Game Art and Machinima: Initial Ideas and Story Part 1

By Meg Sugden

Due to the fact that this is a team project before we came up with any ideas we first wanted to see were everybody's skills were so that we could get an idea about what everyone would be doing in the group. To begin with my skills obviously lie in creating the 3D models, along with having to texture them as well, even though this is not a part that I particularly enjoy. Then there was Stuart and Callum who are both concept artists, this meant that we had a spare place for animating, in which will be the role of me, with help from the others as it is an area which we feel okay about but none of us have much skill in the area. This is therefore a really good opportunity for us all as we can improve our skills in areas which we might not necessarily have picked. This said, the roles in which we decided upon is pretty straight forward in which I don't actually have a lot of work at the beginning of the project besides the extra tasks which we will be doing. 

For this module we wanted to be able to come up with first initial ideas in which we sat down as a group and came up with a range of different ideas which could be taken forward into the development stage of the project. To generate the ideas in the best way possible we created a mind map in order to spill every idea possible down using the themes that we were given. This was a very helpful stage and we were easily able to see our ideas develop already at this very early stage in the project. We can up with a range of different ideas for each theme that we were given and make sure that we documented everything thoroughly; including even the smallest detail. 

Now that we had all of our ideas down on paper we wanted to narrow down what we wanted to look at so that we could determine what the story was going to be for the project. Working in a group for this made it a lot easier to bounce ideas off each other and my team, myself, Stuart Brown and Callum Brown from my course found it extremely simple and quick to come up with a broad range of different story ideas that could all be associated with the main theme that we wanted to choose. We narrowed it down to five different areas that we liked the best which were detective, theft, wildlife, gift and surveillance cameras, all of which fit into the three different themes perfectly. We then used these areas, which we took off the previous mind map ideas page, and expanded on them, experimenting with different story ideas from each of the different sections within these five sub-themes. 

Next we moved onto coming up with the main story that we were going to roll with from the previous mind map. Altogether we had four stories that we were willing to take forward into the final scripting stage but this is where we had to narrow it down in order to do so. Even from the start of this project we were pretty sure that we wanted to do something to do with animals as this way it is easy to model and you can make them slightly unrealistic without it looking strange.

Idea 1: Our first idea is taken from the idea of a story about how ants worked together during a flood that happened in their home. We wanted to take this idea but then change it around slightly so that it was people in Manhattan instead, just to give it a little bit of variety as this is not an area which would normally be affected by water. The idea would be that the people would follow in the ants footsteps and built a raft to be able to help them get out of the water and stop themselves from drowning. I do quite like this idea but as a idea for a game art and machinima project it would just not be possible as not only creating the people, which in itself would be hard, but then creating the Manhattan buildings and not to mention the water and flooding would be too much for our task, especially when we have a very small poly count available. 

Idea 2: Our second idea was to go down the God approach that we discussed in the idea development  and have a line of animals awaiting to be presented a gift from God himself. This idea is obviously based off the gift theme we were given at the beginning and it would be interesting to see how it could be pulled off, but again like the first idea it could be again difficult as it would mean modelling a lot of different characters and again this would heighten up the poly count. 

Idea 3: The next idea uses the theme of challenge in terms of a duck-billed platypus character that is a detective and he has to find out which dangerous Australian character has stolen the food in his village. This is a very interesting story as it has the scope to be different genres in terms of whether we make it a serious cut scene or humorous one. In terms of modelling this one wouldn't actually be as difficult as there would only be two characters and the environment which would definitely be doable, and the idea of using Australia as a setting gives the opportunity for very scary or even funny characters to be added in as there are many things that are deadly living there. 

Idea 4: The last idea we came up with looks at the day to day life as an animal in terms of what it does and where it goes. This could again be interesting as any animal could be picked, we could challenge ourselves with using an animal that burrows and follow them down a tunnel underground or even an underwater animal and capture the camera under the sea. It has a lot of scope for being challenging, and comes easily under the theme of surveillance but it might be hard to turn it into an interesting story without it just being a simple documentary style video. 

In the end, as a group we have decided to take forward idea 3 as it offers the most scope for being a different genre of a cut scene and we take it in a lot of different directions in terms of the other character used and then also the outcome of the cut scene, which is probably the best way forward.