Entry 1: Beginning of Pre-production work

A little about myself before we start: My name's Robert Anson, and I'm a 3rd year student doing computer games art. I'm part of the AGD team ‘Loading…’ and am working mainly as a character artist, working in both 2D and 3D, although I am also doing a few of the environment assets on the side to help with the overall game workflow. This blog will show you the progressive workflow that I will use as the project goes on till the final result. (Also please note that the first few blog posts will show work already done a few weeks back in the October month, so I will post the correct time they were done until i've brought this all up to date)

Wendesday 1st October- Monday 6th October

In our first meeting we all were tasked by our leads to come up with a game idea for the AGD game, and put it onto an online poll in our closed Facebook team group, which we use to discuss our work and arrange team meetings with. The most voted idea was a b-movies monster game, in which you would hunt people down as a b-movie villain to gain points in b-movie themed levels. 

As one of the character artists I was charged with coming up with concepts for this idea, so I took reference from well-known b-movie monsters such as the classic 'It Came From the Deep' and Audrey II (little shop of horrors). I already had a good idea of what I wanted to create so had certain images up as basic reference rather than creating moodboards.

I did a few designs, as you can see below,  however a few days later the idea was changed as the scope for the project doing multiple humanoid characters in a realistic style for the game would have taken up a lot more time than the AGD module actually requires.

'It came from the deep'

'Little shop of horrors inspired '

Instead the game idea that was discussed and agreed on by the group is a more child friendly monster scaring game, where you play as a scary monster that has to navigate the challenges and dangers of a household full of humans, scare the child, and escape again. For the character style we largely used Monsters Inc as a reference point, as it has a colourful palette and the type of monsters we wanted to create. For the art style we again used Monsters Inc, but also looked at games such as ‘Grabbed by the Ghoulies’ and ‘The Wolf Among Us’ to create the combined cartoon feel we’re going for. 

'Monsters Inc, The Wolf Among Us and Grabbed By The Ghoulies reference images'

With this as our basic idea, I again created multiple monster ideas for possible character choices, also making use of the previous designs from the b-movie idea and implementing them. I did quite a few variations in order to give my team a lot of choice to decide from. Some were inspired by monsters from the reference mentioned earlier, whilst others were ideas based on themes like the undead and Halloween. 

After they were all reviewed by my team, I was told to work further into monsters  2, 14 and 20.

The next post will show the further concept and developmental work on these 3 designs.