Peter Harries

I've drawn up a few thumbnail ideas for environments, the silhouette on some of them is a bit off. Anyway just thinking up scenes. Need to get back working in Maya soon!

I've taken some photo's to help me come up with ideas for our landscape for the nightmare world. I was thinking of having a landscape that really makes you feel like your in a massive environment. So I went for an adventure up the Preseli mountains in search of a bit of inspiration! Here is a taste of what I found... It was so, so cold up there...

Ben's created the Basic model of our main character, looking good so far.

Ben just e-mailed me with this, I think this suits the concept a lot better, looks a lot younger.

Based on our feedback yesterday I've put togeather a couple of moodboards on our character and first scene and a research sheet on tentacles. Oh and the title we have for our game at the moment is R.E.E.M. it mite turn out to be a bit of a working title and it doesnt actually stand for anything yet, but it sounds good :)

Ben has put drawn up that start of our first character sheet. This is the currently nameless boy that the player will take control of. Matt and I pointed out that the character looked slightly older than our original idea had him, so I think we're planning to develop this further.

Today we had feedback on our style sheets. The general vibe was good although we still have a few things to improve on. Our style sheet featured a scene from the start of the FMV as the main character is sleeping in bed shadowy tentacles creep out from underneath the bed to drag him off into a nightmae world. First render, no textures or lights. Second render, added some lights. Final render, the style sheet we showed today. The feedback we had was to define the tentacles more. Research tentacles to make ours more recognizable. Consider the light source, maybe add a window. Possibly add light to the lamp on the desk. Continue to work with the subtle palette but to have more variation on the colours and textures.

Our second set of storyboards! The story has changed quite a bit. The scene starts with a young boy asleep in his bed, as the camera pans out shadowy tentacles crawl out from under the bed and wrap the boy up and pull him through the bed into another world. As this happens the boy wakes up, He's in a dark shadowy world being dragged towards an unknown destination. There are other children, still asleep. The boy fights his way out of the grasp of the tentacles and falls to the ground as he breaks free. The boy stands up with the tentacles disappearing into the distance in a strange world. Rough boards, animatic mite have to wait so we can come up with a style sheet. Some amendments will be made, the other children being dragged away by the tentacles will be in sleeping positions. Also the bed won't break when the boy is pulled through to another dimension.

Since I last posted we've finished our first set of storyboards and made them into an animatic to show the class. The idea was that the gameplay would be strong enough to represent the game on it's own. So our animatic was a montage of in game footage of particularly spectacular parts of the game that communicated the feelings of being lost and alone. Tuesday afternoon we screened our animatics. unfortunately our idea of a montage of game footage didn't go down well and came across as very incoherent :( Because we went for a in game footage montage and the fact that the game is a first person mystery game made the animatic very difficult to understand. Also the fact that the player wakes up in a strange world not knowing who they are or why they are there was pointed out as being cliché. I do agree with most point, so back to the drawing board! We're storyboarding for a new animatic and tweaking our original game premise as we go. Ben has come up with an interesting ide