Big Game Project (week 1)

The Big Game Project has finally begun and things are going great so far. This week I’m not going to spoil too much about the game that we are creating but go more into detail what I’ve been working with.

This week I’ve been focusing on re-drawing the material placeholders that I drew last weekend. If I haven’t mentioned before, I use Photoshop and my Wacom Intuos 4S for most of my drawings, If I use other tools I’ll be mentioning it.

The estimated time limit I had for each material was two hours which was way too underestimated. At first I was rusty with the tools I use since I hadn’t drawn digitally in a long time but I had also underestimated the materials themselves. The time it actually took to draw the materials was from 2 to 5 hours each. To get everything properly done I did research of each material. For wood, stone and glass I took my DSLR camera (Canon EOS Rebel T2i/550D) and went out for a walk to gather the textures and take a closer look of the materials to refresh my mind.

But for the other three materials (Crystal, Coin and Iron) I used references from Google since I couldn’t find good enough resources by myself.

Overall it was quite time consuming since we have a somewhat realistic art style to our game and it’s something that I aren’t too used to, but there are much detail work and that’s something that I really enjoy, especially when seeing my mobile doodles next to the finished results afterwards.

The materials that I struggled most with were crystal and coin, the reason for that is its reflections. I tried to study how gold and crystals in general are drawn and how they look like in real life but I had a hard time translating it into a great result. But in the end I’m quite satisfied, there are improvements that can be done but for being the first time attempting doing the materials it’s not that bad.

Aside drawing the materials, the lead artist and I went through the animations together and got an introduction into Unity since were the once that are going to implement all the art there to make things easier for the programmers. I don’t mind it at all, in fact I was surprised how fun it was to play around in Unity in relatively easy ways.

If you are interested more about our progression I’ll be posting things weekly and you can also visit our game blog for more information:

http://deconstructeddevelopment.wordpress.com/

Here are the before and after results of each material.