Project Proposal Presentation
The first part of the MA involved us doing a presentation on what we want to do this year. I'm going to run through this as I did on Tuesday and then will go through the critique I got afterwards.
Hello, I'm going to speak to you about my proposal for the year and what projects I have planned out for myself.
As most of you know I'm Amber and I am studying the ISMA course this year. You can find me @AmberEJJamieson on twitter
For this year I want to work on mobile gave development, I want to know the difference between how mobile games are made compared to PC.
This is why I want to look into mobile development. As of last year (2015) the mobile market had the largest money intake out of all of the games on the market; a whopping 33%. It is also predicted that as of 2019 this will increase by another 12%. So learning how mobile development works and how to create work for that field I am broadening my employability.
This quote means a lot to me and I stick by it, Last year if we were to make our FMP 3 times then I feel like we would have had enough time to experiment and find out the best way to do things. In other words iteration and experimentation is key.
Applying this quote to my work here is a diagram showing how I have split up my projects. I have split them into 3, the first being the smallest and getting more intense as they go; this gives me enough time to practice, experiment and improved before working on the last project.
Here's a table showing how I have split up the modules into projects. The first project is in the 1st term, the 2nd in the 2nd and the 3rd in the 3rd.
This is the pipeline that I work to at the moment and how I plan to work for the projects this year, however if the project involves characters there would be a section for rigging and animating.
For my first project I want to do something small and test out how to make things for mobile games, So it will be 1 character and a small series of props.
For the second project I will be more intense so 2 characters, one human and one beast, a medium sized environment (possibly interior and exterior). The main parts of this project is to test out the limitations of UE4 visually so working on shaders, lighting and materials for mobile dev.
In the last project (FMP) I will be working with James to create a mobile game, using what I had learnt from the previous projects and applying them. I will be doing everything art wise on the project whilst James does everything technical.
The reason I am working with James is that when you get an artistic person and a technical person together you make something special; our FMP is proof of that. We both want to make games and by having our two different skills sets we can produce that.
When it comes to UE4 I need to look at the limitations it has and test out my characters, environments, props and materials in it to make sure that I can achieve the desired effect and have it run on a mobile device.
During this project I will mainly be focusing on the art side of mobile development; by doing this I want to get better at art direction. I feel by doing all of these things listed on the slide I will get a better understanding of what I need to do to be an art director and will gain skills in each of these fields.
My main inspiration for this year are games like Abzu, Jouney and Firewatch. The main thing these games have in common are the simplistic style, beautiful colour schemes and captivating narrative, this is something I want to replicate this year.
I'm going to replicate their style by looking at Emilie Stabell's work and tutorials, she has this one shown on the slide that helps you create a beautifully soft by stylised texture.
I will also need to look at colour schemes and how they can be used on mobile devices, most games on the market use pop colours to draw in players and make it easier for users to navigate the game on a small screen.
In terms of concepting this year I will be using a technique called colour scripting used by animators. It's basically a small thumbnail with bold strokes in the colour scheme you are using, Its simplistic approach and use of basic shapes and colours will work well when developing a game for a mobile device.
This year I am going to need to talk to art directors and mobile developers, I have chosen a few that I think will be helpful. Jolyon because he is an art director but also develops for mobile, Ben because he's an art director and get set games and uppercut games because they have both produced games for mobile devices using UE4.
Finally is there any questions and here is my information.
FEEDBACK & REFLECTION:
After finishing the presentation there was a very long discussion about what my question was and if what I wanted to do fit into that.
My original question was "How does mobile development differ from PC?" but if I was to keep this as my question I would have to also work on PC development and study that as well as mobile. There was also the confusion on what it was that I wanted to solely look at was it the development pipeline or the art? The problem I was having was that I didn't know how to fit the classic game art projects into the ISMA mould. I wanted to look at how the pipeline changed in mobile to PC dev however we all came to the conclusion that the pipeline was unlikely to change it was only the limitations and constraints of tri count and texture sizes ect. that changed. The other problem was trying to look at art direction as well at the same time as thing would pose another question and wouldn't fit into just one. There was also the problem of evaluating and grading artwork; as this is susceptible and how to you gauge if something is "better".
I went into the presentation feeling confident that I knew what I wanted to do but came out feel like I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to work on the 3 projects I had suggested but not how that would fit into the ISMA. So myself and James went back to talk to Mike Powell about how we could make what we wanted to do fit; and we found that the best way to do that was to research into Indie companies and find out how they work as this is our main goal (we want to become or be in an indie company). I am first going to look into how indie companies function, how many people they have ect. and find a role within the company that I can base my work on. My main concern is how quickly I can get into doing some art but for the moment it is important to learn and research as much as possible.
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