished assets to show off compared to our last project that was only two weeks long. I'm not disappointed in our group or our final outcome, far from it. I feel we all worked our best considering all the problems we faced, I just wish there was something more to see by the end of the project, which is a little bit of a let down. Hopefully this will change during FMP.