Development Progression

Yesterday, I began the production side of developing my 3D envrionment, I decided to use a box modelling technique, which I believe works very well for building environments, and especially to create the concept for the Salts Building.

It was important that I referenced the images I had taken previously during our planning stage of the environment. Below is a couple of images that I used as a reference and a couple of images from yesterdays development progress.

 

These images were good enough to be able to view the detail and reference for a detailed replica of the model itself. Monday's work. I continued development in the next five hours I had the next day, unfortnatly with a laggy network and some oustanding pieces I had to catch up on I wasn't able to fully develop it to a standard that I would have liked to. Overall the general finished design finalised as this for this weeks production.

Today we also worked on our sound planning which has to be in next week, this was simple, describing the music for my area. We decided as team we would do the music for our own environments during the animation. This was a good idea and we tried to make sure to develop a consistency between the sections.

Today we also worked a movie production piece, developing a small section of editing, it was a good excercise, and helped to get our minds working on the editing/consistency which I need to assure works on my team.

Production Tasks - Marketting Concepts

Todays task was an important one, and begun the producton our of our marketting. Although it was important to begin production, without any sort of marketting ploy, it wasn't conceptual to start any production on the trailer environments as it stands.

T-Shirts Designs

T-Shirts Designs where first planned in Street Shirts, (http://www.streetshirts.co.uk/) a local business that develops t-shirts and using there online design tools we could import images and designs in order to develop a idea of what kind of shirt we would like to create.

For this task we had to access an online local company (Street Shirts) to upload our team name and game graphics to how they would appear on t-shirts.  This gave us the opportunity to experiment with our images to see how they would look from different perspectives, such as the sleeves, back, and front.

I learnt from this exercise to appreciate the standard of quality in graphics, the resolution and format to be used, such as PNG. I also learnt that the site in particular, offers vector conversion which is a useful application to be implemented. However if we don’t use street shirts, which was commented to be rather expensive per t-shirt, we will need to develop a vector graphic conversion of the voted graphic.

It was quite a surprise of the cost of the t-shirts, it seems that the more images that we put onto the t-shirt (Text itself cost £5 extra) the higher the price raised, I managed to raise my costing up to £25 which seemed reasonable, but they might be a deal for batches of t-shirts rather than one off t-shirt designs.

Promotional Graphic

Professional Example

I am tasked to create the web banner that will be used to promote our game concept on websites, social networking hubs, and college website. It is important marketting this concept was to the letter and was themed with the story line. I analyised and research web banners first, gaining knowledge of the kind of elements that need to be applied. I found that create a decent sized image, for which 800 x 200 pixels in width and height, with a 72 DPI, this assures that it will load fine with a decent amount of detail on web applications.

The deadline for my web banner is the 27th Feburary 2012.

From my analysis of these two banners I have found a simple and animated design tends to be popular, however, with the above Ghost Recon effect works well enough to be seen as a poster, possibly, I can use our game graphic with some of the A3 Poster graphics in order to keep a consistent look throughout our promotional products.

From this, I have also discovered a resolution of around 72 DPI as it’s a web graphic and an 860px by 120px, it seems a PNG format would be sufficient however, if I wanted to implement an animated banner I could use Flash or a GIF format, either way, both support transparency which may or may not be useful to our end product graphic.

It seems important to include our game logo obviously and our team logo, as well as perhaps some action screen shot or design element. Like concept art. Also to note, the colour scheme needs to fit our game design, I noticed for action games a lot of white is used, Battlefield 3, Sabotage,  Call of Duty, this could be because white is a very clear colour and easy to display graphics on. It may be important to also add the rating, and perhaps a link to a website, or trailer and naturally any possible platforms it will run on.

A list of the content for reference is below. The web banner deadline is the 27/02/12

-          Release Data 10^th May (4pm – 7pm)

-          Game Logo and Team Logo

-          Display Images

-          Age Ratings, Platforms.

-          3D Environment, Screen Shots

-          Flashy  Text and eye catching

-          800 x 200 Pixels

-          72 DPI any higher it takes longer to load.

-          16 + Age Rating

I found that the best place to present these logos, would be social networking, websites like facebook, or even the college website, Kongregate seems to promote mainly games created by independent companies and social games, which would help to get our name out, however, bearing in mind the cost of advertisement, we would have to watch our current budget.

Final Project - Planning Week

This week has been the week for finalising and producing our planning documentation for our final project. It has been an eventful week, and has proved to be a challenging in the area of time management, especially with planning the next six production weeks after half term. As team leader it was vital I provided advice and presented the best way to manage our time, however, because each person had individual task, I also had to give individual assisstant to members of the team to assure that they made best use of the time they had.

Every team member has to produce an environment, in order to pass the unit, and also as part of the team effort to produce the trailer. Since this is a similar element we share, I proposed that we developed this in the course of three weeks, giving us half the production time we have to develop these environments, being as they make up the main centerpiece of our project.