Francis Varley: Games Art 2024-25

Reflective Statement - Building Alliances  I am unsure how to feel about my contribution to the group project; I feel that I have helped my team, and feel that - really - I have completed a solid chunk of work that contributes to this, particularly when I compare what I have created in this project to the outcomes of projects I completed last year. Additionally, many aspects of this project and the work that I have completed in regard to it fall well outside my comfort zone: environment pieces, the bulk of the work I have produced, are still something I struggle with, and in this, I feel that the pieces I have completed for my group pushed me outside my comfort zone and challenged me. The age rating of our project was also a source of discomfort in my designs: we as a group settled on a lower age rating which promoted simplicity in our designs, yet this age rating was a target demographic that I have very rarely produced artwork for. As such, I feel that my drawn pieces were often ...

Formatting the Presentation During the last session, we as a group discussed what we should do this week, and formulated SMART targets that we could all work towards in preparation for the summative assessment. My assigned task has been to format our work into a presentation, which I will then send to my group. They will then have opportunities to edit or change it as they wish. This was a very simple task that largely encompassed me collating all the work that I had access to and separating it by subject matter and creator: with our goal of the presentation being a "pitch", I felt that this would clearly show the assets that we have for the game whilst illustrating the overall visual style as well as gameplay components.  Loading Screen Art Additionally, with the presentation largely complete, I went about creating one final piece of loading screen art that utilises final designs that I have not previously drawn. This encompassed the lung level design, the fungal spore tower...

Self-Assessment Last week, in session, I cross-referenced the work I have produced for this project to the Building Alliances Rubrick, the criteria that this work will be assessed against. The Rubrick details nine criteria that the project as a whole will be marked upon, which we were shown at the beginning of the project and have been available for us to see since.  I found that, when looking at the module learning outcomes, they were written in a way that seemed incredibly vague, mentioning in broad terms how pieces of work may be "Satisfactory" to the project as a whole, and how other pieces of work that "Exceed Expectations" gain more marks than those that do not. The Rubrick does not give any definition for as to what a "Satisfactory" piece of work looks like. In this manner, when I self-assessed my work based on these Rubricks, I found it difficult to judge whether or not my work was "satisfactory" or whether or not it met "expectation...

Loading Screen Designs The next set of illustrations that I was set to complete were those of mock loading screens for our games, drawn in a similar style to my conceptual pieces, that would be shown in between game levels. These would, almost similar to the concept art, aim to show the general "feeling" of the game and artistically illustrate what players could expect in the level they are about to play. My first illustration, similar to my concept pieces, showed a large swathe of microplastic enemies overwhelming a meaty environment. In creating this, I followed largely the same process that I used when creating my previous pieces, beginning with a perspective sketch and drawing the scene atop it, then drawing line art over and filling in block colours before adding shading. In this piece, I tried to push the difference between the foreground, midground and background, and as such converted the piece to grayscale multiple times. This allowed me to see the overarching tonal ...