Week 1 of Big Game Project - Introduction

I have now entered the first week of production in the course Big Game Project or BGP for short. BGP is a course in which several groups takes on the task of making a game in ten weeks. My role in my group is that of a lead artist, to ensure that the graphics look appealing and uniform. As a lot of the course is preparation, reflection and reports the actual production time for the game is eight weeks.

So what is the project I am working on? I am working on Gravity Grind, a racing game which takes place in a giant scrapyard. The game is set on a planet that is covered with junk and scrap, some buildings remain but most of them have been reduced to rubble. The game draws inspiration from other games like Wipeout HD and F-ZERO GX.

As a lead artist my first task was to create a style guide for the project, this style guide is meant to help us artists and guide us to have uniform visuals, to ensure that we're on the same page. At first I struggled with the style guide, as I have never done a style guide for this big of a production. There's a lot of research involved and it ended up taking a lot of time. I'll link the style guide below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/myc277vfaqukutr/Styleguide_GravityGrind.pdf?dl=0

I'm pleased with how the style guide turned out and that counts for both the look of it and the content itself. Although there is only four pages, it still communicates the necessary information well. Aside from the style guide I have been active with other stuff this week. That includes a lot of mockups, various editor work in Unity and  starting on making the racing tracks for the game. Below is one of the mockups I made for the game. It was an early prototype to iterate on what kinds of tracks we can have in the game.

Aside from all the art assets produced, I recently got involved with Shader Forge. It's a plugin for Unity that allows you to create shaders with a node-based system, much like in Unreal Engine 4. It's a neat program which allows you to visually create shaders without the need for coding.

That's it for me this week, a bit short but I'm saving the good stuff for next week, see you then!