Negotiated Project - Opening

Hello there! This is (supposed) to be the journal for my Negotiated project. Let me give a preface similar to the Hindsight 20/20 one in a previous post (Please look at that if you haven't seen it already).

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Preface

So, this it my Negotiated Project. Or well, it's meant to be. To be honest, there's very little available for the Negotiated Project. Hopefully, the rest of my work makes up for it - especially with the Platformer Project. So you'll have to deal with what little there is for my Negotiated project.

I am disappointed in myself. I have been for a long time now, knowing what my Negotiated Project was like. I effectively had what felt like an Art Block during this all; I probably spent more time looking at a white screen trying to figure out what to draw more than actually drawing. I'll probably be expressing this throughout the Journal here, so be warned.

Also, like in the hindsight 20/20 post, I didn't document my thoughts as well as I should have. These are all post-project thoughts, but they're basically the same as they were at the time. Also, instead of being listed in a week-by-week basis, the post is listed in parts. This is because, if I did it week-by-week, each post would be very short.

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From even before we started the project, I was worried. I wanted to keep working on my game. I feel that Art is not my strongest aspect, and have been like that for a long time. I know, practice and practice - but with how I am, effectively a perfectionist, I always find things to hate about my work. Things that I don't like, but don't have the skill to improve - at least to the standard that I want it to be. Usually, I 'finish' a piece thinking 'I could do better'. In fact, it's rare that I don't think that. I'd definitely be happier if it was a less common occurrence.

Now, for my Learning Agreement. Though I wasn't the most excited about it, I knew I had to have a plan of sorts. One that I felt - no, knew - that  I would stray far from. But, here's what I had originally planned:

For my Negotiated Project, I will expand on my Platformer project world and explore the possibilities of where I could’ve taken the game – with both ideas I had during the project and ideas I will think of during the Negotiated Project.

The game I created during the Platformer project was a 2.5D action-platformer, featuring the ability to teleport a short distance at will. I created this with a mix of 3D models and 2D artwork in a minimalist style, and will expand on this idea and delve into what the game could look like in a more refined style. The game I ended up with in the Platformer project took place entirely underground, I want to explore the possibility of environments in the context of the game world, including exploring the world above ground.

To give a meaningful context to the development, rather than just exploring these possibilities for the sake of it, I am going to explore the concept of duality. Within my game, there are two prominent features of the world – the ‘good’ player side, and a ‘dark’ void side, which serves as the antagonist of the game. I did not have the chance to explore it for the project, but I would be interested in exploring the concept of duality within the context of my game. Perhaps exploring the concepts of being a ‘necessary evil’ and making use of Environmental Storytelling would be something I want to explore.

I will achieve this by focusing on the environment, the world itself, along with potential assets for use in the game. To start with, I will be creating a visual ‘storyboard’ of the level, showing off the various parts of the environment that the player would progress through focusing on the colour schemes and visual points tthat the area would have. I will then select a few of these resulting pieces and expand on them, creating more detailed and interesting pieces.

From these resulting pieces, I will extract parts of them and use these parts to create usable assets – including variations of these assets would allow me to create a diverse amount of modular pieces for use in the game. What I created in the Platformer project was visually similar throughout the entirety of the game, and I will experiment with adding more variety to this.

For assessment I will include:

Thumbnails/ blockouts of level areas

1 Level Storyboard

full pieces based on chosen thumbnails

A collection of modular assets

In the work following, you might notice that this doesn't follow the Learning Agreement at all. I had a plan, wanted to try to follow it, but I noticed a major flaw from the very start. I'll be going over that in the next post, so please look forward to it.