AGI STUDIO 1 - Week 1 Folio Plan Proposal

1. Rationale: Intention

I am interested in building strange yet immersive worlds, possibly in areas that are often less portrayed and explored in current media. Two brainstormed examples include: 

1. Underwater Restaurant (occupied by aquatic dwellers such as reverse mermaids of all size and shapes, the player is served all kinds of strange and potentially inedible foods, fine dining setting

2. Shan Hai Jing (An ancient chinese literature/book that records mythical geography and creatures, the player is a ‘zoologist’ of the time whom aims to capture these creatures within scrolls and ultimately complete this literature/book)

These examples provided rarely have fully fleshed representations in the western game industry, and hopefully my works will feed some insight to the community of their potentials.

2. Context: Field

My field would be game design, with a heavy touch of concepting and illustration during its initial planning stage.

As for my first example, I would be looking at games such as No Man’s sky, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Daniel Ferguson’s Ascent of Grob’s Domain. These games all rely on their wacky yet light-hearted gameplay. and players discover all sorts of strange looking creatures with derpy behaviour.

For my second example, I would look to open-world, survival craft games such as Ark: Survival Evolved, Valheim, and also creature collecting games such as Pokemon for gameplay content.

3. Method

My project will follow this general guideline: Mood boarding, initial concepting (rough sketches to figure out the ‘feel’ of the game), gray boxing, finalised concepting (2D illustration).

If time proves sufficient, some 3D modelling will be completed for the environment, and ambience music will be added.

4. Production: Tools

Week 1 - Mood Boarding: Completed at the very start of the project on Pinterest

Week 2 - Initial Concepting: Very quick illustrations at the early stages in Photoshop

Week 3 - Gray Boxing: Probuilder on Unity 

Week 4 & Week 5 - Finalised Concepting (2D illustration) - Rendered in Photoshop

Week 6 - Finalising touches 

(If 3D modelling could be added, then this would be completed in Maya, Zbrush (if models prove complex), Substance painter (texturing))