Big Game Project: Week Two

This week has mostly focused on fleshing out the game’s look and feel as well as active dialogue to ensure we all were on the same boat in this regard. With a design meeting taking place early on to help keeping common ground between the design and art department. To further aid in this endeavour I was assigned to write a dedicated aesthetic document for the group to access at any time in order to always have easily understood guidelines even if the lead designer was not available.

It’s important to go back on the most rudimentary of steps to be able to follow up on what it is you wanted to achieve in the first place. In this case mainly what sort of experience the player should have while playing. To have an aesthetic goal is one thing, figuring out how those goals will be reached is a relatively more complex task depending on the nature of the project. While this endeavour might seem to be taking away time from other tasks it is a much more intelligent investment to have a plan to go back to, saving you from the hassle of trying to pick up the pieces later on in case direction is lost. All too often do we witness games with inconsistent artwork and colour schemes that could have been easily avoided should the developers have maintained some basic communication between one another.

What I asked myself first was what sort of setting this fictional world was based in. While it might seem unimportant for a racing game it is valuable to have a solid understanding of the background of the game world in order to follow a coherent line of reasoning when constructing everything else – be it environments or vehicle textures. These sorts of things helps telling us why the world is as it is portrayed, in this case a resource-strained industrial world on the edge of a vast galactic civilization that stopped concerning itself with equal prosperity long ago. Where thousands of people make a desperate gamble every day in the hopes that they will snatch that one in a thousand chance of triumph in an otherwise withering existence. In order to establish these factors I had to consider how life played out for the various peoples of the race-littered world and thus I could not ignore any detail, because it all helps to build up the setting as a whole.

This is one of the most daunting tasks during development as it requires a solid plan and vision to be present from the initial artwork to the very last polishing of textures. Everything in the game must contribute to this singular achievement or else it will risk causing such sever inconsistencies that the player might experience a tonal shift half way through the game. It is extremely important to plan around and understand how best to make all the game’s components work together. Otherwise the lack of a plan will show through the entire experience.

That’s all for this week, until next time!

Björn Erik Berndtsson. Graphics and Game Design.