Portfolio - Patricia Bere

About Me

Hey there, I'm Patricia, a 4th year Games Development student that loves art & music.
I always enjoyed looking at the creative part of video games, appreciating the hard work the artists put in and wanted to get involved so that I can create game art and  music for video games myself.

While working on The Last Agronaut I also started to enjoy the asset implementation and level design part of Unity.
Creating animators and adding the animations to a model has proved to be very satisfying to me as it makes the game come to life.

Career wise, I hope to chase my dreams and work in fields related to Game Art & Level Design / Game Music Design

Team Nova

Team Nova
Our team, Nova is developing a 3rd person, turn-based video game. The game is called The Last Agronaut. The name of our game is actually a combination of two words ; agro, from agriculture and naut from astronaut. The Last Agronaut is set in space, on a floating isolated island. The main character, Penelope is a scientist and a farmer, having to live alone in this environment and tend to her sheep while battling virus-infected plants.

Our team is made up of five people. Every person on the team has a main role and two other side roles. Each team member has duties related to their roles which they need to fulfil in order to develop the game. The customer audience for The Last Agronaut are over the age of 18 such as 2nd Year Game Development students. We chose this customer audience for our game because it will contain grotesque or scary features, such as blood and violence.

The game engine we are using is Unity and we have decided to go for this engine because of past experience with it at previous internships. We’re also using 3D modelling, image editing and sound editing software such as : Blender, 3DS Max, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, CLIP Studio Paint, FL Studio.

Concept & Graphic Design

As a team member, I am assigned with 2 roles ; Concept & Graphic Design and Level Design & Implementation

Main role : Concept & Graphic Design
Within this role, I am in charge of coming up with ideas for how things could look and feel and then conveying these ideas visually. I draw or paint characters, environments, user interfaces, weapons and vehicles both traditionally and digitally.

Challenges of this role include :

  • Adapting to a specific art style.
    There is a set art style that needs to be achieved for “The Last Agronaut” which is called semi-low-poly. This means that the look of the game cannot be to realistic. It has to look more like a cartoon.
  • Learning to use new graphics editing software
    This requires to keep using and trying different brushes, settings and tools in programs such as Adobe Photoshop or CLIP Studio Paint.
  • Drawing concepts the whole team agrees with
    This requires to show my designs to the team members and discuss what is good about a concept, what needs to be improved and/or what needs to be removed.

Acceptance criteria of this role include :

  • The quality of a drawing
    This refers to the resolution and file type of a drawing. Files shouldn’t be resized outside graphics editing software, and should be saved as .PNG for best quality.
  • Specific parameters
    Making sure the canvas size, brush size and colours are consistent is important to keep artwork looking smooth.
  • Errors & Testing
    Sometimes mistakes can be made and programs cannot undo all history therefore saving the  progress iteratively in a new file before exporting a final .PNG is essential.

Sound Design

My sound designer role has been changed since progressing with the team project and now my secondary role is level design & implementation.

Secondary role : sound designer
Within this role, I am in charge of creating unique music and specific sound effects for The Last Agronaut. This includes coming up with the songs played in the games such as area themes, time-of-day themes, as well as character voices and SFX, and background SFX such as attack sounds.

Challenges of this role include :

  • Coming up with unique melodies
    This task isn't necessarily difficult as it is time consuming. This is because coming up with a new melody can take a lot of trial and error until it is satisfactory enough to present to the rest of the team.
  • Finding specific reference
    It can be difficult to find the right inspiration or reference to the sounds needed in the game. This means looking up game or movie themes and sound effects and see what was done well.
  • Learning new technologies
    Learning new sound technologies such as Pure Data and how it may be used with Unity and also continue gaining experience with FL Studio.

Acceptance criteria of this role include :

  • The quality of sound
    This refers to the audio quality of a sound. Particularly, if the sound is being converted from one type to another it is important to keep a copy of an original FL Studio project file so that if quality is lost it can be re-exported as .wav for example.
  • Specific files
    Making sure the right file types are used when exporting sounds into Unity. This means exporting any sounds used as .aif, .wav, .mp3 or .ogg
  • Errors & Testing
    Testing if the sounds work / play in Unity as they normally would in a media player.

Concept Art Methodology

I have read up a thesis called CONCEPT ART CREATION METHODOLOGIES Visual Development of “Rock Boy” by Julia Rässa. This thesis perfectly focuses on the importance of concept art and the steps that should be followed to ensure a unique and relatable design to a character.

Rässa talks about four professional concept artists interviewed on their methods when creating the art.

The 1st step is to acknowledge and learn the story / narrative of the game very well. 
It is important to understand the story, as the next step is to be able to divide the story into smaller parts so that it’s easier to pick out the important details.
A 3rd step requires the concept artist to visualise the story in an art style that would suit the game, in the case of The Last Agronaut, a semi-low-poly.
The 4th step is to find image references and collect information that can support both the narrative / story elements as well as their visualisation and ideas.
The next step is to be able to sketch the ideas using the references collected. Every fantasy design is based on a design of a real thing. This step is rough and doesn’t need finalization, it is a representation of any early designs.
The final step is to get the team together with the concept artist so that the most unique and best suited designs are selected from the sketches. The concept artist then improves and adds more detail to the design and checks back with the team until it is satisfactory. This includes personalisation to the game, specific colour palettes and more variations.

Moodboard.PNG
 “The Last Agronaut” moodboard

Reflection

At the start, I followed my own intuition based on my previous experience with art. I didn’t have a specific method which gave me some difficulty when coming up with the designs. For example, I didn’t think reference was necessary since the early stages of pre-production were vague and more focused on the ideas but not their visual representations. This was a time when I used my raw imagination to come up with concepts as it was faster and less time consuming, but it didn’t produce great or unique designs.

However, as soon as I researched the specific literature and followed the recommended steps, my progress was more successful. So far I have followed up the steps, from looking up reference images that helped me with my designs to sketching and detailing my work as much as possible.

In the research step however I first got some things wrong.
I used reference images that weren’t important to the design I was trying to achieve. For example, the plants I was trying to design were to be evil, alien looking. Instead of looking at carnivorous, spiky plant life first, I chose to research general plants which wasted some time.

In the sketching step I had not created enough / multiple rough sketches of a character which in turn didn’t give enough variety to a design in order to be selected as unique. 

Another mistake was forgetting to talk to the team about designs and just selecting the ones I liked before agreeing with everyone else. This lead to miscommunication on my behalf and slowed down the approach to the final design.

I worked on these steps however and once I realized my errors I tried going back and reflecting on what I have done wrong, as what needed more work and also what was done well.

By following this step-by-step process, my overall workflow has improved and I have come up with unique designs accepted by the team and our mentors. It has proven to be more efficient to follow a known and experimented professional technique rather than my own instincts.

References

Updated on 22 July 2020, 6:37 PM; 715 page visits from 13 December 2019 to 10 October 2024