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.

[COS WOT] Graphics



Compilation of Team Game Logos.

Today we discussed the logos for the graphics of our game. It was vital that we developed and design a piece to represent our game, and to be used in splash screens, which help to define these elements.  Four out of the five team members successfully created a game graphic, Curtis Stoyles didn't create one, due to an issue with his copy of photoshop which crashed, therefore rendering him unable to generate his own logo.


I will first disucss my design before moving onto how we chose the general graphic and then what the chosen graphic was, and the point made to improve it and the others. For reference mine was the chosen graphic, and we was to apply the rock of michaels graphic into mine, and combine image selections.

 Understanding that storyline, I knew our inspiration was games like Tomb Raider, Amnesia and Uncharted, taking a look at there logos, of which I have included below in one compilation for reference.

As you can see the game logos here are generally very basic and simple, with a general style applied to there text. This the sort of standard I was aiming for, not because it is simple overall as a design, but because the simplicity in itself allows us to apply the image to a numner of other products, therefore increasing portability. 

I wanted something that looked good on box art, that could be applied in numerous locations, and the inspriation from our products allowed us this.  I could place any format under Chronicles of Saltaire Header, just as Uncharted has, to represent any sequel of the game of the same element.

Joey also noted how well it would look on box art, a simple design always help to sell a product, with a catching but simple, not to overfaced, can help promote our product successfully in the long run.


The Production

The development of the logo was a simple and not to dudious process, with a few years of Photoshop behind me, I was comfortable in setting up my environment.  Taking inspiriation from the likes of Prince of Persia logo, I decided adding a simple line along the bottom, and giving it a large stroke, wasn't beneficial. Like the Prince of Persia logo, I wanted to have the effect of sand, well, in our case, liquid, relating to the Wine. I applied a smuge effect tot he line, to give it the effect of liquid, duplicating it, and bringing it together, with a small opacity to create a better effect of overlapping, flowing liquid.

Example of the Prince of Persia Logo

Cybertronix - Production Plan

It was important for the team to fully dicuss what elements we were including into the trailer. We decided on content and I have discussed this in the previous post, and split this between the team members in order to help speed up production work. Because of the level of detail that we need and the style we are going for a quite low poly apporach, faking our environments with textures and normal maps to give definitions.

I was tasked with creating the animations for the final product, as the animation would be quite a simple task in essence to everything else, and because I was the most comfortable with cameras and animating elements in the game in order to produce the final product. As the animator I am going to have to make sure that I get more comfortable with the camera elements, and how to properly rig/manipulate some of the creates to work well inside the final product.

Inspiration of this kind of animation I have taken from this youtube video, from the game Dark Descent. It has a very basic animation but one I would like to apply to the characters, specifically the front approach of which it details quite a clear aspect how we would like to animate the trailer view of the main character.  With the low poly hand works well to an idea Joey said about making a character.

I have also been tasked with modelling the front exterior of the Salts Building, which is set as our main building for our storyline. We also stated that it may be possible to use the front of the building as a splash screen, for example, remember the old Resident Evil games with the gore warning, which showed a modelled element of the environment, we could use something like this for our our own splash screen. 

The other members of the team where tasked with developing there own sections as well aswell as a marketting jobs, I will discuss these below for reference. 

Joseph Brown 

Joey was tasked with creating the central plaza area, with the aid of Michael and/or Stuart and Curtis if required. This is  a large task as the central plaza is a main figment our game, and needs to be rather detailed. Joey was optimistic about taking on this task, and therefore the group saw no reason to decline him this environemnt. As well as this, he also wanted to model the lions, while I am personally not willing to place so much work on Joey, he was addiment to take on the task and as project leader, allowed him. However I stand back ready to help him progress with this, if required, as does the rest of the team. 

Bust of the Lion, a model Joey will be creating.

Central Plaza, to be modelled by Joseph Brown

Joseph has also been tasked with handling marketting and assuring the team marketting elements have been done correctly, and effciently. He has been tasked with creating the A3 Poster that will be posted around the local environment.

Cybertronix - Project Plan

Today we had a meeting between the development team for Cybertronix, to discuss the building of our 3D trailer. To begin with we begun to develop the brain storm, that would describe the trailer content as well as a little back story to help us visualise the environments. It was important for our team that we all got our own point down, and to help decide the story and the trailer, we took elements we liked from each story and implemented them into the final idea, as we believed everyone followed a very similar structure and also provided content that we believed as a group really worked well for the story.

An example of my point, relates to elements that Curtis introduced in his story that we really liked, inspired by the stone angels from doctor who, he created foundation that the expression of still objects, such as statues, would change when the player was not looking at them. While this is a small feature, it really does create sense of a dark and quite shocking environment, that would work well in the final idea.

Another example, was the idea of having a tomb under the Salts Building, specifically the plaza, this came up alot in peoples back stories hence we decided it was obvious to implement this feature and concept.

Brainstorm for Trailer Production

Proposal

As a team we decided the following elements need to be implemented into the trailer. Because we have not yet created our storyline, we decided by covering the elements more important to the story line, and also to allow for us to change and expand on ideas our own ideas.

We have decided on a storyline base that included alot of elements from every member of the team, so i'll explain briefly what this details.

The main character, the protagonist of this story, is an ex-solider, tormented by his own past, and suffering from the dishonour detained on his father, and ex-mill worker in Saltaire, who was condemend to Linchfield because of his insane notion of the existance of the Wine of Titus, an old relic said to provide the drinker with immortality. When his father died, he left an old key, with no notion other than, "It will open the way" in a message along with the rest of his fathers belongings.

During a local newscasts, covering the excavation at the Salts Building and the discovering a metal grating, seemingly and entrance to something, engraved the intials TS. The main character deciding this may be his chance to prove that maybe his father wasn't mad, deciding to call his girlfriend a comms expert, into helping him break into the vault.

Using the key he has retained from his father, he manages to open the grating, which reveals to be a spiral staircase, which opens down into a tomb. During the course of the plot, the main character handles choices and elements, and completes puzzles, while fighting the lions, that have been hunting him, allowing him the pass further.

Apart from the lions as the bosses, for the sake of provided history and progressing the story, the player is also being hunted and followed a evil historical organisation that stretches back to the days of Sir Titus.

The choices the main character makes throughout, will depict how the story progresses and will choose how the end plays out. As well as the ambiences, the main character will get flash backs of his past and the past of Saltaire as he gets closer to his source. The end, the main character has the choice to save his girlfriend from death, grant himself immortality, or take it for himself and prove to the world it exists and make his fortune.

Content

We realised because our story we will need to implement quite a solid amount of content. We have decided that we will make 2 enviroments that are based on the current Saltaire location, because we are working with it in present day, we will try to keep the locations the same. The two locations we will be replicating are, the front of the Salt Building, lions included, which we decided would make a good main menu display, if used.
Here is a reference image of the front of
Salts Building in order to give a visual idea of what this looks like.

Trailer Backstory - Individual

So, today we have been tasked with generating a solid individual backstory for our trailer. What do I mean? Well, basically, we need to express our ideas through the use of creative thinking and writing, for a logical guy like myself, this should test my creative senses, and allow me to expand my understanding of story structure in the gaming environment.  The backstory isn't just what will happen in the game on a story standpoint, in my personal opinion it has to represent elements of everything, setitng the scene and hitting the following points in order to assure that the planing stage for the trailer covers everything we wil be doing this year.

Mind-Map of Trailer Back-Story

Points to cover:

- Sound, ambience is just as important as the visiual representation. It somes cases it tells a story itself, the back mysic helps the mood and sets the physics of the scene. For this I will consider some more fitting music for my trailer, by looking at other trailers of similar build and taking examples.

- Visuals are vital. Music tells the story but without the visualisation it will nothing more than a CD track, visuals provide many attributes to the scene, such as telling a story through actions, and expressions.

- Narrative. Look at Skyrim trailer, basic, simple. The voice over does the most to set this scene I think, it gives a general approach to the story, sets the environment, it is from this, I believe included an narrative overlay would benefit ther trailer. However the narrative, overlay would have to be the sound of characters speaking, working along as it was a movie, this would benefit the scene well.

3DS Max Environmental Designs

During this session, we had to create a enviroment inside 3DS Max. We were tasked first to handle dealing with with creating the basic box modelling, to create a window. We based our windows on the primary architectural design, building a simple box, and setting the width, length and height to 6, 30 and 10, we got a primary level design.

From there we applied a bend modifer, applying an angle of 190 percent and 90 percent. This applies an accurate bend to the box level, and allowed me to extrude the end twines to create a sort of window shape. This allowed me to further build upon this element, I decided to go for a more victorian style, making more strict points and angular edges.

Building a top block, with a more vampiric fanged design to it, allowed me to compliment the victorian architecture I was aiming for, and hence improve my design with low poly blocking, however, increasing the basis of the design.

Duplicating each element, and grouping I was able to create a basic primitive with the window, allowing me to build on this. This particular element was useful as it allowed to me to save on the amount of work I would have to generate and increase my work flow.

Unfortnatly, the computer kept crashing on me, and I wans't able to get as much of the desing done as I wish, I had to apply basic materials to the object and settled for a unfiinished scene to meet the end deadline. But these are the contraints and the problems of game development and it has taught me to back up more often and keep a auto-backing system in order to save my work for crashing of unstability.