Onward and Upward

Well its the hand in deadline so I though it was a good idea to neatly bookend this section of my project with a nice reflective post about what I have learned and how I will advance my project next term.

I had my final Project Alpha presentation in which I gave a (probably) half-hearted summary of my concept and my progress, gritted my teeth and stared blankly into the middle distance trying to absorb as much insight from my tutors as possible. One piece of advice that was so glaringly obvious I don't know how it possibly didn't twig earlier is that I should put the same same level of commitment to silliness that is in the Capital Ships into everything else. With the Destroyers I became so preoccupied chasing the modular, hard sci-fi aesthetic that I forgot about the element of fun that was supposed to imbue this project. So the future should be more matryoshkas and football and less aluminium tubes.

I will also focus on a bit more character work, to give a human face to these factions. At the end of the day a character concept artist is what I want to be. It then might then seem odd that I, an aspiring character artist, would choose to do such a non-character heavy final project and you're probably right to think that it is. But I chose such a spaceship heavy project for two reasons:

1. To get me to draw something else, to broaden my horizons and force myself to think about conceptulising in a way I wouldn't otherwise. And

2. I like hard sci-fi (the aesthetic more so than the genre) and decided that a project was an excellent excuse to actually push me to explore it, albeit with a decidedly humorous (read: piss-taking) theme.

So that's that. I'll savor the brief respite I get over Christmas before Project Beta begins and then get to work on more exiting things next turn. Bigger, better ship concepts, character paint-ups, GUI mock-ups yada yada yada yada yada...

See you then.    

The Destroyer

For what I would argue is my first real step into some serious conceptulising for this project I decided to go about designing the ins and outs of the Destroyer class of vessel. As we have already established the Destroyers are the main damage dealers of your fleet and with them being the main constituent of your fleet I though it would be a good idea to develop them first.

Destroyers are modular ships, or at least more so than the other classes. Unlike the Capital ships and the Support Frigates which are composed of two pieces, the engines and main ship part (whatever you'd call that. Superstructure perhaps?), Destroyers are composed of three pieces, the Bow, the Main Truss and the Engines. The front middle and back as it stands. With the layout pre-established it was only natural that I began proper design work afterwards.

I started with some sketches in my sketchbook with one page for the Russians and one for the Americans.

The CAC designs are more chaotic and asymmetrical. The USA follows an opposite school of aesthetic with the designs being more orderly and symmetrical.  

These were both fun and excruciating to produce.

Et viola. The constituent parts for the ships. But Quinn? You ask, weren't the ships also supposed to have solar panels and weapons, where are those?

I'm glad you asked.

Solar panels, radiators, guns and missile pods all waiting to be copied and pasted at a moments notice.

And this is where the real fun begins. Thanks to the modular nature of the Destroyers I can use my concepts of modules to make concepts of actual ships.

Hashed together concepts with arbitrary names.

The idea is that different parts will have different pros and cons. Some engines will be faster than others but hold less fuel, some trusses will have better armour than others but hold less weaponry and some bows will hold more crew than others but weigh more, making your ship slower. 

Solar panels likewise give your ship more available energy but weigh it down. Radiators allow your ship's systems to cool down quicker making action turnaround faster, but they likewise add weight.

Parts of the Destroyer.

A later concept of a Destroyer (R) reconciled with my earlier concept for the general layout. Note that the bridge and truss have swapped positions.

Meet Boris

As I further developed my ideas I did I nice little paint up of a spacesuited CAC astronaut.

Meet Boris, a happy moon-bouncing, gun-toting madman of an astronaut. But he didn't come out the press all neat and painted.

No. As with any painting I started with a quick sketch which I developed into the line work for the painting.

Cue a few hours of eye-drying screen staring and carpel tunnel inducing tablet scratching and we ended up with this:

Looks like the finished piece doesn't it? But it isn't. Following some feedback from one of my tutors (hi Steve) I softened the bounce lighting on his extremities from the lunar surface and neatened up the CAC script on his helmet. These final touch ups created the final piece.

It was also brought to my attention that the rim lighting on the left hand side was incorrect as it appears on the same side as the light is coming from. It should indeed be on right (Boris' left). I'll keep this in mind for my future rim lighting endevours. 

Emblems

Emblems, or symbols or logos or embellishments or whatever you want to call them are very important in communicating across not just who the ship belongs to in this game but tells you about the ethos of said faction being communicated. At least that's the vague notion I ran with in my head as I set about concepting (not a word but roll with me people) various emblem ideas of the two factions.

Stars are key in the emblem's of both factions (go figure). The CAC is bold with red and yellow and a healthy amount of hammer-and-sickles. The USA is stark and militaristic with blue and white and old-school style stencil type.

While I'm quite partial to errrrr all of them, for the Russians I decided to go with design no. 11, for the yanks I went with design no. 8. 

The Big, The Bad and The Just Plain Silly

With the types and style and blah blah blah of my ship varieties established I jumped into developing a few ideas for the capital ships of both factions. This was also a good opportunity to shoe-horn a few not-so-subtle references the the background cultures of the USA and CAC. This, perhaps it should be said, is not a serious game after all but a stylised and slightly humorous look at the Cold War conflict transplanted into space, a Cold War 2: Spaceship Boogaloo if you will.

I has been brought to my attention that the shading on these ships is a little egregious especially
in regards to the yellow lettering on the left side of the hulls which stands out seemingly unconcerned with natural laws.
I like it from an artistic standpoint on these designs but will make sure to rectify it in the future.

Soviet-Space-Sphere, Matryoshka Ship and Saint Basil's Space Dome make an appearance for the CAC 

In the American corner we have an Atomic Space Cone, the Clinton of Libery (keeping in mind this was drawn back when Hillary still had a fighting chance and there was still some hope in the world) and a Foooooooootttttbbbbbaaaaaaaaaalllllllll. 

Spaceship Flavours

With some scrawls laid down and some ideas planted fast in my mind I got to work on the preliminary designs for the game's spacecraft. By this point I knew I wanted to vary the nature of the ships and did this by developing three different classes of ship:

Capital Ships were to be the biggest and baddest of the bunch. They are also slow movers and big targets.

Destroyers are your modular damage dealer, they make up the main bulk of your fleet. Their job is to lay waste to the enemy with their vast arsenals of guns, missiles, lasers and everything in between.  

Support Frigates are shuttle craft with huge engines bolted to the back of them. They are the smallest and the fastest ships tasked with either healing and damage mitigation or recon. They are also the weakest vessels.

The differences and relative size differences are summarised above.

Meet Brad

In the proceeds of fleshing out more ideas a did a paint up of a US astronaut:

Smug grin, tiny flag, jacked torso and no calf definition all squeezed into a tight fitting spacesuit complete with fishbowl helmet. What more could one ask for from America's finest.

Some Sketches

Of course I, like any other burgeoning concept artist worth his salt (stop laughing), carry a sketchbook around as often as I can. In it I did a few scribbles to help the ideas of Delta-V get a grip in my mind. Here they are:

Russian spacesuits, Kalash pistols, symbols and spaceships galore

Scribble of an American spacesuit, a spaceship, a spaceship captain, a CAC emblem idea
and an emblem for a faction we do not speak of anymore. 

Monkey-armed American in a football inspired spacesuit. Exaggerated musculature and proportions
were floated around inside my head a a means to further differentiate between the two factions.

Also guest staring an early Photoshop sketch of a Russian serviceman:

He's called Sergei in case you're curious.

Factions and Ships

So we have Space-Yanks and Space-Charlie, which is all well and good but what sets apart our ideologically dichotomous friends from one another in terms of aesthetics and design? To answer this question I, of course, developed some moodboards.

Looking at the space technology of both the US and USSR I came up with some rough guiding principles for the aesthetics of my two factions.

USA: The American designs were to be sleeker and more sophisticated in appearance to their Soviet counterparts. They were to be symmetrical and clean in appearance with white, blue and silver being the predominant colour palette.

CAC: The Soviet designs are more hashed together with style sacrificed for practicality. They look older and more bashed up and utilise a much more eclectic colour palette including the colours red, orange, cream, yellow, green and white.

Both factions will also feature egregious references to their respective native cultures, predominantly in the design of their capital ships.

Speaking of ships, I had to design some of them. Spaceships fighting in space is the main theme of the game after all. So I hashed out some quick ideas for the two sides in the only way to hash out quick ideas, on a big Photoshop canvas with a thick round brush:

USA Concepts.

CAC Concepts.

I got some good ideas from sleek cones to shuttles with huge burners thrown on to ungainly cylinders thrown together with reckless abandon and an engine stuck on for good measure.

   

A Space-based RTS Concept

Now to address the elephant in the room, yes the deadline for this project is the the 30th of November and yes the date stamp on this first blog post says the it was posted on the 27th but with good reason... Okay not a good reason but a viable reason and that reason is that I have completely blanked on the password for my previous progress blog (it was a Tumblr blog in case you were wondering), so instead of letting my hair go grey with stress and raking out my eyeballs with my fingernails trying to remember a password that has long ejected itself from my brain (YES! I know, I should have written it down. Shut up.) I though I'd go back to Ol' Reliable and make myself a Blogger blog.

Good, now that that's cleared up onto the real content.

The brief for the project is fairly simple: produce a portfolio of pre-production work that will go on the be developed and displayed in some interactive way to cement your understanding of work in the videogame industry. Or something like that. You must also be able to describe your role under a single title, which is easy for me: Concept Artist.

Project Alpha, which is the name of this first term project which will go on to for the basis of next term's project, Project Beta which is pretty much just Project Alpha with more meat thrown on its projecty bones. For my Project Alpha I decided to develop the concept art for a hypothetical 2.5D space-based real time strategy game called (oh so imaginatively) Delta-V (pronounced Delta-Five, it's a pun on Delta-Vee you know, the amound of thrust needed... oh forget it. I get it it's a great pun!).

DELTA-FIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVEEEEE!!!

Delta-V sees you take control of a Fleet admiral of one of two factions; the United Systems of America (USA) or the Soviet Systems Alliance (CAC). Yes, it is the cold war in space, if that wasn't obvious enough.

As Fleet Admiral you take your armada into battle to take control of planetary systems which can be used for research, resources and colonies to make you better and battling and controlling planetary systems. It's quite simple really.