Week 3 (Coming to the End)

Monday
During Mondays lesson, we finished off designing our characters.

 
Here is the front view of my character finished, I finished it off by adding the hair to the character by rolling out some putty, then cutting it into loads of strands, I then layered these stands around the top of the head, this makes it look like pieces of hair.
I next added the arms to my model, I did this by shaping the putty into the muscle shapes of arms, then added the hands onto the ends of these arms, and tried to place a sword in each hand so it looks like the pose which I had designed for my character to stand.








Here is the side view of my character finished, from this angle you can see the hood of my character down the back, this make him look more like an assassin which is the look I wanted my character to have. You can then see the sword angled up towards his head, this is because I thought it adds to the effects of looking like an assassin.











Here is the view of my character from the back. When you look at this angle, you can see the many strands which I put onto the back of my characters head. This is to show that they are strands of hair, instead of it looking like a hat, or a hood or something like that.















After finally finishing the whole of my character, our group then painted a strand around the cork of our characters, this way when we come to play our game, each player has a specific colour which represents their special move, as well as a certain place to start on the board.

Rob - Purple
Safina - Red
Chris - Green
Josh - Light Green
Jack- Blue
Jamie - Yellow
Me - Orange


Finally we decided what map we wanted to use for our game board. We decided to pick the star shaped board as we thought it was more fair than the other board idea we came up with, we found it more equal as all starting points were equally far away from each other.
The next thing we did was drew the star idea our bigger, as we felt that we did the board to small before, also that because our game character models are quite wide, we felt we needed bigger spaces on the board so the characters had room to stand on spaces next to each other.







After drawing our design out big, Jamie came up with another design which he thought was a good design for our game, but after asking the rest our our group we decided to stick with our original design which was the star shaped board.












Next we drew our board our onto a piece of foamy card to make it more stable then a piece of paper, once we drew it out I cut the board our so we were just left with the star shaped board.










After cutting our board out, we came up with an idea of making the board 3D by adding more card to the star so that its risen from the board which the star is on.
We measured pieces of card, so that they would all fit around the sides of the star, and we started to stick them down with pva glue, after a while though we found out they were sticking very well, so decided to use black sticky tape instead as it held it better.

Because we gave each character a colour we decided to colour the top of the board so that each character knew where they were meant to start the game
We painted black between the dots so that players were able to see the dots as they stood out from the black background.
And painted the dots in each corner a colour a colour of a character.

Next we decided to call our game "The Star of The Lost City", we came up with this name because of our game been in the shape of a star, and because the theme of our game is a lost city. After deciding this theme, we printed out pictures of ancient city ruins so that we can stick them to the black pieces of card placed around the star. By doing this we felt it made the board look more interesting and easier to tell what the theme of the game is.

Because we placed this star board onto a wooden board we needed to add some colour to this board so that it matches the theme of our game.
We first painted it white, and then glued some brown sugar to the board because it would look like sand which goes with the theme of looking like a lost dessert city.
We then made several city ruins using mini bricks which we then placed around the board.

On Fridays lesson, the first year students were coming into our group to play our game, before they came in we had an hour to set our games up and do the finishing touches to our game.
Jamie also brought in a new card idea, where we had card with things written on such as......[CARDS]........

After setting the game up we had to create a feedback sheet for the first years to fill our once they had finished playing our game.

Here is an example of one of the feedback sheets filled out by one of the first years, we used these questions on our sheet, as we thought they would give us the best feedback for our board game.

After reading most of our feedback sheets, most of our feedback was positive, so our game turned our to be successful.















 

Week 2 (Progression)

Monday, Tuesday & Thursday
On Mondays lesson, we had to do another presentation, this time with our group so we could present our character designs as well as our game rules.


During this presentation I was told I need to change the clothes my character was wearing because if a person was wearing trousers and a jacket, it wasn't going to protect him from hits. I then knew I had to come up with a new design, when designing I decided I wanted to re-draw the head and give my character a different look, this was the design I came up with.

On my new design I added a metal chest plate rather than a jacket, this way he'll be able to protect him self from big damage, I then decided to add a belt, but with chains wrapped round as it makes him look more dangerous, and look more like a tougher character.
I keep the hood idea, I thought by keeping this it still gives him the assassin look which is what I want my character to be.

As well as having the metal chest plate, I added bigger boots, also with chains wrapped around them, and metal arm guards to be used either as shields or just to protect against damage.

I then drew out my design again, but changed the positioning of my character, to show what stance I want it to have.

After deciding on a stance for my character, I needed to start making the model.
I started of making a wire frame which I needed to start the structure of my character, I then start of my shaping the putty onto the wire, into muscle shapes to create the basic, body shape.
I then started to add on different bit of my character such as the boots, the belt, and the chest plate.
On the left is the side view & front view of my model so far.






















As well as starting the models, we also decided to add cards into our game, so if you pick up a joker, half your life is gone, and if you pick up a; Jack, Queen, King or Ace you get a special move. You pick a card up every 5 moves, and have to use it within 3 goes. Nothing happens if you get any other cards.

Week 1 (Ludology & Design Work)

Monday
During Mondays lesson we were told we were going to be presenting our character designs, once I'd finished presenting I was told I hadn't done enough design work, and had skipped straight to the Photoshop work and a final design which isn't how it should be done. Once everyone had finished presenting the whole class was told that none of us had nearly done enough work as we should have and need to work more on our designing, and to start drawing our character orthographic.

In the second half of this lesson we were shown a slide show of how to draw our characters in proportion by using the size of the head to measure out how many heads long the body was meant to be. Here are the drawings I did using this method.

During the afternoon lesson we learnt that Ludology is how games function, and how we react to games. 
We were first told the two main principles of games; Randomness and Uncertainty.
Random being set field of outcomes for given input, for example rolling a dice would be random because you don't know what number its going to land on. Some games contain no randomness such as chess or connect 4.
Uncertainty, may be predetermined but is unknowable by the player. So in some cases the only uncertainty comes from what the opponent will do.

When talking about randomness though there are different kinds for example;
a dice is a Binomial Distribution meaning each input has same possible chance of output each time, Whereas pack of cards which is a hypergeometric distribution meaning each time a card is drawn the probability of other cards been pulled out is altered, for example if you take a card out the pack, it means if you go to take another one there is less cards to chose from as one has already been taken out.

Tuesday
During Tuesdays lesson we were given more time to come up with designs for our character and draw out our orthographic. Using another template to work out how to size our character using the size of the characters head. I managed to draw out and finish my characters orthographic.

 

 As well as designing my character orthographic for my stance/pose.

Thursday

In today's lesson we started learning how to sculpt using epoxy putty, epoxy is like a glue when mixed, and has a chemical reaction, its exothermic, so it gets warmer and hardens.

First we started sculpting a blanket roll, with straps and buckles, we did this by rolling out the putty and cut it into a rectangle, I then rolled it into a roll, left indents for the straps, cut the straps from more putty, attached them and then sculpted the buckles to fit on top of the straps.

Next we started sculpting a backpack, we rolled a ball and placed it on some card, then rounded it into a tear shape, I then cut out two straps to add onto the top of the bag, then next I covered the top of the bag with another piece of putty to look like the cover of the bag, then added indents around the bag to look like stitches and finally added a strap and buckle across the front of the bag.

Finally we started to sculpt a head, this time we put a ball of putty onto a cocktail stick and using the tools I sculpted detail onto the putty to make it look like a face, I then cut out strips of putty, and layered them next to each other on top of the head so that they look strands of hair.

Friday

On Fridays lesson we talked about player dynamics and character classes and archetypes, we then had to put our character into an archetype and give it balance by giving it a strength and weakness, such as the game, Rock, Paper, Scissors has, for example; rock's strength is beating scissors but weakness is paper, and scissors and paper also each have a strength and a weakness. We then got back into our groups from our previous lessons, this time we needed to put a set of rules together for our game, first off our group decided to put all our character archetypes together so we could work out how to make them different and what each characters strength and weaknesses were against other players. We gave each player a fair amount of health and a strength and weakness against each player, such as a ranged character strong against a melee character but weak against another ranged character.

We then came up with a way to play our game, first off we decided every character is unable to attack on their first go, but could still move, but movement varies for what type of character you are; ranged characters can only move one step whereas melee can move two.

After moving, melee characters can attack other characters which are one square away, and ranged can attack from three steps away from another character.

After moving the player would then roll the dice, depending on what number the played rolls, its tells whether the character can attack or not (1,2,3 would mean a hit, 4,5,6 means your character misses). 

If the player gets a hit, they roll the dice again, this determines the strength of the hit; 1 been 10 damage, 2 been 20 damage, 3 been 30 damage and so on.

We then decided to add a twist to our game by changing the outcome when a 6 is rolled, instead of been 60 damage, the player would use a special attack, we then had to decide which each characters special move;

Rob's special attack is "Seduce" which means that if he rolls a 6 the character one step away from him would be seduced which allows him to control the players character for 2 rounds.

Safina's attack is "Health Drain" meaning if she rolls a 6, a character within 3 steps will have 50hp taken from then and will be added to her own characters health.

Jacks attack is "Fire" he is able to burn a character one step away for 3 rounds which take 15hp each round.

Jamies character's attack is called "Copycat" which allows his character to copy another characters special move to any character within the radius of 3 steps.

Chris's character is able to cause 60 damage to multiple characters within the radius of one space(in other words he can attack more than one player if there next to him)

Finally my characters power is "Critical Hit" this means that once I've rolled a six to gain this critical hit, I roll the dice against, and depending on what number I roll i hit double to figure, for example if I roll a 3 which is 30 damage i will do 60 damage instead of roll a 5 I do 100 damage.

Once we'd finished coming up with our game rules, we then need to test our game out, we first used the board from a classic board game, we found this worked well as it allowed our characters to move in many directions, but a negative was that the board was too small meaning our characters couldn't move far.

Our next idea was to use the same kind of board but we drew it our bigger so that our characters had more room to move. We found this was a good design for our board, but decided to come up with a few more designs before we decided our final board decision.

Our next board was rectangle shaped, this had a few problems, first off the board was too big, and took a while for characters to get close to each other, also the characters were unfairly placed because some characters were closer to others, whereas using the star board each character was equally far apart from each other.

Finally our last design included buildings to make our game a little more tricky, as ranged characters couldn't hit you if you were in a building, we thought this would make our game more interesting, and fairer for melee characters, but decided it made our game to complicated as we all couldnt grasp the idea of escaping players by moving through buildings and getting trapped in buildings.

Summer Project

Over the summer holidays we were given a task to come up with a design for a character for a post-apocalyptic game.

My first idea was for my game environment to be set in the future, with more medicines been used but still less people using contraception.
 I had an idea of over-population been the big issue which causes the apocalypse, because of this over-population a war starts because of everyone fighting to survive and trying to get food and water. With this war, riots break out, hoodies roam the streets and looters raid the shops.
From this idea I noted down a few features I could give me character which would match the setting of the game.
Character: Dark          Mysterious
                   Chavy        Stubble
                   Rough       Hidden Face
                   Frowning   Evil Look

 After writing down these features I decided to sketch an idea of what my character could look like, this is it;

The above picture is the reference I used for drawing the head of my character, after drawing this main outline for the head I added a few of the characteristics to make him look how I wanted him to. 

Such as adding the long hair to cover his eyes occasionally, the frowning eyebrows to make him look quite evil and rough looking, and a stubble to make him look even more rough looking.






After drawing the head out I decided to start colouring it in Photoshop, I scanned the drawing on to my laptop and drew the outline onto a new canvas, I then added the base colours of the head, and then started to add the shading to the face, to give it depth, I then added the detail to the head of my character such as the shading of the eyes. 

After colouring the head I thought of texturing it to make the face look more realistic, I found a picture on the internet and copied it onto Photoshop, I then positioned it to fit the face of my character then overlapped it onto the head to show the texture. Once I had finished, I was unhappy with the finished picture because if felt the head was too thin and didn't look very good, I then stretched the head to make it wider, I was then happy with the end result, the picture on the left shows my finished face.




I thought next I had to draw out my head but as a side view,This is how my drawing turned out for the side view, I was quite happy with it but thought it could be improved as there was a few things which I thought needed changing, but I decided to scan it straight onto Photoshop and change the bits I was unhappy with it whilst colouring it on Photoshop.


The picture above on the right, is the design after I had finished it in Photoshop. As well as colouring the face, I decided to texture it as well, also to make it look more realistic, after finishing it I was happy with the finished picture as I thought it was a big improvement from the original drawing.



Once I finished my head I had to think of what I wanted my character to wear, my first idea was a hoodie so that when he has his hoods up he looks hidden and evil looking, I then drew a couple of pictures of hoodies, one wear it was the hood but with no face showing just shadowed, then the other with part of his face showing so it looks like he's just hiding his eyes.

I then wanted to draw these on Photoshop and add some colour, so that was the next thing I did;

This is my finished hoodie in Photoshop, as you can see I decided to colour it quite dark, this is because it  adds to the look of my character been dark and evil. I decided to do a plain hoodie as it fits my character into the environment, so it blends in with the other character within the game.












I then went straight to drawing the whole body of my character, one with hood up and one with it down. 

I added plain black trousers and trendy pumps, I did this because I wanted to make my character look trendy, and blend in with the environment. 

After looking back at both my designs, I was extremely happy with the character with the hood down but not with the other, I felt the hood didn't look very good or realistic, so I decided to start it again and took some inspiration from Assassins creed.

                                                                         

Here was my new design for my character with his hood up, I feel it made a big difference on my character and looks loads better then it did, this design covers his eyes which gives him the mysterious/suspicious look which is how I wanted my character to look. Its also look a bit more realistic shaped as the previous one didn't look right.