Concept
After the feedback we got from our client and a careful team discussion, we decided to go for the "City builder" concept. Since the overall concept was still very raw, we decided to allocate some time for individual research and development of the concept with potential solutions. I started creating my concept with some desk research of existing city builder games, emphasizing mechanics that could be interesting to our product. Then, I looked into what are some relevant climate change related threats to Dutch cities. In this way I came up with a city builder game with the following key aspects:
The user needs to protect the city of Rotterdam from inland floods
Little changes to the infrastructure influence the overall climate change, thus the city could get less flooded
The user is able to travel between future and present versions of the city
*More details about the concept can be found in the image below
I presented the concept during a team meeting in which we dissected all the ideas, creating a final product concept based on diverse visions.
Art Research
Because of technical issues, I could only participate partially in the general art research, where the global artistic direction was researched by the team. Instead, I had the opportunity to later individually research on the potential art styles for the effects (ex.: smoke or fire) and shaders (ex.: water). I started the research by asking myself "What does the client/product need and how will the art style help achieve it?". By answering that question and spending some time on desk research of existing art styles, I found 4 potential styles for our product, noting down their advantages and disadvantages. Next week, during an artist meeting within the team, 1 style will be picked and a stylesheet for effects/shaders will be created.
*More details about the styles can be found in the image below
Mood board
Together with another artist we worked on the mood board (board containing images that convey the overall mood of the product). Since our city will have 3 states overall (improved state, current state and degraded state), we decided to divide the mood board in 3 according parts for each state.
The images were selected based on the specific color we picked for each mood.
The mood board also contains additional ideas of how visual queues can be used for building the mood.
Learning
This week I continued mainly to work on my procedural geometry generation learning goal. I continued with the second week of the Houdini course that I am following.
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