It’s been a while since I’ve made an update, and it’s all because I’ve been working on a research project as part of my uni Honours year. And now it’s finally finished!
‘Creating a Taxonomy of Environmental Narrative’ is an exploration of the techniques used in modern games to tell stories using their environments.
The research project is in two parts; the exegesis, which is the written part of the work and currently has the most up to date version of my taxonomy and the UDK environments created to explore these techniques.
There are a few bugs with the environments, and because I had such a short amount of time to make them aren’t very optimised so unless you have a fairly decent PC they may not run very well. I’ve only been able to test them on two different computers. I intend to revisit them at some point and finish them to a portfolio standard, but right now I’m releasing them as is in order to get them out there.
Download Links:
• PDF: Creating A Taxonomy of Environmental
•UDK Levels (Megaupload Link)
Gallery:
Brightfog Island was my first ever foray into the world of 3D modeling and texturing. Before I learned what the word ‘optimization’ meant. Still, while the modeling processes I used might make me cringe now I do think the final scene came out quite nice in the end. It was also one of the very few chances while studying I had to work on environmental design, one of my main areas of interest. The scene was modeled in Maya 8.5 and rendered using the Maya Software setting.
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Working on Bungle in the Jungle I was doing 2D art assets for the HUD. These skulls are some of the more interesting pieces I designed and painted to work in the game.
These skulls appear on screen when the player is under the effect of one of the different damaging statuses.
There are 3 skulls in total, one for confusion, poison and fire. They were painted entirely in Photoshop with a Wacom Tablet.
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These are some pieces I made for a development group early last year. These were used mainly for design pitches. The project was a strategy game based around steampunk airships. The group fell apart and nothing ever came of the project but I still think these are pretty cool. I designed the base “holy dog” logo as a vector using illustrator for any documents or advertising stuff. These pieces were all created working with that vector in Photoshop CS4 or CS3. I can’t really remember what I was using back then.
My first job when I joined Irrelevant Modding to work on ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ was to design and create the HUD. The original plan was to have a generic HUD layout for both sides with the team name shown somewhere. But I convinced them that making two separate HUDs for each team would help differentiate them better and give the game a nice extra visual layer. I also convinced them that the life bars for each team should take damage as the player does just to add another visual layer of player feedback. Thankfully our lovely programmer Andy was able to get all of this actually working!
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This is a model I created for the ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ UDK game project. It was created in Maya and textured using Photoshop. The model is one of a series of capture points in the game that players on one team must destroy in order to win the game.
The game type called for two versions to be created, a complete statue and a destroyed model to replace it when the player has destroyed the point.
For the last few months I’ve been working on a UDK project called ‘Bungle in the Jungle’. A class based shooter loosely set around the Spanish conquest over the Aztecs in South America. I joined the project about half way through it’s design and production stage and mostly worked in an art role. I created all of the 2D art for the game for the HUD and menus, as well as doing some modeling for characters and level assets. I also did some animation and rigged most of the game’s projectile weapons.
We are still working on the project, but it is pretty much at a stage where we are happy releasing it for people to play. Below is a gameplay trailer;
You can also check out the game’s production blog, as well as watch another trailer highlighting the various weapons and teamwork strategies after the link.
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I created these portraits of about a year ago with a sort of magical fantasy sort of theme in mind. One of my friend Ruby and one of myself. Inspired partly by the character portraits in older RPG’s like Baldur’s Gate.
They were both done from start to finish in Photoshop using photos as a base, and heavily painted over to change the light and colour and give them a sort of painted look and feel. Some parts of the images were taken from other photos and placed in, like Ruby’s necklace, the card in my hand and obviously the fire. I unfortunately lack the power to control fire without a lighter.
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These barcodes were a design exercise I gave myself after seeing this post about a Japanese design firm creating fun and interesting takes on barcode design.
I decided I’d like to give it a go myself because it sounded like a fun challenge and it allowed me to work with Illustrator with vectors, which is not something I get to do very often as most of my 2D work is done in Photoshop.
The constraints of the exercise were pretty straightforward. Black and white only, and the barcode still had to be readable by a scanner. This meant that the vertical lines had to remain intact.
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Working with the Irrelevant Modding team on ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ I was given the job of creating the 2D artwork for the game. I worked hard to establish a visual style for the 2D art that worked with the already established 3D graphical style of the game. This logo was created for the game’s main title screen as well as for use in any promotional material. It was created entirely in Photoshop.
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