Joshua Gardener - Concept Artist - Game Cover

For the final of my work as concept artist, under the production art is the production of the game cover, the piece that goes out and serves as physical marketing to the masses.

And here it is;

On designing this i made sure to carefully assess our games strengths in order to best design the cover to appeal to an audience that is recipient to those themes. since our game has strong story and environment usage my cover became focused on the mystery invoked by our game rather than being character focused. Additionally popular trends right now are character focused covers, so being an exception to that rule should help us stand out from the crowd.

The imagery in the cover is the things left behind by our protagonist, leaving an omen of what is to become of him, thus evoking intrigue to our story. the short passage at the back is also meant to go hand in hand with that to flesh out the story with only the cover itself.

In terms of the production of the cover, i made use of photos i had taken of my own pocket watch alongside a pair of glasses, to get the right perspective for crafting the drawing, modifying things where needed and then building it up from there. 

The cover worked largely as a composite and test for everything i had learned thus far, good imagery and colour usage, sourcing material to aid my construction or for proper usage on the cover to give indication to age and our company.

As such i am proud of this cover, it definitely pushed me to be much better at digital painting than i had been previously, and stretched my efforts of resourcefulness to their limits.

This has been a very intense project, and i had a blast working with the other lovely members of the team, hats of to them and this is Joshua Gardener, signing off.


Sources used in the construction of the image;

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/stack-vintage-books-10121481.jpg

Book stack

https://a.1stdibscdn.com/archivesE/upload/8419/3935/8419_1337812600_4.jpg

Desk Texture

http://media.kotaku.foxtrot.future.net.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2015/01/pegi_ratings_system.png

Pegi age ratings and criteria

http://static.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1253/12539083/2378034-9794697466-pc-dv.png

PC game logo

http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/splashscreen-jpg.16690/

Unity Logo

http://bgfons.com/upload/books_texture3025.jpg

book texture

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/tf2freakshow/images/d/d8/Steam-logo.png/revision/latest?cb=20121224140150

Steam Logo

http://orig02.deviantart.net/8a74/f/2007/223/b/4/old_crackly_parchment_texture_by_teeth_man.png

Parchment Texture

Joshua Gardener - Concept Artist - Animated Intro

Nearing the end of production, my next job covers the creation of stills for a intro sequence for our game; these i created by mimicking old silent films to better compensate for our lack of voice acting.

To accompany this the still are almost all in first person as i want the surprise of the main character being a ghost to be the final reveal, and hence leave the player with some sense of impact on the events, keeping them in the dark almost as much as the main character himself.

The stills were overall quite challenging to do as i wanted to make an effective opening considering the restraints that we had, hence i made a slow paced intro the made the most of each shot, not needing the movement of an animation to convey the message of the start of the story well to the player.

Joshua Gardener - Concept Artist - Gameflow Storyboard

Next from me as concept artist is the Gameflow storyboard, this document is meant to show the in game progression and pathing from a narrative point of view.

The slides themselves are designed to tell the story itself, so i won't repeat myself here. however i will elaborate on the importance of capturing the game flow as a storyboard, by laying out the game we've made as a story it helps the team figure out what aspects are interesting and where we can improve as game designers, as this allows us to view our story from a slightly more distant view.

overall we hope to intruige people with the narrative of the game, especially by ending the vertical slice with a cliffhanger of a locked room murder discovery. aspects like this are key within the industry itself as it means you are drawing more people back to your product when it is fully released.

Joshua Gardener - Concept Artist - Art Bible

For my next role as concept artist i have prepared the Art bible for the team; the art bible being a visual representation of what we should be going for when we develop the game, this being to keep the team more focused when making design decisions.

The art style for instance we went for is dark and slightly Gothic, emphasising dark colours with higher contrasts between light and dark, this also means we overall have to be careful of our placement of light within the scene as this affects how the player observes the scene.

The character we opted for is a professor/scientist looking character who as a result of early events becomes a ghost, for this we have the design for pre death and post death of the character. in life he has a fairly dusty and grim colour scheme, reflecting the dark times of being on the German side near the end of world war 1. when a ghost the main character is covered in a spectral mist.

Our Gothic styling meant that our level of detail had to take into account a fairly good amount of detail to capture the withered or decayed imagery typically present in Gothic art. so our emphasis on the stone and wood textures is important. its also effective to remind ourselves that we need our propaganda image and books to be fairly good quality because of our setting and narrative. so it helps remind us then need of backing up our design decisions due to narrative assertions. 

We strongly asserted early on that our camera was going to be highly controlled, making use of systems like seen in games like Until Dawn, our camera is specifically set to display our scene in controlled angles in order to provide more atmospheric camera angles, whether this is to present the environment in a more aggressive way, or to unsettle our players is up to us.

Colour palette's are fairly straight forward, yet are important to remind ourselves of, good uses of grey scale applies excellent contrast in the scene, while our pale tones make our ghost theme more prevalent.

Retreading some ground, we reinforce our setting atmosphere, with the importance for our game to be on the emptyness and cold nature of the environment, so the absence of heat in the environment is crucial as a reminder.

moving onto technical guidelines which act as a good group reminder for how to organise and conduct themselves within programs in order to make sure other members in the group can find their work or identify which pieces they are.

Lastly it all comes down to our inspirations, the art style moodboard received some fabulous inspirations from Bloodborne and Resident Evil, to Tim Burton's unique creepy drawings, and movie's like hotel Transylvania provide some charm to the darker Gothic styling.

The art bible was quite a large source of work, the effort of trying to make sure you sum up many of the key factors for the team to remember in a few pages of a document is definitely challenging. like the excellent examples i was able to find the importance of showing and not just telling is something i was trying to implement.

Joshua Gardener - Concept Artist - General concepts

Hello i'm Joshua Gardener and i am the concept artist for Etherial Games;

Our Group Comprises of; 

Craig Lang as our Game Designer
Rastislav Smolen as our Character Artist
Myself as Concept Artist
Ben Matthews as Environment Artist

My Role;

As concept artist i am someone who looks at the earlier stages of production, working on the ideas we are using in the game, and focusing them to the point where our the other members of the team can use them in making final assets for the game slice we are creating. An example like,character artist for instance can then go and use my work to build a character model in unity. in this respect the concept artist has a lot of working in the early game, rather than the late game.

Progress and Setting Up;

Now at this point and time the team has already discussed some of the basic facts and ideas for our game, and we've got a little bit of a grasp on what is going to be going on in our game.

As our two themes of the game that were selected for us, we got; Library and World War 1.

From this we garnered that our setting was in an abandoned library, with the setting being the closing days of World War 1, and our main character was a professor who got caught digging too deep into some of the last projects aimed at trying to turn the tide of the war.

First Milestone Presentation;

For our first Milestone we had to present the material we had made so far in a bid to sell our game and test our concepts to our Publishers (teachers). For this i showed some various pieces of concept art covering some of the basis of design; characters, environment etc.

This was the initial image i gave the group on what i pictured our game to look like, with there being dynamic camera angles, with our character placed in the scene, and on top of that some closer views of what investigating various areas might cover. We have since changed this idea slightly, but the general imagery of using all of these ornate bookshelves, with camera angles that make good use of the environment and character placement for added atmosphere, have remained consistent. 

The character placement is now more akin to dino crisis and the old resident evil's.

Another aspect i got to show off was an idea for the layout of the level, based on some talking between me and Ben our environment artist, i wanted to have a go at constructing how the level might appear. And also to get an idea of how it would flow, at least from an aerial view. We wanted two floors, seating area's, some offices, and of course a lot of bookshelves. and i worked to combine them in a convincing and well constructed floor plan.

Moving on i wanted to start constructing the look of our character, and get a more rigid idea of the direction both I and the team wanted to bring him in; i started basing these idea's from a great idea from Rastislav and through some independent research. What we where aiming to capture here is a man in his late forties on-wards, with signs of age, glasses to indicate his intelligence or position.

All these aspects i made efforts to capture in different ways through some bust designs.

Lastly, to solve a problem that came up while discussing our character and his death, i wanted to show how our character might have died, following some inspiration from games like Murdered: Soul Suspect, i concepted the idea that our main character, Franz, had been shot once through the eye. this had obviously killed him, but in death the cause of death changes, the eye dulls and goes grey in colour, while its surrounding flesh becomes scripted with magical runes. this was my way of adding some flavour and flair to detail within our narrative.

That's all for this post, from now i will be breaking down the elements i have to concept, showing my research, development and finalisation of ideas to use within the game.