A start...

After being undecided between the Jack Of All Trades and the 2D assessment, the latter prevailed.

Although the basic idea would be the same, the JOAT assignment would have focused more on the game rather than the development of the character itself, which is what i was interested.

The idea for this character was born in Trafalgar Square, when i saw a homeless person that obviously liked teddy bears. The duality of the two elements stirred a weird mixture of feelings inside me and will be the focus of this assignment.

The above is a sort of One-Mood-Sheet which, although it doesn't show a clear idea on how the character will look, hopefully sets the feel for how he is going to look.

As I was brainstorming different ideas, the one that became prevalent in my head was an African shaman-inspired Teddymancer (the bigger one in the image).

the nail of the thumb

First thing first,we have a 2D assessment / Jack of all trades.

And for either of them i thought i would have to develop a character(s) so i di a couple of thumbnails to get the creative juices flowing.

Was thinking of going with some sort of summoner type guys,

we'll see how it develops.

Influences&Co

Where am I from?



The image above answers more or less that question.

I say more or less because of the nature of my influences and my complicated relationship with art:

Starting from the fact that I grew up focusing on science and therefore missed out on a massive amount of influential inputs during my school years, during which any form of art was followed in my own time.

The biggest influence overall were obviously the wide arrange of games that I've experienced during the years but Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli was probably one of the main influence regarding visual inspiration, with all of the amazingly detailed stories that are portrayed in his films.

Another major non-game-related influence should be attributed to Magic: the Gathering, by far the greatest trading card game and also staple of the genre, holding the record for widest played.
Not only it has a massive universe of it's own, documented through books and regular on-line updates, but it also contains some of the most beautifully crafted artworks.
Anastasia Ovchinnikova is part of the massive group of artist that have worked on the Magic artworks.


Artwork for the card Prophet Of Kruphix

Some of the most prolific artists like Kev Walker, John Avon, Pete Venters and Christopher Moeller even have their own personal fan bases.

Aside from that the street hip hop culture also had a big influence starring artist such as Banksy, Shepard Fairy, Mr. Brainwash and others. There are many sources of information regarding the birth of street art but probably the most interesting as far as the story behind the recordings and the way the are edited together is Exit Through The Gift Shop.

2D first session

Whilst doing the group project on the game devlopment side of things, I'm going to have, for the remainder of the term, another brief concentrated on asset creation.

The group is going to be divided into two classes: one for the 2D development and one for  the 3D development, in addition there's the Jack of All Trades route which represents those who will be interested in doing an indie app style of games and, although it can be done in either style of development, it keeps the same brief, which is focused around creating the assets of a mobile app game.

That is the long term goal, in the meantime I decided to follow the 2D classes and during the first session we had to create two concepts in the two hours of the session: one a room and the other a character concept.

The focus of the exercise was to create two concepts in a limited amount of time and also to test our perspective

For the first hour I decided to try the room concept.

Above is the reference we had to follow and below is the concept that I came up with. Since it had been a while since I'd drawn, this exercise was, for me, an ice-breaker with 2D.

After being stuck for a while I came up with the idea of ruins, so that it would be possible to look through walls without having to omit them from the representation.

The other idea that would have made this possible was to use glass walls but it would have probably required more time than I had available.

For the second hour we had to come up with a character idea and for this I couldn't come up with any immediate ideas, so by using the third reference given to us I tried different shapes and silhouettes until I created the one-armed sword wielding scout cyborg on the right.

The idea that i developed as I kept drawing was that the missing arm's place was taken by an additional computing system or power supply.

New Year, New Project

During last year I was concentrating a group project at uni where I was the developer and as such I was organizing and coding the game at the same time. This left me with little time for keeping the blog updated.

After realizing that the blog is a vital component to communication, I decided for a different approach this year, hoping to keep updating at least the blog once every two days.

So here we go.

First session of 2016 we were introduced to our new projects, to which there are not many limits apart from a polygon count set to 300.000 as a maximum and the fact that it has to be a playable game. Also, it is suggested that'd we team up in groups from 2 to 8 people. In the end our group stabilized at 9 people, 1 concept artist, 1 main coder, 2 coders/concept artist and 5 modelers.

To start with, working with eight other people seemed daunting but I believe we can make good use out of the amount of man-power we have. After a first meeting between myself, John, Haydon and Matt (the three coders and concept artist) we established a few key points for our project:

• Thematically speaking the two main points we agreed on is that the character will be a wizard, using some sort of progressing spell system, and that he/she will be trying escape from a wizard prison/maze.
• Another point of interest regarding the plot is the idea of a tree, or nature-connected-element, that is part of the jail system and sucks out the magic of the protagonist, reason behind his lack of powers. Although this point is still not confirmed but it received enough interest that it's now part of the ideas that are going to be sketched out.
• As far as mechanics go it's going to be centered around combat with a third person over the shoulder view and a WASD movement system, possibly with the fights taking place in big environments fighting boss-like enemies.
• Other points of interest that were discussed were the idea of a map with fog of war active, showing only the parts that were discovered by the player, allowing the possibility to use a maze-like structure. The other idea was to use a sort of barrier type system, which will determine the progression of the player, by unlocking skills as he/she moves further out from the center.

As for now, I've started creating a mood board for inspiration to sketch out some environments. I'm using Pinterest for it as usual and here it is (direct link):

Follow Alessio's board WizardJail on Pinterest.

I will be updating it and the blog as we get further in the project.