Long time no blog.

Okayyy so, Its been a little while since I last post something, that's because of Christmas laziness and drink....well i'm not going to Lie, its Christmas. xD

Okay I have been working on the bonus level character, Its not final, but i wanted it to look like Flux but different, like the Grendels but different. I haven't had Illustrator so I have had to do it on Photoshop using the pen tool. Its a bit more time consuming, but I got there in the end, I played about with it and have 2 versions of him.

This is the latest version, I didn't like the eyes in the last one, so I inverted them and deleted what white that's left behind that was the black.

I invertedd the eyes. like show above, I like the above one better.

Opening scene rough

I have designed some start sequence rough image, just to visualise what the starting story images will look like. Ones at night and ones in the day time, i really like the simplistic style of the images. here you are.

This was quite simple to create, Its mainly the pen and brush tool. I took the character Flux that I designed before and placed his one this kind of floating island type thing. I created this using the pen tool on Photoshop, coloured then and used the burn tool to create darker areas. the clouds in both images were just paint brushes, and the sun in the day time I literally made the moon yellow and put a Gaussian blur on it making it look like its glowing. Hope you like it. I will be putting more graphics up shortly.

Presentation Notes

Presentation Notes

Slide 2 - My Role

My main roles in the project are;

• · Character design
• · Visual material

Slide 3 - Storyboards

Flux is the main character is our game, he lives in a mystical land called Nebula, it’s a happy place full of light and happiness, until kreig comes along and steals all the light in the land, turning all creatures in nebula evil, Flux hides and escapes from this disaster, his quest is to collect all the light orbs to restore happiness back into the land of nebula.

• · Then refer to storyboards.

Slide 17 - Our Influences

• · Our main influences came from games we found called Feist, Aether, monkey tumble and Braid.
• · Feist - We liked the very simplistic style with the silhouettes and trial left behind the character as it moves.
• · Braid was quite similar Feist but focused more of light with shadows and silhouettes.
• · We wanted to combine these two sorts of styles together having light trails combined with silhouetted elements within it.
• · With Aether we like the start sequence and simple design of the character
• · We liked Rasta Monkey because of the very colourful background and also how some of the items you go past are in front and some are behind you, its sort of like 3D in a 2D environment.
• · For the character design my main influences were Kidrobot
• · This was due to its stylistic and funky designs.
• · We liked the idea of floating islands, this also reminded us of the British gas advert and sonic the hedge hog.

Website Design Template

From the image in the previous post Peter has taken the background from it and put it as the website image, Its very simple but very effective. I hope you's like it.

Website Image...for now.

This is something I did in photoshop for peter to stick on the website ready for the presentation, In this we took inspiration for Feist, the colours used in the back group, light trails and the silhouettes, I also incorporated the floating level matt and Peter cam up with, which i also said reminds me of the british gas advert. This isn't final at the moment, Its purely just a piece to show for now, Ave a skeeeeet.

test

Peter and Matt had an idea on levels or platforms hovering around, like little planets in the sky, there will be some drawing on here to show what i mean in about, but when I was told this i thought about the british gas advert, here is an image for.

Stay tuned for more stufff.

Presentation Layout

zSlide 1: Peter
Introduction
Throughout this presentation we’ll be taking you through the development
Slide 2: Everyone
Introduce their own area (explain what I will be doing, ei character design and backgrounds).
Slide 3: Peter
Characters – outline of each role
Slide 4: Grant
Storyboard (holding pictures up, reading descriptions and explain what's going to happen).
Slide 5: Matt
Names
Slide 6: Dan
How to play
Slide 7: Matt
Sound
Slide 8: Dan
Website/game/iPhone using Unity
Slide 9: Joe
Level designs
Slide 10: Peter
Website
Slide 11: Grant
Inspiration, where we got ideas, influences from Feist, kid Robot, British game and Braid
Slide 12: Dan
Audience
Slide 13: Peter
Gantt chart / blog
Slide 14:
Questions?

Grendel

This is the evil little bastard tries to steal the light orbs off of you. He holds a stick of fire to guide himself through the levels, his antennae also glow too, the closer they get the brighter the scene go's, this will alert you to his presence.

Possible Logo Ideas

Peter ask me to come up with some logo ideas, I initially thought of something like this. very simple and easy to use in context and also linked in with the glowing ball Flux sits on.

Dr Dred

This is for now 'Dr Dred', we havent found a name for it yet. but he is the one that stole all the light.

Matt asked me to do a more simple Flux. I took the clothes off, and straightened up some of the lines. I like this very much. Peace Out.

New and Improved Flux.

Matt Mentioned having Flux with as subtle outline as possible, so the outline would be just darker than the colour inside. making it more subtle and more natural.

Flux in HD...I mean Colour

This is Flux is colour.

Flux - Character Design.

Here is the general outline design for Flux. Enjoy.

Character Reseach

My group game across a website called Kidrobot, specializing in artist-created toys and imports from Japan, Hong Kong and Europe, They're very funky designs appeal to kids and adults. I have take inpiration from this website to develop ideas on Flux. Here is an image of one of my inpirations.

This character is very funky, I especially like the eyes, its very stylised. the colours make it stand out too. I want Flux to have a bringly colours body when you can see it, mayb e like bring orange or blue. Bery Nice.

Baddie For the baddie Joe came across a joker style villain, full black eyes, cape, stick and smart pants, we all quite like this idea. not necessarily the smart clothes. but a sort of glowing walking stick and evil glowing eyes. here is the image I will be basing the villain designs on..

Character Development

Okay so we have been talking about what the main character of this light orb game can been, we all agree'd it should be cute, big eyes, and harmless looking. We wanted very little detail in the head, very minimilistic as the their eyes will glow to lead their way through the level.


These are some sketches I did to come up with a character,m it was hard to decide what we wanted it to look like, we wanted it to look like a kind of mystical creature, but not scart. the ones circled in the picture are that basis on what I came up with so far. One eye, so its a cyclopse, big head, small body, it will travel around on a floating orb ball that collects the light orbs, the more orbs you collect the brighter it glows and the faster and highwer you can go. We came up with the name Flux for this character, it might be the name of the game aswell, but we wanted the name of the game to portray what the games about, ei the sun/light. Stay tuned for more designs.

Light Orbs

Our group came across a game called Feist, It's a game that uses silhouettes and light to guide you through the levels, Its very clever with lighting, and uses light orbs to bring the level to life. Here is a video for it.

We have used this game as inspiration for a game idea we came up with. Our innitial idea was that an evil dooer stolen all the light in the land, and your sole purpose is to take it all back and restore light to your hom e. We thought about it starting out dark using silhouettes so you can navigate round the game, collecting light orbs as you go bringing them to each check point to restore light, once all check points have been completed you will face a boss in oder to collect the all the light orbs to restore all the light to the land, but in each level there will be gremlins trying to steal it off you, if you lose orbs they die and you cant get them back, if you dont reach the minimum limit for each checkpoint its game over.
Within the game there will be mini games in which you have to collect more light orbs and score points for each orb you collect, these points go onto your profile the more points you collect the more stuff you can unlock withing the game.
When the gremlins come to steal your orbs fast pacing/suspence music will play. Matt Bridgeman will be making the soundtrack, you can listen to all his music on his music cloud.
Im going to be doing the character design, the sketches and final designs will be on here soon. Enjoy.

Game Ideas/types etc...

Games Types

Platform Games (Braid)
Educational (spelling, maths etc GCSE Bitesize Games)
First Person Shooter (e.g. Call of Duty)
First Person (eg Zelda)
8 Bit Sega type games (sonic, Street Fighter etc)
Puzzles (sudoku etc)
stratergy games (e.g.World of Warcraft)

We thought of the game a part of an advertising ploy, advertising the website or some sort of product, this is formally known as Advergaming. We had the idea about advertising either the website or a product. A good example of this the Rizla game. Its a remake of the original Pac Man, using rizla skins and rizla packs.
Rizla also presents a great idea, when you log on, you can choose which skins you use, each represents a different colour when chosen your skin and go into the website the colours on the website will be the colour of the skin you chosen. We had an idea of doing this but with characters and each character have a different background and feel to it.
We thought about a platform type game set in space, where you can choose a character to use in the game. Im going to be creating some characters in illustrator and will be on here soon.

Hello Game.

Okay so with the authorship unit out of the way we start thinking about the game project, its a 12 week group project with 5 IMP's, We are too use Flash or Unity to create a one level game, its a long project, so it needs to be really good. We have a presentation on 10th Decemeber, so we aim to have our idea down by Thursday 3rd December, then have a week to rehearse for it.
Im really enthausiastic about this project, and everyone I have spoken to in the 2nd/3rd years really enjoyed this. It will be good to gain new skills and work with people I havent before.
In the coming posts I will write stuff about what timne of games there is, advergaming (advertising a product or item through the game), examples of games, our game ideas, production and eventually the finished game. Happy reading.

One Last Thing.

Heres my website!!
http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~gcorlett

The Station - Final Outcome

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/gcorlett

Above is a picture of the different parts of my finished site. Im not totally happy with it, but I'm just glad that I got it working. After many hours at uni 24 hours at uni the day before the deadline I got it done, I'm now just hoping that it gives me a pass. Given the time I gave myself to do the project the pictures in previous posts were unrealistic, and too ambitious given my php ability. I have learnt alot in this project and I hope to develop my skills further in the future projects too. I had alot of trouble getting my design to fit on smaller resolution screens properly, so im the end i scrapped the initial design and used the pier in the top banner. It wasnt ideal and I was pretty gutted that i had to compromise the project due to having to rush through it. I think the end prodect is minimilist but abit plain, I think I could of tied harder and also started the project earlier that I did. But given the time I left myself to do it I'm quite pleased with the end result not in its aesthetics but in it's ability to function as a working site. I had alot of trouble with the coding on the edit profile and upload features, due to time I didnt have the time for image upload and gallery features, however the video upload and feature video shows them that I could make it given the time.
Okayy so I think I have covered everything, Im just glad this project is over and am very much looking froward to the Gaming project :D

THE STATION Profile Page

Okay so heres a mock up of what I want the profile page to look like on the station. It has their profile picture, info about them, their uploaded media and their favourites/ recently watched videos Here it is:

The Station Profile Page

Mock up website designs

Okayyy. No more coding screen shots to put on here today, BUT fear not I have some website designs i did in photshop. I have used the same template for the back ground in each. I quite like them and have appeared to be popular with my course mates. I do like the design, it has the Bournemouth Pier in it, so it sticks to the brief. Your better just seeing them here they are:

The Station Home Page

The Station Register Page

The Station Video

The Station Picture Display

P to the H to the P

Login-do.php

Login.php (Design View)

Login.php

Userlist.php

user.php

PHP PHP PHP or words to that effect

Okayy. Today I started the task of coding THE STATION. I got the process, register and connection pages pretty much coded. I have taken snap shots of them and here they are.

Process.php

register.php (design view)

register.php

connect.php

I will have more on here tomorrow plus some more ideas for the website design. Peace Out!

Rob Hawkes - Lesson 1 - The Basics

PHP Underground Session 1: The Basics

View more presentations from Rob Hawkes.

Website Design.

I have had abit of trouble trying to decide what I want the site to look like, I wanted my artistic flare to come through rather than having it just a plain layout with just block colour like rescource space (figure 1). I previously made the Bournemouth Pier using Illustrator.(this is in the last post and shown in figure 2). I decided as it was called the station I wanted it to kind of reflect at TV, so I created this on Illustrator aswell. I have tried to make it as simple as possible and not being too busy and crowded.

Figure 1

Here is the website layout I talked about above.

Figure 2

I have used the Pier in the background but reduced it in size so it doesnt dominate the whole site, and places this TV in the foreground, which will be where the video will be show. there is a volume slider and on and off buttons, which will act and the play and pause buttons. On the right I have created a section where you see the title of the film, the description and a button that leads you to the uploaders profile. And at the top I have used a simple font for 'The Station' and other text, I have also places the BU symbol next to it too.

That is all for now people.

The Station

The website has to be Bournemouth/Dorset/South Coast orientated so I thought I would use the a picture of Bournemouth pier and draw an outline of it in Illustrator then colour it in photoshop. Im not entirly sure how im going to incorperate this image into the site purely because of the size. I might have to reduce the size of the image to be able to fit all the content of the site on it. here is the image.

I created this using illustrator, using the line, pen and drawing tool, then transferred it into photoshop to do the colouring and shading. It took me roughly a day on and off to create this. it was quite ambitious but I think I have pulled it off. Tune in again for more website design ideas. x

The Station

Okay I should of done this a while ago. But here I am. Our new project brief is called 'The Station' which is where we have to make a front end and back end of a contact management system, in which users can make profiles and upload videos to the site. Basically a mini Youtube.
For this project we will be diving deep into some seriously heavy PHP coding aswell as the HTML and CSS we learnt last year. We learnt a little PHP last year but we have learnt alot more for this project. to be honest I'm still trying to get my head around PHP coding. I got an E book for PHP off someone on my course which being 500 pages will take a while to sort though to find relevant bits.
The styling of the website shout be minimilistic and should reflect the area. e.i south coast, Bournemouth and Dorset. I have come up with a few ideas already but none of which I am entirley happy with at the moment, All i have done I feel to not reflect the brief. I will put them on here at a later date when I am fully content with my ideas.