The Scéal
(The ‘story’ in Irish)
Meet Father O’Brien, a dedicated servant to the Church since birth, dies suddenly in an unfortunate, unsatisfactory and quite frankly disappointing death. He chokes on a stalk of broccoli, let me repeat that for you, the innocuous and so called ‘super’ food, ‘broccoli’ and less than 3 minutes later, he’s dead, clambering for any slight hint of oxygen to sneak through a minuscule space in his throat, but alas this is not to be, and he realizes he must accept his fate, that this is in fact ‘the plan’ from the Big Man upstairs.
In truth, he’s been preparing for this day for years, sure Jesus Christ, doesn’t he read about it every single day in that bloody bible of his!! He quickly becomes accustomed to the idea of the after-life and since he’s ‘a man of the cloth’, he is looking forward to some sweet perks.. however he finds himself in a place quite unlike Heaven indeed, unless ‘Heaven’ is a vacant, dodgy wasteland with nothing but emptiness and horrific odours for company. So the wings, halo and a hug from Jesus are completely out of the question then?
The Background
As part of my Masters, we were required to take on a major project, be it alone or within a team. I chose the latter, understanding that 3 heads would most certainly be better than one. Considering the Masters was in ‘Creative Digital Media’ the whole idea is for dynamism, sharing, pushing forward and developing something that was not there yesterday.
I come from a very strong creative background and it was of high importance to me to break strongly into the digital world and understand all components that can go into creating one single app, game, website. There were three of us on the team, Bernhard the Austrian, was the programming genius, Ann Marie and I would be the creative dazzlers, dividing up other roles as they arose. We created a video game, ‘Pontification’, a 2D side scrolling puzzle platform video game to be playable on Windows, Mac, Linux and Xbox operating systems.
My personal aims in coming to the project were to produce a video game of partial completion, to gain knowledge in how to create video game artwork, and the building process as a whole behind making a digital video game deployable on an number of operating systems. Learning about the communication process between designers and developers really paved the way for my appreciation of the importance of this relationship in my future roles.
Environment Concept sketches
The Grid System
As a team, we devised a ‘grid system’ that made our workflow much more streamlined and efficient. At first, level designs, character sketches, dimensions were simply guesswork on the part of the artists; these were then given to the technical game designer who would have to spend time sizing and fitting character sprites and level layouts within the constraints of the program.
This not only wasted time but was also completely inefficient as the final designs would appear different to the initial sketches, due to proportioning. Therefore, we devised a universal grid system for all aspects of the game design; this grid system would run right through from initial concept stage to artwork and design down to the programming stage.
Demonstrated below are the steps taken from initial concept down to the final level layout
Grid System being utilised within the game design process
This shows the step-by-step approach taken from the initial blocks right through to the finished environment. From the top right; grid structure received from level designer, then placed in Photoshop and used as guide.
The background is created for perspective and atmospheric qualities of the level (discussed during concept stage). Next comes foreground, background etc, following the file and folder naming structure agreed upon. As you can see, with the new grid system, it is quite easy to spot and rectify any issues or problems after being tested within the game.
