The Cool Down Period

So, after three full years of RIT I'm starting to be able to expect the types of madness and insanity that will assault me throughout the school year, but still, the sheer amount of work that seems to come my way over the quarter is incredibly overwhelming.

But this probably because I just came off of a very pleasant summer where I read lots of books and lazed out in the sun. For my last free summer ever, it was nice.

But now I need to get back into the flow of things. And it's stressing me out. It seems like I'm always working, working, working. And drinking a ton of coffee all the time. I practically live in the coffee shop at the library...I'm like some sort of hipster emo writer. I feel like I should be wearing all black all the time and have a black beret and that I should talk in a snooty accent.

Enough joking around though!

Despite some struggles I did manage to get some decent work done this week, it doesn't feel like I did a lot, but I've definitely made progress. It's that awkward cool down period where the obvious changes to the project are coming slowly, but they are definitely coming along. I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked to on the project this week, but I had other classwork fall down on top of my head (Not literally, all though sometimes it feels like it). I'm redesigning my identiy - my logo, my business card, my website, my resume, my other blog, I'm even working on redesigning this blog.

I tried to get in contact with Rolling Hills Asylum so that I could have the chance to visit a real psychiatric hospital to give me a better idea of where to go with my thesis, but unfortunately due to some poor timing and the Halloween season I don't think I will get the chance to go. I'm sad about that, I was super excited to check it out and get some pictures particularly for textures.

So here's the progress I made on the blocking models this week:

The assets without the building surrounding them

Ward A, high security

The Nurse's station

Ward B, overview

Ward B, common area

Ward B

Level Overview

As you can see, I'm still having some issues with the isolation ward. I'm not completely sure what I want to do with it yet. I've also changed a few of the level aspects. For example, Ward B is not purely bed rooms, but is in stead large areas with many beds that also has storage closets, a series of showers, toilets and a common area for patients to spend their time in. 

Next week I'm going to get the assets of Ward A done and set up this blocking model file to be a file that I can reference the assets into. 

Block Modeling Progress

Well, despite being sick and feeling like my throat has a furry animal living in it, I managed to get the block modeling that I wanted to get done this week completed.

As you can see, the Isolation Ward still needs some work, part of that is due to the fact that, while I have an idea of what it looks like, I've been focusing so much on the other wards that I haven't had  a chance to write it down conceptually.

And this week's time sheet:

Invisus-What's in the Name

Wow, this project seems so entirely HUGE compared to what I've done in the past. I'm almost overwhelmed by everything I have to accomplish. I'm also learning just what it's like to power through being sick when you have a large scale project...which I suppose is actually great real world experience.

Yeah, I know it's only second going into third week back at school and all ready I've gotten sick, it's nothing serious though, likely just allergies trying to kick my rear in to submission, but I say no! Moving from the south back up into the far North never goes well for me. I'm a southern girl at heart, I need my heat and my constant sunlight. Again, good real world experience, learning to press through and take care of myself while still getting my work done. Not easy.

So this week has been spent working more on my design document - which is actually proving to be a bit of a challenge; not because I'm not a decent writer or because I've never written a paper on this scale before, but because I've never written a paper of this type before and there seems to be no excessively wrong way to write a Design Document, so I'm flailing around attempting to make it look pretty and also make concise logical sense. I know I've written mock Design Documents before, but for some reason any knowledge I had of writing one has flown out the window.

I've also been blocking out the level layout in Maya with extremely simple polygons as well as trying to decide how I'm going to accomplish the overall level layout. I realized in the process of blocking things out that there are going to be a lot of small assets and the thought of all of them is almost overwhelming. But I'm cautiously excited to tackle the task and I suspect that once I get started it won't really be so much busy, busy work.

But, I figured that I would attempt to explain why I chose the name Invisus for my project. I had intended to call my thesis Fracture because of the fractured mindset of the main character. Upon doing some research I discovered that LucasArts has all ready produced a video game under the name of Fracture. So I started looking into some other words that could say a lot in a single word. I played with translating software and ended up going back to the second foreign language I ever attempted to learn, Latin.

I fully admit I was never very good at Latin grammar, but I was fairly decent with Latin vocabulary. Invisus comes from the word Invidere (Derived from the latin word Videre, meaing to look), which means to cast an evil eye on, to bear ill will, or to be envious, or - as I was taught in school- to dislike someone (including yourself). Invisus is the past perfect conjugation of the word Indivere, which means that it translates to mean hated or detested, or loathed. But what really caught me on the name is that not only has it's primary meanings, but depending on who you speak to, Invisus also means hostile or malicious.

It also means unseen because of the conjugation of the word Inviso, but I always thought that was an awkward word.

Anyways, I leave you with a bit more concept art. Block modeling of the level layout is well in progress!

Level Design/Basic Concept

So I've been drawing out the absolute basic level design. This is just a way for me to see how the Asylum is laid out and it gives me an overall goal to accomplish. The overall floor plan is very loosely designed on a floor plan I found from a British Archive of the Denbeigh Asylum (To the right of this paragraph). I focused mostly on one section of the female ward since the main character of the game is mean to be female and since the Denbeigh Asylum is HUGE and I definitely had to set perspective limits on myself -I am only one person after all, one very confident person, but still... :D

After studying the Denbeigh floorplan and focusing on what exactly I wanted to be able to show the player, this is what I ended up designing. It's a fairly simple layout, especially considering the Asylum map I was looking at, but I think it's a very realistic goal for myself.

The basic floorplan consists of two wards, Ward A being of a higher security than Ward B, a Nurse's Station a few hallways, and a high security isolation ward.

Time Sheet Week 01:

Art Style/Planning

In the planning stages for my thesis one of the more difficult obstacles I've run into is deciding on an art style. I wanted to accomplish something that emulates my own digital painting style and also emulates some of the unique art styles that exist in my favorite types of video games.

For my digital painting style, I have a somewhat messy speed painting style. I like to make a lot of my own custom brushes and paint in low opacities so that I'm layering colors and then blending them together as if I was creating an oil painting (Which is my absolute favorite kind of traditional painting). The result is a somewhat cartoony/comic booky style that has reminiscent of realistic painting. However, I like to avoid complete realism because of the theory that the more realistic something is the less human like it becomes and the more people shy away from it. (Like in the Final Fantasy Movie The Spritis Within - it was incredibly realistic, especially for the time, but it lacked that "human quality to it, which made it all together a very unsettling movie).

I'm actually not the biggest game player in the world (I lack the proper coordination to be able to play successfully, except in easy mode), but I love watching people play video games and I absolutely love the art styles of many video games. One game I keep going back to over and over again to reference the art is Gearbox Software's Borderlands.

I love the unique use of the sharp toon outline combined with a shading that is somewhere between cell shading and realistic. But the Borderland art style has a quirky quality to it that definitely makes me feel like I'm playing in some sort of comic book and even though the actual game play can get quite intense, it still has a quirky quality that makes me feel kind of happy and excited.

I'm looking for a style that's a bit more dramatic and invokes something unsettling and has a little bit of a feeling of a horror game. (We are following an asylum patient after all, and I can't imagine having a pleasant happy time in any sort of psychiatric hospital.) So I looked into games that are of the darker/horror genre, such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. 

This particular game has a lot of the nonrealistic shading, though it doesn't use the sharp toon outlines of Borerlands, but the color scheme of this game is a lot darker, rooms have a lot of browns, blacks and greys as well as other earth tones. It also makes use of a lot of dramatic lighting generating by small light sources. The result is a unique art style that still invokes the intense feeling of a horror game.

In the end, I decided to speed paint a piece of concept art that mixes the styles of what I would like to accomplish together. I ended up using sharp, dramatic, comic book style shading with more saturated colors. Each element of the color palette has a monochromatic shading scheme. I tried to emulate the heavy shadows that I've seen in horror genre games, such as Amnesia, but I also added the extra element of a realistic texture on top of the low opacity painting. 

Basic Research

Once I decided the theme for my thesis I started to do some overall research on how to accomplish everything I wanted to do. The easy part was deciding how to create the graphics (since I've been studying Autodesk Maya that was the easy choice, though I did do some work in 3DS Max over the summer, I'm just not confident enough in the program yet to feel comfortable using it).

The hard part was deciding how to accomplish the "interactive" part of my thesis. For that I researched several engines and editors. Since the inspiration for my thesis came from Dear Esther, I decided to first look at Valve's Source Engine and see what it was all about. Source Engine is a game development engine with a fairly broad and comprehensive set of tools for game creation including asset management for custom made graphics and management for Audio (Which is something I would like to have in my final project). It's also a tried and tested engine since it's been used, not only for Dear Esther, but also for Valve's Team Fortress Series, Half Life Series and Counter Strike. The Source SDK is available to the public if you have a copy of one of Valve's source engine games (Team Fortress 2 is free and I own copies of Portal and Portal 2) along with the map creation/level editing software called the Hammer Editor. Unfortuneatly, I have very little experience and minimal knowledge of either Source or the Hammer Editor and they both suffer from the fact that they are first and foremost modding software -which while there is nothing inherantly wrong with that (again, Dear Esther) it might limit me in what I can accomplish in the long run.

So moving on from there I decided to take a look at Unity, which is one of the best known game engines on the college student market. Unity has some pretty great features, including assest management for both art and Audio. It also benefits from it's renderer which has a "Deferred Lighting path" and a batching system. However, the majority of the parts of the Unity engine that makes the games made on it pretty are only part of Unity Pro (Which involves paying money and suffering through licensing problems).

So finally, I decided to use UDK, which I do have experience using. In preparation for Unreal Engine 4, UDK has undergone some changes since the last time I used it, however I have spent a little time keeping up with some of the changes to UDK. The biggest problem I can forsee in the long run is audio asset management, which I've had problems with in the past. 

Concept overview

For my thesis I want to create a single interactive level in two different styles. The first being a pristine environment and the second being an environment eroded by time. After some thought I chose to use an insane asylum as the setting for the game for a few reasons.

First I wanted to be able to invoke an eerie feeling in the player and a psychiatric hospital struck me as perfect. Abandoned asylums have been the subject of many horror movies and ghost hunting TV shows and generally people associate asylums with crazy ghosts and other horrors. Even today, thrill seekers visit abandoned asylums in the hope of encounter a ghost or something otherworldly.

The second reason I chose a psychiatric hospital is because in many of these hospitals' heydays they had pristine environments that were still rich in variety. For example this image from the medical records at the Archives of Ontario shows the female infirmary from the Toronto Hospital for the the Insane, the room in this image is not only clean, like you would expect a hospital to be, but also shows has a degree of personal human touch to it. There is a variety in the textures - from the striped wall paper, to the wooden floors and even the rug in the bottom center of the picture.

Psychiatric hospitals are also environments that -since so many asylums have shut down in the last several decades- have been largely left to the mercies of weather and eroded by time. This image to the right from Hellingly Asylum is an example of how rich a mental hospital's environment can get after a period of time abandoned.






My primary inspiration for this thesis is from a project by TheChineseRoom started at the University of Portsmouth called Dear Esther. The game was originally built in Source Engine and released as a mod for Half Life 2 as an experimental game that did away with most traditional game play. Instead the players were given a very rich environment to explore, but not to interact with as they followed the musings of the unknown main character, a man left on a deserted island with a letter that always begins with "Dear Esther..."

I found the concept of abandoning traditional game play to explore a story that would be unique to each player incredible fascinating and I wanted to emulate some of that in my thesis project.