I'm Back

"But Sam, where did you go?"

I went to flu-land, where most of Champlain's student body went this week! This horrible cold-fever-flu thing is making its way around campus and eventually got to me. It was one day of complete agony followed by four days of just not feeling good.

While I was absent, apparently Marc noticed some disconnect within our team and our vision. This is a huge issue. We all have to have a big picture of where we're going, and we should all know what the end result of our game is going to resemble. Class on Wednesday, apparently, reflected that we were a bit disjointed.

Alex met with Marc on Friday to talk about things, and also with the other leads to nail down exactly what we want in Mageball by the end of the semester. I laid in bed and drank a hundred cups of tea.

Yesterday, I was finally feeling like a person again (instead of just a pile of sickness). So today, I was ready and able to show up for our usual Sunday meeting. We started out by gathering in an empty classroom. Alex led the meeting, going over all the changes we were making and all the decisions the leads made. By the end of it we had a full list of everything Mageball was going to have.

Also by the end of it, we had decided that Sibyl was changing to part-time character modeler and full-time environment artist. Marc had suggested this, because our game cannot be released with no/crappy environments. Technically, we already have a character. It's just not good. So right now, Sibyl has to do environment work until we are in a comfortable place. Luckily, she had no problem with this at all.

I had an artist meeting with them right after to talk about things, and we were all brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. Sibyl, Kyle and I work very well together, and after today I believe our environments are going in a great direction.

Environment artists usually work closely with the narrative designers to develop a world that feels like people actually live there. We want our maps to have personality and feel like different cultures inhabit these places. These places should tell a story through the art we put in. So, we talked a lot this week about the narrative. We didn't want to step on Matt's toes and change the narrative design on him, but there were some things we wanted to stay away from.

The story was that the "ice tribe" worshipped wolves and the "fire mages" worshipped dragons. While there is a lot we could do with that, we thought it to be a bit cliche. We listed out a bunch of animals we could replace those with and settled on a stag for the ice mages, and phoenix for the fire mages.

I also mentioned that I wanted to stray from asian architecture. Our game was already being compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender non-stop, and we don't need to draw anymore connections. I also just wanted to step in the fantasy direction more.

After Matt presented his narrative to us, I kind of started to picture both cultures as elves. The fire elves lust for power and wealth. The ice elves are more self-absorbed and concerned about beauty. For other geeks reading: fire are basically Blood Elves of Warcraft lore, and ice would probably be Lothlorien elves of Lord of the Rings lore.

Going in this direction, I spent a lot of time just looking at references.

I know this is hard to see, sorry!

For the fire map, or "Crystal Caverns," I looked up a bunch of statues of phoenixes, general cave references, and pillar references. We decided, to reflect the fire mages and make the map more interesting, we had to have some ornate stone pillars and archways. There should also be statues in key places around the level. Making a collage of references is just a good way to look at everything at once, which should give us one combined idea of what to do.

Again, this is hard to see. Our other level designer, Rob, has been working on the ice mages home field and posted a picture from Guild Wars 2, suggesting a direction we could go in. 

Temple of Silent Storms, Guild Wars 2

We were all totally on board with this idea. One problem us artists believed ice environments have is that they're always too blue. Making this a nighttime scene and adding fire, along with wooden architectural elements, would balance the scene in an interesting way. We also loved the torn banners in this reference, although we were already going to have those.

So basically I was looking for references on how to do ice and snow structures, snowy scenes with wooden or fire elements, and general references for architecture.

We also have to redo the goals. We decided they should be rock, because rock can go in any envrionment, so it would make sense if in any level. This means we only have to  do one goal asset, which is a good thing. Sibyl made a simple napkin-drawing of an idea she had for a goal and I ran with it.

We stuck with the "ring-on-a-pole" idea. The added banners would mark which goal it is, as well as the runes etched into the ring. The runes would be what powers the "portal" inside of the goal (Kyle's idea).

Working off of the new animal ideas for the mages, I did some logo work. Logos are an important part of sports teams. They could be used on jerseys or banners, or pretty much anywhere on the fields.

I'm really aware that I'm not a graphic designer.

I I like the simplicity of these types of logos. They can be usedf stfusedused anywhere as a sort of "stamp" to markp" mark territory.ry. I want to make one for "Fire" and "Ice" too.