Altered States Part 2 - Final Evaluation

Upon finishing Altered States Part 1, I started a two week project to 'wrap up' the Altered States project. I could make whatever type of outcome I liked as long as it was completed within the two weeks, and it carried forward aspects of techniques and concepts learned within Part 1.

In this project, I decided to make one or two outcomes that relate to my chosen degree (Games Art) and the theme of Altered States.

I designed box art with a focus on colour for a game with the core concept of altered time and reality, demonstrating my skills in illustration as well as character and environment design.

Colour, time and reality - these were my main focuses while trying to come up with a game concept that I could illustrate for. Why time and reality? I went back to my original mind map for Altered States, and I tried to come up with new words that I could add to it, and these were the words that came to mind.

Since colour is the core focus for a lot of my work, it would make sense for it to be my biggest priority, but I felt that it must come after time and reality in this case, as it would follow them more naturally.

So what are the first things that come to mind when I think 'altered states of time and reality'?

My mind immediately went to steampunk. I absolutely adore steampunk - the fashion, the technology, the setting, everything! I'd been looking for an excuse to use steampunk in my work more, so the fact that it fit in so nicely with this brief was perfect. On top of that, I felt that it would potentially fill a gap in the market to make a game centred around steampunk. While there are definitely games out there with a steampunk vibe, there aren't many modern video games that fully meet the criteria for a truly 'steampunk game'.

Other ideas I had were dystopia, parallel worlds, time travel, futuristic worlds and such.

I felt that the typical futuristic vibe, where it's all sci-fi space travel and minimalistic designs, is a little bit overdone and I wanted to make something more unique, so I disregarded it.

Dystopia however caught my attention far more. There are so many ways a dystopian society could form and progress, and for so many reasons. As a concept, I would have a lot more room to 'play around'.

I didn’t want to choose between steampunk and dystopia, so I combined them instead. I decided that I should build my game concept around two parallel worlds, one beautiful and steampunk, the other a grim dystopian reality. I made some mood sheets at this point to kick things off.

Before starting any design work, even with my mood sheets complete, I wanted to make sure I looked at some games that I have played to help me with my design choices.

I chose two games to look at in depth- one being 'Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA MegaMix' so that I could look at a large range of animated videos in order to study the colour choices, the other being 'Professor Layton and the Lost Future' so that I could study the way they tackled my other two themes, time and reality.

The first thing that I decided to do after a lot of research was create some thumbnail sketches in order to decide on composition. I managed to come up with 6 different versions before I ran out of ideas, then I took my sketchbook around to my peers and asked them to vote on which ones they liked best. I narrowed it down to 2 candidates and chose from there.

After the composition sketches, I sketched anything that came to mind as a warmup, not necessarily anything that would be useful for the project. However, with my previous research in mind, the simple sketches turned out to be useful in the end. I modified what I came up with to fit better later.

I refined the designs for my character’s two looks and the environment design in Procreate.

Once I had finished the designing stage, I moved on to my final piece. At this point, I had decided to make two final pieces rather than just one, in the form of two variations of the same illustration.

I encountered a couple of hurdles throughout drawing my final pieces, like problems with my time-lapse that I was relying on for documentation.

When I’m drawing and I get ‘in the zone’, I often forget to take breaks, so I set alarms to make sure I don’t work for too many hours solid. Due to this level of focus, I can never remember to take in progress screenshots, no matter how hard I try, hence the time-lapse.

I was able to have a time-lapse in the end, it just doesn’t look as clear or professional as I had hoped. I have learned valuable lessons for next time, so the next one should look a lot better.

The problems I encountered include the video appearing upside down for sections and parts of my process being difficult to see. Next time, I will take the time to edit the time-lapse after I have finished if anything appears upside down, and I know how to prevent the visual issues now.

While I am a little frustrated that the video itself isn’t exactly the way I had hoped, I didn’t let it get me down, and I wrote a description of everything that I did in order to make it as clear as possible, and I feel that it is a good enough substitute this time around.

I am very pleased with the way that my final pieces turned out. I think my favourite bit of what I produced is the style of colouring I went with for the characters. It was fun and refreshing to step out of my usual comfort zone with it, but I didn’t step too far out, so I didn’t get caught up in teaching myself too many new things in a short period of time. I would quite like to practice this method of colouring more.

I am also very pleased with the background. Environments have never really been my strong suit when drawing, so I am very happy that I was able to pull it out of the bag for this project. I feel that practicing backgrounds more in my spare time wouldn’t be a bad idea.

As for what I feel I could improve, I would say I need to get back in touch with the basics again. I know that when something gets easy, you should push yourself more, but for me it appears that in streamlining my practice to make it easier, I have cut out some of my fundamentals. Now that I have noticed this, in order to improve I am going to put some more practice into the basics of things like anatomy.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I am proud of what I have achieved.