Production Week 8: David Hamblin, Microsoft Feedback

The last 2 weeks were very busy as everyone is putting in extra time to polish the project to the highest standards we can achieve. Great to see so many determined and hard working people in the team. We missed last weeks blog due to the Easter Break and everyone was focusing on finishing up their areas as best they could in order to prepare for our first functional build! 

It even worked just in time for our WiP industry presentation!

We had an industry guest from Microsoft, David Hamblin who gave us some glowing feedback which made us all very excited to see what we can achieve in the final two weeks. 

Production Week 6: Easter Break (hah!)

Hi it's Viktor here this time, giving you a brief introduction what have happened this week in our project. Getting close to the deadline, everyone is working hard and trying their best to finish the required areas.

With Easter coming up, we had a shorter week than usual so we had less time accessing our project due to school closures. On Wednesday the tutors requested an update from the team's producer to tell them how progress is going. I've spent more than an hour explaining everything and walking through every tiny detail with Phil and Juriaan. 
They were pleased with our progress so far, complimented on the overall design, most of the asset's quality and the lighting of the scene. Some things need addressing, the elevator area needs texture updates as they were too low quality and we had to shift our focus from making the outside environment even more alive and pretty, to make sure the elevator and generator room areas are finished to a high standard.

Production Week 5: The Final Stretch

Our deadline is looming ever closer. Going from 12 weeks, we spent 2 on developing the art bible leaving 10 weeks of production time. Our fifth week on production we aimed as a group to get as much of the ocean view complete or ''working on'' as possible. This is mostly done now and needs placing in the scene, after this we begin to split into groups to work on the generator, elevator rooms and finish the balcony simultaneously. We have had some great feedback towards fine tuning our work this week from Escape Studios tutor Christian Avigni as well as some extra feedback on VFX from Tom Harle.

We now have bubbles, fish and kelp moving in the background of our ocean view!

Production Week 4: Guest starring Thomas Harle

This week in class we had a guest artist who specialises in VFX, Tom Harle. Each team presented their projects to him so far and he gave us some excellent feedback! According to him we have achieved the ''Bioshocky'' look! And we are on the right track, but we might have to significantly trim down our scope in the reminder few weeks. As a group we have humbly agreed this. 

Production Week 3: Main Hall Deadline

This week marks the first internal deadline for our team. By this Friday we had a goal to get the majority of the Main Hall completed. Although there are some things that still need tidying and tweaking, (we are of course all still learning!) we pretty much made the deadline! See our results below! This was our first major benchmark to see if it was possible to achieve all we had planned for our level and at the moment we are feeling quite confident of what we can achieve with our remaining 7 weeks.

Production Week 2: Main Hall Overhaul

This week has been a lot of planning and redirecting the team to smaller tasks. Our producer brought to our attention we were very behind schedule and it was acted on fast how to rectify this. The creative lead and producer knuckled down, planned what we needed immediately, and re-distributed tasks among the group in order to meet our first deadline to complete the main hall area of our environment. Our team came together quickly on this and we have gained back some good time because of it! Our main hall area is almost completely transformed from the previous week!

Production Week 1: Hero Assets

With the first two weeks dedicated to art bible research and a blockout in place we are now ready to start proper production of our scene. We have been getting some assets in place with base textures and even have some lighting in place to set the mood of each of our areas.

Each week we intend to share some screenshots of how are zones are looking so you can see them develop over time! Adapting from our blockout you can see how our level current looks below:

The main hall of our station is slowly starting to take shape.

Initial Character Development

Our character artist Kyran created a bust sculpt for his specialism project of a character called Lilith.
As we were developing our narrative for the Golden Line we were trying to figure out why the player would be down there anyway? We decided to incorporate the character Lilith into the story, how she can be used to guide the player and allure to more details of the story similar to how Fontaine did in Bioshock 1.

Weaving a compelling backstory around her and our environment we (unfortunately for her) decided to give her a split personality. One of sweet and helpful and one...that...well ...might want to rip you open to get to the Adam inside!

Initial Art Bible

We are a group of 9 BA Game Art students studying at Escape Studios.
Currently in our second year our first big group project our task is to create a Bioshock and London inspired environment. The aim should be of recent AAA game standards and be a  delightful visual experience. To be completed in 12 weeks.

Excited and with an amazing well balanced team we begun our research. The main focus of the brief is a quality environment, however as we have some super star Technical Artists on our team we would really like to create something with fun game play mechanics and puzzles, time allowing. Not only that we have an awesome Character Artist and hope to use his skills to create something that could potentially terrorise our players!

You can check out all members of our team and their individual portfolios on our team page!

We have spent the first two weeks of the project researching and developing an art bible for our team to follow. This has allowed us to explore and develop our game narrative, our visual style and what our environment to be. This art bible will grow and develop and change dramatically as we work on the project.

We have decided to set our environment in a Rapture themed underground station (or should I say, underwater station?) which we have decided to call the Golden Line! We have created an in depth back story and history of the place which will be slowly revealed to the player as they investigate the area, lured there by a distress call by the mysterious character Lillith.

Our map of the area we wish to cover. We have broken each area into priority and represented this by a colour key. Each area can be blocked off via locked doors, blockades etc if we find we do not have time to achieve everything.