###### tags: 21359999_1J5Z1019_production_log.md

# 21359999_1J5Z1019_production_log.md

## Week 2
I am writing this in week 2, but the work mainly made for this week, was made on week 1. I designed a concept piece for the overlord character in our game, going for a demon aesthetic as the game was to take place in hell. I really wanted a flesh and armour look. The colour helped with that with the red muscle underneath and the red blemishes on the grey armour plates which really ties everything together.

---
The next steps would be doing some character designs and see what the rest of the group think of the designs and see if they think it fits with the others people have drawn up. That way we have a few different designs we can choose from. Also, I'll be editing some of my slides so that they are better for the HCP presentation.

---

## Week 3
This week we refined the Powerpoint in accordance with Andrew's feedback. Getting our research in there and adding videos to my slides, that way it was a lot easier to get my point across than trying to explain the image. We would have presented it this week, but unfortunately Andrew was ill, so we couldn't do that, but I did do some work looking into characters. Just doing designs that I thought looked good, taking inspiration from dark souls and For Honor.

I wanted to create a bit of a stylised samurai, something a bit different, keeping with the medieval theme, but something that wasn't a knight, just to see what the team thought. The consensus was that I would make a good miniboss, which is something I agreed with.


For these, I took the mini boss idea and went with it. First designing the helmet and then pushing ahead with the full design. Looking at the Dark Souls Ornstein character for inspiration along with the Solsthime guards from Skyrim. I really like the blotchy mottled look. I think its quite unique, but I also wanted to see what it would look like in a metal look, like my original style. I still need to run this past the group to see what they think and see if it needs toning down in detail.

---

## Week 4
Despite the problems with trains, this week was very productive, eventhough only 3 of us were in, we still got a lot done, looking into references and then getting our ideas collated and then being able to allocate jobs and try to inform the other members of what we discussed. We decided that we wanted 4 overlords, all with different themes and enemy types to go along with that. We also liked the idea of having one central enemy that would change in accordance with whatever overlord was present at the time, so we thought about a robot. I'd already made a design for the demon overlord, so I took over doing the designs for that and then created some standard templates for a robot that could be added onto and then I made the demon version of it. I will be showing these to the group next week to see what they think of it. Overall, it was a really good session, our biggest change was potentially changing to an FPS game instead of a rogue like one, but we are still discussing this change.

## Week 5




I started working on the 3 different enemy types, but mainly the big enemy and the small enemy type. I wanted to give it large wings and being able to fly, but being a relatively easy enemy to kill. I took a lot of inspiration from Doom and Warhammer 40k. We all came to the conclusion that we didn't need to make a universal robot that we can all add on to, but instead we just thought that we could all just make the 3 enemy types too. I just focused on demonic robots and demons in general.


These 3 are the small, medium and large enemy types that I settled upon. I really liked the backwards animalistic leg look and wanted to keep that across all of my designs as well as the protruding bone and spikes. I wanted the armour to be extremely weathered, as I thought it would make for some great textures throughout the characters.


We agreed to make to mini bosses. As of writing this, they are still a work in progress, but I have one in an almost finalised state. I wanted to give him a bit more of a chunky armoured look, with a crunched up lowered head and spine. Giving an imposing looming stance with accentuated shoulders and spikes, but exposed muscles where possible. To compliment this boss being the big and heavy type, I thought about the other being a lot lighter and faster in style, to have to two opposites.

---

## Week 6


This week I started by making the other lighter mini boss to compliment the heavier boss. I gave them similar armour pieces to make them feel similar, but also give the impression that the style of armour is only for higher ranking enemies, which I thought felt quite thematic and linked the two bosses together. They still need some refinement in the armour and overall line work, but I like the design and I think I will probably stick with it.


Next was my first full colour sketch for one of my characters. This being the heavy for my standard enemies. I kept similarities between him and the overlord, having the burning eyes to link them together. I wanted a smokey charred look for the armour, that conveyed the shape, but didn't give any sharp highlights. This philosophy continued into the gold of their armour, with it being dulled down to more of a brushed brass with a rough surface, meaning that it isn't as reflective with the light diffusing on the plates. After looking at references, I needed the hands to have looked like they'd burst out of the gauntlets and that the arms as a whole had expanded out. I really like the style of this character with all the bones, exposed parts and armour. I think I will stick with this style, but with refinements to the tabbard and armour.


I started to add colour to my standard enemy. This would be an enemy you would come into contact with. I really wanted to give it this look of grafted flesh and bone. The original underneath would be a corrupted robot, the original metal of which would be split apart *of* covered over. I wanted to add lots of depth to the colours on this character and it makes me want to add the grimy flesh look to my heavier enemy. I think it really adds a grotesque gory feel to the enemies, rather than just a big red demon. Overall, I am really like this character the most and think it has the most potential.

---

## Week 6


This week I finished off all 3 of my basic enemies. For the demon characters, I switched the theme for my heavy enemy and changed to a reddish flesh colour which I prefer, to just the flat red as it matches the overlord more and I also like the style more, as its more interesting than the red. I do like the back armour as it has a nice look and contrasts the red nicely. I also liked the look of blending the look into bone extremities, but overall I really liked the more realistic look. I also liked the spotty style, blending the purply flesh into the red with the little spots. I think it adds to that animalistic style, but I really liked the paint jobs, but as I said I want to change the heavy, but I think I will also be bringing the the colour schemes to the mini boss enemies.

---

## Week 7


This week I started and finished 1 of my 2 mini bosses, that being the heavy type. II made some minor alterations from the original design, mainly to the face, but also to the feet, replacing the clawed feet with hooves as it fitted with some of my references and also helped with a sense of differentiation between the normal enemy types. I went back to a completely red flesh colour as I thought this could be more of a demonic creature, so its completely alien in appearance and is more in line with a more typical depiction of a demon. A lot of the characters I'd drawn in the past had felt quite flat in terms of the undulations in the flesh, so I changed up the way I painted it this time starting off with a saturated reddish orange. Then using a darker red to add shadows. I did this with a hard ink brush on 15 to 25 percent opacity depending if I was making a hard shadow or making some subtle outlines. Once I'd done this, I went to a near black red and kept the opacity at 13. This was for outlining harsh shadows or roundness in the muscles, using a stippling motion as I blended it into the base colour. I then took the base colour and went for a brighter orange and stippled that onto the highlights. This gave a rough patchy appearance to the skin. I then progessively went up in colour and then filled in where I had just painted. For the brass, I started blending the light and dark. I also added some purple for contrast and then added chipping and scratches to make it look more realistic. Overall, I really like this character as it really does look like a mini boss and has an imposing stature with the arched back.


I'm also working on the smaller of the mini bosses and adding marking to them to make them feel like more of a ancient demon with more of a magi ability, with runes on the armour and body to signify it whilst also having similar styles carry over from the main heavy mini boss.

## Week 8


This week I finished off my second demon, so I had the 2 mini bosses completed to a standard I was happy with. There still could be little areas that I might go back to, but on the whole, I'm happy as it looks how I would imagine a sorcerer demon to look, with a bit more of an ancient vibe, with the more saturated reds and oranges. All our characters are very different and so are our styles, but in our case, that's fine since all our bosses are different and don't necessarily have to conform to the same style. I think on the whole my characters have the grittiest look and style.

## Hero

This was my design for my hero. I'd designed a character like this before. I wanted to make it look like a samurai, but I wanted to add a more of a modern feel with a metallic theme incorporating a matt grey finish on some parts and metal on others. I really liked the segmented style of samurai armour and wanted to replicate it, whilst also including lots of metallic detail, as thats been something I've really enjoyed including in my work throughout and helps to add a realistic look to the armour with the hint of blue to really make it pop out.

## Week 9

This week I finished off my hero character. I'd taken inspiration from my earlier design, but I really wanted to incorporate the metal look and same stippling I'd been using on the demon characters. It came out looking pretty good and certainly more interesting than just a light to dark blend on the cloth. It looks far more interesting done like this, eventhough it's only a basic version. I wanted to prioritise a gritty textured look with scratches, stippling and lighting. Overall, I really like the design and the next step is to show it to the rest of the group.

## Week 12 Final week

I have been mainly been working on the main project but so I'd not really added more from what I'd made before Christmas. I made my art work more presentable by adding a background and banner so it looks better on a page.
enemy types (figure1)
Mini bosses (figure2)
Overlord boss(figure3)

Hero Character (figure4)


I'm really happy with how these came out as they are actually pretty detailed character sheets with some of my favourite metal work I have done, especially the brass on the demon characters (figure2) really popped with the little bit or purple added to it, which is a technique I got from painting models. I really did use a lot of new techniques on these characters, experimenting and mainly adding different colours that contrast with the base colour like on some of the flesh on the characters. In figure 1, experimenting with greens and blues to create more of a sickly feel, more like rotting flesh. On my demons in (figure 2,) I used more of a stippling technique to really build up and even the rough texture and I also changed the colour to more of an orange where others had been a flat red. I felt this looked far more interesting and had far more depth than some of my other red skinned characters as it made the musculature of the characters stand out more.

## Reflection
I really did enjoy working on this project as a whole. I felt like it had been more collaborative than colabs had ever been, as we all knew what the outcome was going to be. It was great to discuss ideas with people and have new ones thrown around. The only part that was difficult was when people didn't come in and we would discuss lots of things and bring them up in lesson and these could sometimes be quite big changes and we would write this kind of stuff down and put it in the discord, but I think sometimes people would not read it or would sometimes get confused. It was mainly 3 of us me, Jack and Juno that were in consistently and we may have given too much work for some, asking that everyone created a set of enemies, but we thought it was manageable but with the other 2 projects being colabs and character and environment, I think that people probably were a little overwhelmed. I think that having colabs as well was just taking time away from both projects and it made juggling them hard and some lessons we would just spend trying to get through the GGD.

I would have loved to work more on making some of the character in Zbrush. I did do one little practice, but I just did not have time to make anything that I would really want to do, so I just focussed on creating art work. If I'd done more Zbrush work,I would have focused on doing the heads of the characters, modelling the horns by using the dyanamesh extraction tool and experimenting with different brushes to create different rough skin textures. I certainly think that my designs would have been quite hard to make, but I would have liked to have tried, but with all the with deadlines I had, it just became hard to allocate time to other things when I really wanted to get the big project finished. I wanted to make sure that the concepts that I'd done were to a good standard and showed that I did have an understanding of what I wanted to implement into the game, as long as the group thought that it could be applied. I think that maybe we all did want to do more things around character rather than the title screens and things. This was certainly a detriment, but the GDD was such a massive document to try and complete along side other projects that it did become hard and not wanting to write it yourself, as you want to make sure you get the groups input on the project.