This week marks the start of the long anticipated 'Off the Map' project where our final levels are submitted into a competition for the British Library. We've heard many a horror story from the previous year groups so understandably, we're nervous.
Team Papa Osca Wowaski, as we're so aptly named, consists of Kathryn Creek, Ayden Potter and Daniel Burgess, and we're currently the only three person team. The main theme for this competition is Shakespeare, specifically, his plays 'The Tempest', 'Macbeth' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. As a team, we decided to go with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' as it meant we were able to experiment with organic shapes as well as characters that weren't entirely human.
We have three weeks to research and concept our level before our first presentation and we've made a decent start. We currently have four mood boards and the style guide is in the works. The entire level was mapped out by Kathryn, complete with puzzles, within the first three days and the whole level has now been white boxed courtesy of Ayden.
We decided to work on the gardens first, concept art wise; the gardens are neat and pruned so are easy to model. Dan began to model some of the tree and shrub concepts that were produced as part of the style guide as there will be a substantial number of these that all need to be slightly different from each other. We're going for a semi-stylised approach somewhere in between a cross of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Wildstar.
It's been hard to assign everyone roles during the first week as we don't want to put too much effort into the physical side of the game in case it gets rejected and we will have been working for nothing. That being said, due to the fairly simplistic style of the game and the neatness of the gardens, it hasn't been too hard to get down some basic models that can be worked into later.
We've been working by laying our map out in 30x30m squares. This way, we can model everything into one square and match it to the next piece of the map. It also ensures that everything is in proportion.
Before we press on with any more modelling, we're going to try and get feedback from a tutor on Monday morning in case our ideas are too outlandish or maybe even boring.
So far, everyone is working well together, and we have the added benefit of living in the same house! Our weekly schedule is updated on Dropbox, as well as our asset list and every file that we're producing.
Stay tuned for our next blog post on Sunday 28th!