Game artist
Jennifer Stevens
Digital Dreamer
FMP - Hell's Market Post Mortem
Over view
It’s over, it’s finally over. 20 weeks of FMP and here I am on the other side battered and bruised but still standing and I achieved what I set out to do. My goal was to design, concept and create a small stylised market place inspired by gothic Victorian themes with reference to hell and its demons and that’s exactly what I have done. The art style is coherent and I really feel I have made it my own. The humour of the level very much reflects my own with quirky outrageous structures and fun playful props dotted around the streets of Hell’s market. This post takes a look at my success and no so successful elements of my FMP.
Successes
The number one success is that I completed the thing! Before and during Easter break when I was diagnosed with chronic UTI and blood infection I thought I was down and out. Bye degree! Partnered with my idiotic mistakes on Style Matrix projects, which I am still kicking myself about, resulting in me getting the lows pass grade possible just made everything seem hopeless and pointless. After speaking with tutors and explaining the whole situation the plan was to down size the level make it into more of a diorama. This was a more reasonable plan but it just didn’t sit right with me I really wasn’t happy until I enclosed the level again 2 weeks after Easter break. It was at this point I knew I could still achieve what I had set out to do.
Ranking second in the list of successes is the fact I hand painted everything in the level. Everything from the tillable bricks and cobbles stone to the dog’s heads and posters. Everything was painted following some stylised reference gathered on Pintrest but mainly guided by my own flow and desicons. I feel the strongest elements in the level to show case the hand painted textures are the crates, boxes and barrels. The art style I used allowed detailed materials such as wood to really pop. What really makes these assets a success is the combination of PBR and the diffuse working in tandem shown here on the barrel where the light and shadow fall precisely along the highlighted edge. It really brings the asset out in the scene.
Another success I would have to say is the modelling. I set out to create interesting fun but gothic buildings each with a personality that could fit coherently into a stylised game level and I feel I have done that with my particular favourite of the buildings being Beelzepub. I just know I will be returning to this concept to reiterate on it further which could be a project in itself. Its fit within my FMP world fine though using the polys where they are needed and reducing them where possible to match the similar shape and consistency of the fountain which was my bench mark asset to work to. My skills for modelling have definitely improved over the course of this project. Initially when I started and had a time scale to follow I gave myself 2 weeks for each major asset. Admittedly I used 3 days for planning, designing and creating the concept image but that left a whole week to model. I now know I can model good quality assets in a shorter time frame when pushed to the wire. This is a valuable lesson and I am grateful for it. In future projects I can allocate my time much more effectively and be strict with myself to complete tasks allocated for that day. Creating daily goals for myself as well as weekly goals really helped keep me on track especially when the pressure built up after Easter.
The whole designing and creating process is usually my favourite part of whatever project I happen to be taking on. I am happy with the amount of research and development I have done with environment. Ive learnt to keep my designs as sketchy and quick as possible in order to get more of a range and not to be scared of its scruffiness. Each artists thinking, iteration and designing process is different. Turns out mine is scruffy chaos but I get a much better result at the end of it all as demonstrated with the fountain asset. The initial ideas very closely followed the existing design of the water pump I was using as reference. Further and further iteration created the fountains interesting and unique design.
My final success would have to be understanding the engine much better while working with it. Namely particle effects, lighting and materials all of which eluded me a great deal at the start of the project but as this project progress I feel my confidence and understanding about these elements of Unreal have improved allowing me to create complex materials without using blue prints and adding real atmosphere and mood to the level with lighting, answering one of the key criteria of my brief. Problem solving played a big part in the development of this knowledge and particularly when I faced lighting issues most notably the stripy rendering of the dogs heads. When writing about this issue in my blog I remember the sheer frustration of not being able to fix this with a simple button or check box. Needing to create my own version of the light map for unreal to use which hid the seams and made them less noticeable partnered with changing the mip gen settings to no mip maps fixed my dogs heads and kept their detailed textures making the Cerberus gateway a successful key asset of my level.
Not so successful
There are few things I regret more than not concepting the whole level before designing the individual buildings to populate it. I think my impulsive nature and eagerness to not fall behind the schedule played a part into why a definitive concept of the street never emerged. I had made a few rough sketches to deciding where I wanted buildings to be. The evidence of this failure is most noticeable in Buer’s potions Emporium. Squished in-between two major buildings and face to face with the protruding Beelzpubs horn, Buer’s didn’t have much space to develop its own personality quite as much as the others and so had to really of the store front to demonstrate its purpose. I really wish I had planned ahead more for this building.
My time planning was quite unsuccessful, completely saw that coming even listed it as a risk factor on my brief. I think initially I was too generous with my time and then after my illness during Easter where I really wasn’t productive, I gave myself a huge amount of work to do and not much time to do it and so the time pressure really got to me. I am proud that I accomplished what I needed to but the strain on myself was a bit too harsh and something I want to avoid in the future.
This point isn’t so much of a failure as it is a ‘would have been nice to add’. Although I did not state I wanted movement in the level I feel it would have brought the level to life a lot more. Simple things like the swinging of signs to simulate a bit of wind in the level maybe have the dog’s heads moving. I know I was keen to animate them at one point but with the time pressure I felt it would be best to leave it until I had some time after everything is done. Turns out I never found that time.
Did I meet my brief?
In short yes I did despite almost heading in a different direction to create a diorama due to time constraints. I created a quirky gothic Victorian level with so many references to hells demons that it’s a fun mini game to discover all of them. My blog shows my thinking and development sketches as I progress through the project and I have a range of polished concept art to present at the end of all of this which can be portfolio pieces in their own right. I feel my interpretation of the genre and time period is definitely creative and what I have produced I can really take pride in.
Conclusion
Although the path of this project did not run smooth Ive certainly learnt a great deal. Breaking down the project there are more successes than failures and I feel I achieved what I said I would do. I’ll be truthful and say I probably will revisit this project or elements of it further down the line when I have refined my skills even more but as my FMP I’m proud to call it mine and complete. I discovered things about myself and my process during this FMP such as not to degrade my own work (other people do a good enough job of that for me) In all seriousness though if I harbour resentment and bad feelings it doesn’t remove the work from being yours and doesn’t encourage progress or creativity so I just need to accept that I get better with every effort and not to worry about what other people are doing. I am a much stronger person than I thought when truly tested and this is what I enjoy doing. I am very relieved the project is over but already thinking about how I can apply the things learnt from this experience to the next project.
