#1 – White Boxing
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Hello, my name is Martin Månsson and I’m the lead artist in the game developer group “Lag Anda”. We have during six weeks been developing a 1 v 1 fighting game called Wreck Deck, where the players are supposed to control both their own pirate ship and their own pirate crew while fighting and killing the other player’s ship and crew in order to win. Since I’m the only graphic artist in the group means that I have been in charge for making all of the graphical assets that we are going to use in the game, except for a couple of few that my colleagues wanted to make. The very first thing I did was to do the white boxing of the level. Which means not focusing too much on the aesthetical finesse in the game, but to make the most important 3d-models that the players will interact with in the game. Focusing solely on making the 3D-models the right size and form, and maybe color if I have the time to do that. We do this in order to try out if the size and shape of the 3D models work in the game, so that we will not spend hours of work on something that we will not implement in the game. While I have a lot of free hands in terms of designing all assets I will actually have to discuss a lot about the white boxing with the lead designer of the group. Since he is the one who decides how the game is supposed to be played. The level in this game is the pirate ships, where the players’ crews will wander around fighting each other. I have only 3D-modeled the parts where the pirates are supposed to walk around on and interact with and made a little effort on making it look like a ship. The ocean and islands is also a part of the level but those are the graphical assets that my colleagues wanted to make, both the white boxing and final assets.
When the modeling of the pirate ship white box is finished the 3D model is then exported so that my fellow programmers can do wonders with it, but I still have to fix the ship up a bit, since it doesn’t really look like a pirate ship for the moment. More about that in the next post. Martin Månsson from Lag Anda  |
This is how the final white boxing for the pirate ship looks like. Notice that I haven’t cared at all about doing any part of the boat that will be located below the ocean surface in the game, since that won’t be a vital part of the players’ field of view.