Elements of game design

So I had a well-known word processor open and thought to myself let’s continue on this rich vein of form carried over from my previous entry. So the creative process is what I will loosely touching on this entry. To keep me on track I’ll talk about a recent visual design project I had, and the process I took to finish it.

So Monday morning means visual design for me. Unfortunately the lifts were broken in the building we work in, leaving me with eight flights of stairs to climb with no breakfast. Depending on the project and what is required of us, dictates the length of the lecture as you can imagine. This project was fairly loose in direction; produce a scene from the city I study in. No style or media restrictions, so obviously I was going to be struggling for ideas. Once we’re allowed to escape, it’s business time. So I wandered into the city centre accompanied by some chums for a general wander and to see it anything catches our eyes.

We spend the day producing quick thumbnails of some scenes and ideas on site to give us some ideas. I wanted to produce something that captured the fine architecture in my city but also told a story. So from my sketches I played around with a few compositional ideas and style ideas. I’ll post a few below of what I’d but I’m not posting the whole project for my course’s sake. We’ve all sat down before and drawn/painted what is right in front of us before and looked back at it and seen the mistakes or improvements we could make. The process of planning a piece hopefully eradicates these mistakes and saves you time as long as you don’t spend five months planning a sketch of a spoon that you could have done from the gun.















By the time I had finished the business end of the planning, all I had to decide on was what media I felt like using and what style I wanted to use. Given the time period I had to complete it I decided against doing an oil painting, and not because I had no oil paints, my brushes, turps or a canvas with me. So I chose to do a digital painting, I’m not the best as I’m essentially a noob after picking it up eleven months ago. So the practise wouldn’t hurt at all. With all final pieces you’re going to encounter problems not matter how much planning you do, most of mine occurred due to me going full tilt into it and not looking after my layers in Photoshop. This happens a lot to me after years of just picking up a paintbrush or pencil and just cracking on. Luckily I was aware that I would at some point be doing this so I was able to finish with minimal rage from Photoshop. I’ll post the finish article somewhere below to give a bit more colour/life to my blog.
















The next blog is going to be a doozy, you think I talk a load of rubbish already? You ain’t seen nothing yet!