Side Scroller Project - 2Spooky4U

So, our big Third Year group project is - surprise surprise - the Side Scroller project.

It's a big group project, involving the whole year, to give us an insight into what it's like to work in the industry within a large team, and to give us a feel for the pipeline process we're likely to encounter there.

The year has been split into groups;
- four environment teams of three with a concept artist assigned to each
- five character artists
- two engine artists

I was assigned an environment artist position, so I can get some more experience with environments after the King Of The Dead character fiasco.

The project is broken down into four levels, each one inspired by a different word; Hot, Happy, Cold, Scary. We were given a volume of space to contain the level within and the layout.

This is going to be a big lesson in time management (my favourite thing), and working within a group.

I was assigned to the Scary Team (go figure)

The first thing we did was brainstorm all of our ideas out, taking from a wide variety of sources and environments. Due to the vertical nature of our volume, we discussed the idea of decent heavily and drew the conclusion that some kind of cave would be a good idea. Making sure that fit with the Cold level before us was fairly simple, they were planning on ending the level in a cave anyway. We made a few pinterest boards just pinning all the awesome reference we could think of, and then we went through and picked out our favourite images and put them into one final one, where all of our concepts also have gone.

To keep communication going among all of us, I made a facebook group so we could keep everyone updated with our progress. I also organised a few meetings between us all, so we could see how each of the groups were coming along with idea; 21 heads are better than 1 when it comes to analyzing an idea.

The concepting stage has been relatively good, although I think we've definitely taken too long with it. I did a variety of layout designs to get the basic ideas out.

I we settled on a final design and went through trying out colour palettes. We settled quite heaviliy on blues and reds, with some purples and yellows to make things pop.

I was in charge of concepting the foliage and the egg sacs. I looked at mushrooms, due to us deciding on a cave environment, with a focus on bio luminescence.

These were the final designs for them. I'm planning on making the mushrooms a morph target so that they open out when you walk past them.

So. onward to the modelling stage.