Planning an environment

My group are working on the area in saltaire - roberts park. It a wide open area, mainly just grass and trees with a few buildings and environmental features. This means, in a fictional sense, we have a lot of room to play with, so using 3-D max can add much more to the environment.
The first image below is the photo of roberts park I based the drawing on:

From that I drew up a very rough sketch, outlining the shapes in the photo and drawing up lines that I could scale the rest of the image from. After a lot of pencil work I moved onto a black fine liner - which I used to add more detail, highlight objects through various methods such as crosshatching. The image below is that drawing:

I then traced this image, and drew lines cutting it into 4 sections. On each of those sections I was to experiment with different colouring techniques (including the fine liner, which is the top left section. The top right section has been done in felt tip, bottom right was pencil crayon and the bottom left was done with pastels. Out of these 4 I really enjoyed using the fine liner, such a simple thing can bring out alot more in an image - the pastels aswell can create a really good effect when rubbed and blended. The image is below:

I can see what i can change for my groups trailer, what buildings or ruins i can add to make it fit the theme, I may even draw up another concept for that in the coming weeks, but form this i can draw up a rough idea of what i can do in 3-D max.

Analogue Overview

Analogue is a physical form of sound - not digitally created, it is all "real" sounds. It has unlimited bandwidth and works through vibrations. While it can be arguable a much higher quality than digital sound since it is a physical medium there are negatives. formats include: Vinyl records and magnetic tapes (the slower and thicker the tape - the higher the quality) some other examples of analogue products I will list in a later post).

Trailer - Content Brainstorm

here is a screenshot of what are group discussed and brainstormed - all in all it actual went pretty well and we came up with some very good ideas, that kind of melded together to make what could potentially be a really sweet trailer - check the image below for the mindmap

Sound

Today we have bene having another look at sound and the various ways sounds are created for games and films. Although there is alot of modern technology - sound is often recorded using samples that are taken out in the world with a mic. There are "Foley artists" who are professionals at gathering this kind of sound - it was amazing to see how they use different real life objects to create such complex noise. We learnt about the purpose of sound in games and the atmosphere it provides.

The Psychology of Sound

In all forms of media sound is used to create a certain feeling or background that links with the media used, below are how use of sound psychology, has effected me through media.


you look at films like Lord of the Rings or Dragonheart, Big fantasy pieces of music that want to immerse you into that large fantasy world; this also rings true to many fantasy style games like world of warcraft and fire emblem; large orchestral tunes, can vary due to situation but are used to add that overall immersion.

When it comes to psychology no genre is better at exploiting it than the horror genre; panicking or subtle. For example Amnesia the Dark decent uses sound to constantly keep fear in the player, using the environment and music, to build paranoia and suspense making the player scared by their own shadow, and with the characters own scared screams.

Lots of games make good use of sound to keep you engaged when you are doing basic tasks, for example to huge sound tracks in Starcraft 2 keep up the pace as you build units and your base up, and then change to add to the tension as a game gets going.

As for music, a lot of heavy rock I have listened too (artists like "Disturbed) often seek to enrage me, or get my blood pumping, get adrenaline flying around the body. games make use of this aswell, especially action games like devil may cry, where the music has to keep up with the pace and violence.

Music and sound is a key part of games design, and all those iconic characters would be nothing without their sounds behind them, like Mario or Halo.

Below are some links to youtube videos:

Warcraft Music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXhAKAHSe7k

Amnesia trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nY_5-UrY4

Starcraft 2 race theme music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcghLSIpZlM

Disturbed - Indestructible
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj2vU2nr5Jw

Devil May Cry 4 song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOpe2zborw0&feature=related

Halo 3 theme
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0M6Ol8FjQ

Work Update and Questionnaires

Working on the last few essays of this term - Chris's essay on Games and consoles (some history and comparisons) and Mels questionnaire - the group got together and reviewed each other questionnaires taking elements from each for a final question that Robert Briggs will be putting together for the group. We chose a professional looking layout, a mix of simple and some more complex questions. After this review week and work is given in/marked we will be given the next set of work and hopefulyl start doing more practical work.

PDF docs

Saltaire Research