FMP Week 1 : Initial Concepts

Back from the holiday break and right into my Final Major Project. It's the first the week of the project and I've been really enjoying working on the starting concept project.

For summary my Final Major Project is to create a 3D game environment that fits a game in the Moba genre. I'm a big fan of the genre in part due to the beautiful and stylish hand painted art style that is often used. For me a good part of this environment project will be those high quality hand painted textures. Right now the design process is less about that and more about the initial designing process and creating the two sides of the map.

For this environmet I want there to be two very distinct different sides that represent the two teams the game would be played with. My initial idea was to have a town and castle on one side and monsters invading from a mine on the other. The first step on this project is as usual the reference gathering stage.

After that initial stage was some quick thumbnails absed on the three key parts of my level. For this project there's going to be atleast three focal points that will be used as showing points for my project. The Blue side, the orange side and the middle where the two meet.

I took these thumbnails and saw what worked best. Seeing what worked changed my first ideas. Having a full town environment would be too cluttered and one of the most important things about hte Moba genre that I have to follow is the concept of clarity. So instead I'm thinking of working more on the ancient ruin idea. An environment on the blue side that is old and powerful and filled with magic. Similarly the original idea to have the orange side be monsters I slightly twisted. The image of a sort of earth elemental demon coming from the ground I found worked really well. The dichotamy between the two sides, ancient magic verses raw elemental monsters was really starting to come together.

For the middle of the map I was fairly sure I would take my first idea. Many games in this genre have rivers that coarse through the map and I would of loved to do that but I believe over all that a river with running water would be too difficult to achieve requiring a lot more time on engine than I have. The big thing about this project is trying to manage my time. This is doubley hard for me because of my health concerns taking a lot of time so I have to be very time concious.

Here is my working sketch of the entire map. It has clearly defined sides. I was given feedback to experiment with having the project be less symetrical and while I did play with that idea in some quick sketches I believe I won't take that as that might risk losing the fair moba feeling I want. I actually like the look of it being symetrical with similar themes on each side.

The next step was designing both the Towers, or turrets, and the bases for each side. The towers in Moba games are large defensive structures that fire upon enemies and must be destroyed. The bases are the key objectives that each team are trying to defend and usually represent some kind of power source. With that in mind I wanted to create things that fit the theme of each side.

These are the designs and the process I took for the blue side. This side is going to be very magical and ancient. Some of the main feedback I got at the start showing these ideas was to stick to one theme. I was playing with the idea of combining some fantasy and sci fi together with some more gun and electrical themes and now I've decided to make that much more subtle if I'm going to include it at all. Instead the blue side is going to have powerful crystal power, and bright blue glowing energy. Getting opinions from others I decided on these two ideas. The tower with its obelisk deisgn I'm very happy with. It's shape is imposing and fits perfectly. The base with the crying faces I'm a fan of because a crying woman being this sides motif is somewhat ominous. My current plan is for this to be the goddess of this side of the map who is worshipped and appears in several points. I'm also a big fan of the well of power idea, perhaps even a liquid contents of blue energy.

The orange side is not the clean magical ruins of the blue side. The orange side of the map is going to be inhabited by, or perhaps being invaded by, these elemental rock and magma beasts. I'm a big fan of this idea and knew I wanted to try it from the moment it came to me. The base for this side was easier to design. People I asked thought that there being multiple faces or heads was far more interesting than anything else and I am a big fan of having both bases for both sides have a multi faced motif. The tower for this side was much harder. There was no clear obvious choice such as the obelisk for the blue side. I liked the idea of the hand coming from the ground, if we had faces coming from the rock why not other body parts. It could shoot, or swing at enemies. But the original idea didn't quite work. To match the obelisk on the other side of the map the hand idea had to be taller and thinner. If both sides matched like that it would look much nicer.

While I did some minor variations on this colour theme I think this hits the nail on the head. The main colour for each side is a light blue and lightish orange. I wanted to subvert the usual norms games take using red and blue or white and black just alittle. I also find the image of that more orange vibrant magma quite interesting. These aren't the final colours by any stretch and one of my main things to work on next week are more detailed drawings of areas of the game and the colours I want to use. I want to have vibrant colour but also not stupid and garish colour. That might be a very hard line to tread. For example I'm not sure on how I will have grass on the blue side, altough I do like the mixing of slight turquoise colours in with it to make the theme fit more. One thing I want to do but I'm stopping myself is making the left blue side very light and the right orange side very dark. It would make sense with clean ruins and dark lava and rocks but it would go against the theme of the genre, go against clarity. Having the same bounds of tone on both sides is important. Though I may need to play with how I use them.

This week has been very productive. Although I think I could of done more i've taken some massive steps. Next week is going to be another week of concept. Now that I have the main parts of the level done, the rough ideas and the gameplay buildings I want to do workable sketches of other assets. Trees and rocks and buildings. They don't have to be amazing but enough for me to build from. If I have further time then some bigger paintings that clearly show each side of the map that could be used to show each sides theming. If that can't be done in time then it's not the biggest stress. More important right now is the functional concepts to build from.

#GameArt #FMP #Concept