When it comes to evaluation of my FMP last year, I can honestly and brutally confirm that it was blatantly lacking in several categories.
For contextual research, I provided the bare minimum in order to squeeze a pass. Although I had provided enough research to link to my project, it was severely underwhelming and stated the obvious and nothing more.
In order for me to boost up my grade from last year, I have already decided that I will provide context for as many of my ideas as I can. I will do plenty of research and Harvard reference everything I come across that links to my work.
For planning, I did not have a schedule. I did work when I felt like it, which, for the most part, made my project very crammed. Although I managed to get the work done, I was not able to add extras due to forgetting where I got up to for the most part.
Since time management is vital for projects, in order to boost up my grade from last year, I will follow a weekly planning schedule. With an updated weekly plan, I cannot stray from my main focuses or forget where I come up to, making it a fool-proof plan to stay on top of my work.
For theoretical problems, finding the right types of tower to reference for my designs was difficult. In order to sort out my problem, I filtered through towers that had shared aspects to my imagination, and pieced them together, taking several traits from various designs on my Pinterest board until I came up with a solid image to draw.
Practical
During the creation of my tower concepts, I realised that Procreate’s stabiliser tool was far less stable than other types of drawing applications. This was a hindrance for me due to the need for straight lines when working on a specific tower that needed lots of sharp edges and lines. In order to progress further with no other setbacks, I looked up a tutorial on how to create straight lines on Procreate, as there was no tool. I did manage to absorb the information that educated me on the special ability to long hold my wonky line to correct the shakiness into a straight line, and for vertical angling, all I had to do was while simultaneously holding the stable line, touch the screen a little further up with my finger in order to point the line at a 90 degree angle.
For this week, I started working on tower concepts for my theme of ‘Fairytale’. I was assigned the task of creating three artistically different Fairytale themes towers that I would need to create models for in due time to implement into our game. Using my Pinterest board I created prior to starting the design element, I sketched up three different concept ideas for the tower.
One of my concepts are based around pastel colours, (pink, blue, purple, yellow) depicting my own take on a fairy treehouse with a large birch tree as the main base and a smaller tree on top with glowing leaves, which represents some kind of mystical energy-packed battery for the tower.
The next concept revolves around the theme of dark magic, which is a widely used theme in the Fairytale genre. For this design, I referenced an image on my Pinterest tower moodboard (a tall tower with a purple glow) and altered the design for simplicity when it comes to modelling the concept into 3D, and took inspiration for the aesthetic from textures and exterior on Halo 3 towers. In order to decide the colour palette, I colour-dropped a screencap straight from The Pagemaster which included both colours from the Fantasy book itself and the darker backdrop (which added ambience to the scene) and created several colour palettes focused solely around that singular image. When it came to colouring in the concept, I only used the colours from the palettes I had created, making sure to choose from the different swatches I had collected. Next to the tower is the colour palette I chose to use for this tower.
For my final tower concept, I revolved the design around floating objects and separated levels, which fits into the fantasy theme due to the lack of gravitational pull in the earthly scene. I decided that, for simplicity, I would create the tower shape with simple shapes (cubes mostly due to having to stick to the style that was decided amongst our group. I have not yet decided on a colour palette and have only come up with the design, but will look into the best palettes for it next week and colour it accordingly.
I feel as though the designs I have come up with are accurate when it comes to depicting the ‘Fairytale’ genre and although they could be a lot better if I had more experience in illustrating structural creations, I am more than satisfied with the outcome.
The aim of this week was to start working on ideas of concept designs surrounding my designated theme of ‘Fairytale’. In order to accurately depict the genre, I created a mood board on Pinterest to give me context on different designs that accurately/outwardly fit the Fairytale theme. My focus on concept designs in my respective genre is tower design, as we are in the process of making a tower defence game, but along with that, I additionally picked out different pins with creatures/dragons (coming back to the theme) and eye-catching landscaping to give me inspiration for level design when we are to get to that stage.
The above is an example of how I can do research and referencing with citations appropriately.
For this weeks research, I will be furthering my moodboard references on Pinterest based around the theme of Fantasy from The Pagemaster (BuzzFeed, n.d.) and basing the aesthetic of the towers I design throught concept art on her overall design.
References/Bibliography
BuzzFeed (n.d.). 35 Cartoons You Never Realized Were Voiced By Celebrities | Movie character tattoos, The pagemaster, Cartoon. [online] Pinterest. Available at: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/523825000385009319/.
Games Design Y2 