Planning and Concepts

Planning is important to any project be it back in school all the way up to the highest businesses.
There was planning even before your life began and that planning reflects on how you're brought up and the kind of person you will become in life.
Video Game Art Design is no exception, bad planning will lead to a bad final result.
It is important to plan for the appropriate amount of time to each task. For example if we were set four weeks to create a scene you'd need to plan out what is to be done each week, possibly each day for such a short amount of time,
one week would be set for concepting, setting up colour palettes and figuring out priorities of each task. Doing this successfully will lead to a successful project, however bad time planning and management will lead to a poor outcome.
Many people still think the planning is the least important part as its the work at the end which is important yet that work cannot be produced at a decent standard without good planning.
You can not create anything in 3d without a concept first, how can you make something when you don't know what it is suppose to look like, its time period or function?

I will be using the following examples to show my idea of good and bad planning.

The picture above shows a colour chart of the whole world of Journey, its shapes and colours and how those change as the player progresses,
this is a pretty basic picture for a 3d artist to follow, but it highlights everything said artist needed to know before building.
Landscape wise this picture shows the shape of the landscape and how it changes, along with the colour and mood of each "level." It is a relatively simple piece yet is full of useful information. It is important that everyone in the team follows the right colour palette to save on fixing
textures later down the line. Journeys concepts remained simple and the world relatively small which made it easier to create a concise, beautiful but short game which really pushed the idea of "Quality over Quantity."

Another example of planning that - in my opinion, left a worse outcome is that of "Thief" developed by Square Enix.
Although I fully enjoyed the game there were many frustrations throughout that could've been avoided with better planning.
It is considered a stealthy game yet you often have to run in the light along streets as you are unable to climb most buildings. This often leads to being spotted which is not ideal in a stealthy game. I feel
this could've been avoided with better level planning. You tend to spend a high amount of time desperately running around an area trying to find ANYTHING to climb to get out of harms way.
You will also spend a lot of time trying to find a way up to an open window with no obvious way to get up to said window (quite often you have to run
quite a long way from said window to climb onto a path that will then lead you back to the window.)
I feel there should've been more planning on these routes so there would be less frustration for the player when...well, playing the game.

I try to use my own experience in planning on previous projects to help me figure out how to plan - which is something I find most hard, for my next project. I feel my ability to manage my time and plan my projects
is improving the more I do it, however motivation and lack of can often get in my way. I have had a lot of issues due to bad planning
which will hopefully get ironed out as time goes on.


Image references:
http://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Thief-city-hub-41.jpg
http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-23/jrn-world-color-flowchart.html