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Table of Contents

Chapter TitlesBrainstorming

ResearchCharacter Development

Character ProcessFinal Character Design

Enviro’ DevelopmentEnviro’ Process

Final EnvironmentKey Art

Character Sprite SheetSprite Sheet Process

Fighting Enviro’ Evaluation

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This environment piece is scattered with litter, crates and interesting detailing to suggest an aban-donded supermarket. I chose to place this piece in my journal because this is the one I will use for main reference due to its interesting lighting and overall composition.

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EvaluationAll of my final pieces are rolled into the same theme, post-apocalyptic, and share similar colours to one another with the style of the game that they would be used for. My favourite piece is my first environment because it was the first time that I ever attempted photobashing and although it was quite a simple environ-ment, it still looked appealing due to the contrast in colours that I was constantly correcting. I attempted to adopt an Eytan Zana style, with bright bold colours in one small area, whilst trying to photobash in the Last of Us style artwork. I am proud of the final outcome; although simple, it was my first piece and I can only improve. In the future I would like to do something similar but on a larger scale, if I had more time I would possibly add in some furniture and perhaps a platform that would be usable in the game. There are a lot of things I do not like about this piece, for example, I think that the floor could have been blended together in a more effective way, the lighting on the floor could be refined and more detail could be added in certain areas.

My first character is one that would be placed in this environment or somewhere similar in post-apoca-lyptic Sheffield. This piece is not my favourite, particularly because I had a lot of problems with making the character look as young as possible and the difficulty of painting the face. I did end up painting a picture I found on the internet as I am quite good when it comes to replicating an image or painting from reference. I also had a lot of trouble with the hands and ended up taking photos of myself to use as reference which, in the end, worked quite well. Each piece on that character was painting with reference and I found that the jean texture was quite hard to get right so that is something that I will look into studying in the summer. The key art was created using a character that I painted for my sprite sheet and quickly painting in with colours and refining with a lot of techniques I have learned from other artists. This is one of my least favour-ite pieces mainly due to the fact that I was managing my time quite poorly for this module and had to do it at the last minute. I am not proud of doing this which is why I really dislike the painting and I could have done a lot better with more time. I believe that the simplicity of this painting reflects my poor time management but it did provide me with an opportunity to apply the skills that I have learned doing thirty minute ‘Spit Paintings’ for a Facebook group.

My sprite sheet was originally going to be a complete different style but to save time I adopted the same theme from my character and environment. I used my first character for one of the poses and then created three new ones. I saved a lot of time by duplicating a lot of elements that I had already painted and refining them to the new pose. This made the process less daunting but it was also quite a fiddly part of the piece. I attempted the face again but this time with a different reference and whilst colour picking from my first char-acter design. Any new parts to the other poses were painted also by colour picking from my first character. A couple of the poses were created using Daz3D, a posing software used by many artists in the industry. It allows you to pose a 3D model in any way you like and I created a library not too long ago full of poses that I made in the software with a basic 3D female mesh which you can see in my journal. For a simple sprite sheet, I believe these characters are fit for purpose, on the other hand, I am also disappointed with myself with the quality of these paintings. I have seen from some of my previous paintings that if I put in the extra time, I can produce something of a higher quality than the ones that I did for this module.

My second environment for Game Asset Development was my least favourite piece of all. This was the last thing I did the night before the deadline so it was very rushed and I am really not proud of myself for leaving it until the last minute. Although I did do this, and the environment is very simple, I believe that my Daily Spitpainting experience has paid off and allowed me to produce something that still looks quite decent within a very small timeframe. Again, I tried to adopt some of

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Eytan Zana’s lighting techniques over an image of a royalty free sky that I collected a while back from a Gumroad package. Technically this would be classed as a matte painting and because sky takes up around seventy percent of the image, I feel really bad for not managing my time efficiently. It was based on a screenshot of a game I found that was of a desert / wasteland which was quite easy to pull off within a short amount of time. If I could do this again, I would probably create a fighting scene within the factory that I pre-viously painted but from a different angle and with more obstacles designed for a better player experience. For the finishing touches I used the same methods that I did for my previous conceps, using unsharp masks on copy merged layers and erasing any sharpness that I did not want in certain places. This was a technique I learned from Denis Leobner in a tutorial in the 2D Artist magazine. I really think that I could have done a lot better with all of my concept pieces and believe that this is probably my weakest module this semester and it has really encouraged me to take more care with my time in the future.

My working process can be found within the pages of this journal as well as some of the concepts having process shots. These are all lit-

tered with images that will hopefully aid the evaluation.

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