Portfolio Dev Learning Agreement

Hey y'all, welcome to my blog. This blog has been created as for one of our modules this year, we need to show our creative process, our influences, and work by other people which we'd want to compare ourselves to.

It's also going to serve as a production diary for my Studio Practice project.

In this first post though, I'd like to lay out the aims and objectives for my Creative Portfolio Dev. Project:

Creative Portfolio Development: "Extasis" environment


- Project History -

"Extasis" was the work in progress name for a game made last year for the Games Development module. Me, and my friends of Susan Masterworks worked on it throughout the year, but due to time constraints, it had to be cut down significantly.



The original setting and story for the game was an old, half abandoned mining town set in the mountains deep in the Peruvian countryside. The town itself was built upon the ruins of an old Inca village, and the protagonist was to be a young girl. One day she would wake up with her father gone, and a strange marking on her back, and it would be up to her to discover what was going on before the villagers killed her.



Due to time constraints, the story had to be changed entirely, and the little girl became one of a group of escaped mental patients, who took over the town, and ate the townspeople. The name of this version of the game was The Coming of Diego Bertie.


I was in charge of creating the environment, and it was decided early on that the town would sit perilously on multiple levels on the edge of a cliff. When the story changed though, there was not enough time to change the environment artwork, so the original game environment was used.



The production of the game did not end there though. During the summer, Joe and Amir, our programmers, continued work on the game, and added numerous functions that did not make it into the game we handed in. Ben, one of our writers, also decided to do work on improving the story for the game. We even got an artist working on portraits for our characters.

I wanted to make a new environment, more suited to a game about escaped mental patients, but because I was going to have a lot of work to do, I was not sure I'd be able to do any work on it.

When I heard that for creative portfolio development, we could work on improving our skills on a project of our choosing, I found it the perfect opportunity to work on a new environment for the game.


- Environment Specifications -

The new environment from the game is in a different location, and there are various things that will need to be considered when planning and constructing it. These can be divided into three sets of specifications: Artistic, technical, and Gameplay.

Most of these limitations and specifications have to do with story reasons, or physical limitations of the engine. A few though, like the architectural style, are self imposed (if it's a mental asylum, the style dosn't matter much - as long as it's peruvian). These are current specifications - they are subject to change as the project evolves, and updates to the engines or new things the engine can do are discovered.

- Artistic specifications:

• Located in the mountains of Peru.
• Architecture and countryside needs to be noticeably Peruvian.
• The Asylum needs to be build in a colonial style. Mainly Spanish Baroque, and maybe some french colonial styles. Pre-19th century building though.
  
• Instead of a mountain town, the environment is now a Mental Asylum.
• Needs to have at least one building with a vaulted, wide open space.
• The environment needs to be noticeably abandoned and decaying.
• The environment needs to look hot, and not too friendly to live in
  
• Color palette is restricted mainly to autumnal colors. Dull reds, browns, oranges, pinks, yellows. Exceptions can be made when needed, but colors shouldn't jar with the main color scheme (No bright greens, or flamboyant purples. Light pastel blues, greens, or whites are ok as well)

- Technical Specifications:

• The entire environment should be no more than 100,000 polygons. Original environment had 95,000. The target for this environment will be 80,000 or less
  
• All meshes should be quadded
• Light maps are to be created in giles
• Texture resolution is restricted to 1024x1024 pixels max. Props are limited to 512x512 max, unless they are unusually large. No limit on number of textures.
• There is no bump or normal map support in the irr engine.
  
• Must be imported into irredit as an octree.
• If using staircases, collision meshes must be used.
  
• Various lightmaps should be used, instead of a single large one, for greater resolution on shadow edges.
• The scene lit in giles, should be exported as a .b3d for ease of import into irrEdit
• empty sceneNodes need to be placed in irrEdit, and named correctly. The locations and orientations of the sceneNodes dictate where and what direction the Non player characters will be facing.
  
• The starting position of the characted should be at (0,0,0) when the environment is exported from Max.
• When finished, the file should be saved as a .irr scene before being handed over to the programmers.
  

- Gameplay Specifications

• Environment must not be too big, or too spread apart. (In original version, you spent too much time walking and not enough time interacting). Locations of interest need to be relativley close together.
  
• Every location should have multiple exits, so the player never has to back track. This also cuts down on traveling time, and keeps the player interested by showing them different things. To much back-tracking makes environments feel repetitive.
  
• The environment should be simple to navigate. Passages should be wide enough for the player not to get stuck, etc.

- Criteria for Success -

This will be detailed in the next post.