Over the course of my 3rd Year at Abertay I spent some time working on an as yet unreleased project with Eclectic Synthesis. The project title became Red Rampant over the course of my time working on it. This role was initially part of a university module which led on to further employment with the company once the term for that module had completed. I worked with a team of eight people to produce the first builds of the game in the combined role of Concept Artist and Character Texture Artist. I was also involved in play-testing the builds in order to work out and locate any bugs or errors that might need fixing.
In my role as Concept Artist I delivered several different kinds of work ranging from the development of character appearance and preparation for 3D modelling to rendering of game environments and basic environmental prop design. There were several characters involved in the game which I developed in two main batches. Firstly the player character and the immediately relevant npc’s they would be interacting with, namely their Mother and Father as well as the Alchemist character that was the main driving force of the plot.
Beginning with some basic silhouettes I received feedback on the different designs and moved on to creating more detailed turnarounds.
Once I had received feedback on each of these from the team I moved on to creating basic colour renders of each of them so that there would be some reference available for the texturing stage.
Having completed this collection of characters I returned to develop the remaining characters that would be featured in the build. These would be the players grandparents and aunt as well as their neighbours Arthur (a former warrior who will train the player how to use a sword) and Alana (The players best friend). Alana was written to be more relevant to the plot so I began by creating some thumbnails for her design. Having done that I repeated the process from before to create rendered turnarounds for each character.
Moving on from the initial line-work I began to render each of the characters to give more of an idea of form, volume and texture.
During the colour rendering of each character I needed to maintain a muted colour palette to match the simple clothing design. These characters are essentially peasants living in 12th/13th century highland Scotland and would therefore not have well made or expensive clothing. This proved to be an interesting design challenge which I very much enjoyed.
Later in the project development I returned to these character designs to develop more of the facial appearance of each character. This was as an aid to our 3D character artist so they might have more detailed reference for the character model.
For the environmental design we were provided with a map of the area as well as orthographic layouts of the buildings that the player would be able to access. Using these I created some concept paintings of the environment as well as three quarter perspective cut-aways to give a visual representation of the interior environments.
As the project developed we began to realise a more consistent visual style. See the visual style guide I helped to develop with our design team here: https://bit.ly/3P2JhtG
The style we were aiming for would enhance the magical feeling of the old history of Scotland through the use of soft forms and more saturated colours. The second environment painting I produced demonstrates this design choice and contrasts sharply with the first I developed.
By producing these interiors I was able to provide more visual context to our 3D environment artist for each different game space, in order to further develop the environment and characters and make the world feel more full and lived in I created a series of prop designs to flesh out the environments.
Having developed more of the environment I was tasked with creating some promotional imagery for the project. Using the ideas behind our visual style I created a few examples of work that would show off the setting and the characters.
As we began to approach the creation of a final build I was tasked with texturing the character models for the game. As I had limited experience with texturing models in 3D this gave me the opportunity to learn the basics of Substance Painter. Using that software and working with members of our design team I was able to create the textures for each character within the final build.
Overall I was incredibly pleased and feel very fortunate to have worked on this project with a group of such talented individuals. I learned an incredible amount about the nature of the game development pipeline as well as how to manage numerous new programs and pieces of software. I very much look forward to seeing the project develop from where I left it.