My leather black jeans on...
My by any means on...
Pardon, I'm getting my scream on...
Yo, what's happening all you good people out there in the blog-o-sphere? I'm David Houston, and a proud member of team Bala. I am currently the Project Assistant Manager, Environment Artist, Character Artist, and Concept Artist (that's a lot of artist types isn't it?) for the afore mentioned project (Bala). What we have here is a nice little chronicle of my personal experiences while hopefully bringing Bala to a nice sparkly finished product. So without further ado...
The first few weeks have been a mixed bag of feelings for me up until this point. I'm getting a lot of on the job training about what it takes to go in and make a quality production of a game. It's cool to get to be around creative people, but focusing that can be a little difficult because you just want to get out there and make stuff! But that's not really how the industry works...I try to make things that work with the feel and style of the game. The style of the game is very loosely defined at this point because for the most part we really want to make sure the core mechanics work, but we at least know we want a very dreamlike cute-ish nightmare type direction. So that's the jump off point.
Mainly I've been working on the different enemy types as well as the type of ammunition our bullet witch uses. That's always fun, because early on you really get to let your imagination run wild with the process. You start thinking of all the cool things that your characters could do, or all the bad ass effects your weapons could have. But then you kind of get hit over the head with "wait, is that even feasible at our level?" And you have to go and reel it back in. Scoping is always vastly important, so I always find myself asking Angelica or one of our programmers if something is actually doable. The idea is to push what you can do to the absolute max, so that is an enjoyable experience!
I really do dig on character creation, so that has been a huge plus that I've been entrusted with coming up with some of the designs that go into our witch's opposition. One of my personal favorites that I've done is this specter like bunny, that is loosely based off of the Egyptian goddess Unut.
I say loosely because Unut was considered a fertility goddess, and based off the sketch she's not exactly out to reproduce. I tried to keep in mind that Unut was originally a snake, so after she does her hop attack she finishes very low to the ground. Rabbits are also known as tricksters in many cultures so that's why I gave her a big mischievous grin. The sleeve on her leg also loosely reads "hop" in hieroglyphics so I thought that was a nice touch. There's no guarantee that she'll be in the game, but I am proud of the design regardless!
This is basically what I've been doing for the first few weeks. I'm roughly at about 10 different design sketches and concept with more to come! Well there is work to be done, I'll catch you good people next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment