3D I, Week 1

This is my blog post for the first week of our 3D I course.

Firstly, I’ll go through the first class of this week. Among some general information about what we will be studying, the first lesson included a recap of various art elements, along with a group exercise to analyze game screenshots.

While the group I sat with was assigned to a different set of screenshots, I’d like to talk briefly about one picture that immediately stood out to me while we were talking in class.

This is a screenshot from the game Dishonored, which I haven’t played myself. When I saw it, this particular picture just immediately stood out to me as a really well-constructed scene, more than any other screenshot we went through.

To me, this picture just immediately gives me a vaguely menacing, calm-before-the-storm feeling. I think this shot makes great use of several principles both to establish mood and to direct the viewer to the building in the center. Firstly, the use of slightly angled vertical lines in the buildings gives a sense of scale and greatness, making the viewer feel small in comparison. To stabilize the shot, there’s a clear horizontal line in the water which makes the scene feel more balanced and gives a sense of calm.

There’s a very clear separation between the center building and the rest of the background. Other than the foreground with the boat and character, it’s the single object in the entire picture with the strongest, most varied colors, and the highest contrast in values. It also incorporates some saturated red hues, contrasting with the rest of the buildings’ muted, gray-brown and blue palette.

The rest of the background has a lot less contrast both in values and colors. There also isn’t much variation in the silhouettes of these background buildings, which makes it easier for the viewer to just glance over them and look for more important details. To add to all of this, every single part of the shot other than the center building is riddled with lines that guide the eyes towards it, even in the character on the boat.

I could keep going about how much I like this screenshot, but there’s another half of my blog post and I have a word count to stick to, so let’s get to that.

For our second class this week, we had an assignment to create a simple temp level. We got three different games to choose from as influence, as well as some atmosphere keywords of which we were to choose one to base our level around.

Here’s my level, with Mass Effect as influence and suspense as atmosphere.

I chose Mass Effect as inspiration because I’m familiar with the series, and I haven’t played the other two games we were given, Uncharted and Journey.

A runthrough of the level. The purple block at the start of the hallway is the size of a human.

Mass Effect is partly a cover shooter with a lot of closed, linear environments. My level starts with an empty hallway which leads into a bigger room that guides the player around with boxes and walls. I was thinking that the white cylinder at the end of the path would be some sort of objective, or perhaps a boss. The player would have to fight through enemies in the box-filled area to get to the end.

 I mainly tried to incorporate the feeling of suspense through the starting hallway. I wanted to give a sense of claustrophobia in the small size of the hallway and tension in the sharp turns. This part of the map consists of walkways literally suspended in the air, with drops to the sides, to add a sense of insecurity. Along the path to the big room, some of the supporting pillars for the walkway are bent, and there’s a big chunk of rubble over the middle part of the hallway. This was to further add to the insecurity, and to upset the balance of the rigidly structured hallway with some diagonal lines and clutter.

The second part of the level is more straightforward, as this would be the action part which the starting hallway would lead up to. Still, I tried to keep adding a bit more suspense, especially with the gap in the wall at the beginning of the room. This would give the player a peek at the end objective before they walk out into the more open part of the room to fight enemies.

When we split up in the class to show our levels to other people, the group I sat with guessed right at both my game influence and keyword, which I’m pretty happy about. I think there’s room to improve thoguh. I’m a bit displeased with the overall design of the hallway, and I think I should’ve incorporated more diagonal lines to lead the player in and make it all look a bit less stiff. The second half of the level also turned out more bland than I’d liked, I didn’t think enough about the composition of the room and just threw together a generic enemy encounter area.

Still, it was a fun assignment and I definitely got more used to the program as I went along, which felt great. (It actually took me a bit to discover cloning, and I spent some time creating individual walls from the ground up. Don’t look at me.)