Grace Mills

Grace Mills was another character that was created at the beginning of the project as we wanted some of the survivors to represent the staff and lower classes to cause some friction with the upper class Davenport family. I wanted Grace to be the perfect maid before the outbreak, but i also wanted her to be an integral member of the group afterwards and someone who would stand up to her former employers when it came to her own survival. Later on I also came up with the idea of Grace and Edward having feelings for each other, which could create a little forbidden love story amongst the horror of the outbreak. I included all this in the bio i wrote for her.

Virginia Sinclair

Virginia was one of the first characters we came up with and i'm happy to say that i was the one who conceived pretty much everything about her. Below are the initial sketches of her, along with a character turnaround and her bio.

 For Virginia's face that my team mate Bas was going to draw, I gave him a reference picture of who i felt looked like her. That person was actress Samantha Ferris.

Below is the Image he did, it is exactly how I pictured her and i'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Credit to Bas, who's blog is linked on my first and last posts 

I think Virginia is my favourite character. I'm really happy with her design and i think her back story is the most interesting.

Costume Research

Since i was allocated story and costume, I couldn't start designing without having some sort of plan as to what the Victorian and Edwardian eras were like in terms of clothing. To solve this I sketched out a lot of Victorian and Edwardian designs. I've drawn everything from butchers to ballerinas in an attempt to really encompass the era's different costumes. Although there is a lack of colour in my designs this is partly due to the Victorian and Edwardian era as colour doesn't seem to have been used much but also because a variety of colours can be used if we want to use them, but colouring each and every costume would be too time consuming and unnecessary as i was also swamped with story planning, biographies and my dissertation.

Enough excuses though, enjoy!

Flotsam City

Just like the names of our characters, the name of the city was highly debated with various suggestions being put forward but none sticking particularly well. I did the same as i did with the names and wrote down a few potential names for the city. This eventually led to the city being called Flotsam. We then started designing different features of the city, including transport, architecture and the city's shape itself, below are my ideas.

Next I wrote up the city's history that explained what the city was famous for and how it was designed.

This then led to the actual design. If we had had a fourth group member they would have probably been put in charge of the architecture and planning of the city, but since we didn't have that person I did what I could so that people could at least get a general idea of what we were going for.

Our Story and Character Conception

After our initial idea got scrapped and we decided to go with out new Victorian zombie game, a new story had to be made from scratch, so I wrote up the skeleton of a story that we could roughly work from.(Right click and open the picture in a new tab ti see better).

Although this rough story wasn't particularly detailed, it did give us something to work from and a pool of characters that could be easily created as family members, staff and residents of the city. From this we managed to create eight characters.

We liked the idea of a family surviving the apocalypse and so made five members of the group family members and we jotted down some quick ideas about who they would be and what their defining features would be. We also wanted a couple of staff members in the group too to create a class division which could make for some interesting story telling.

Being a group of three, naming these characters was a bit of a problem. Any suggested names quickly got shot down by one of us and we were having trouble agreeing. To counter this i researched the top 500 girl's names of the 1890's. From this we could pick out those we liked and we were more likely to agree on a couple of names.

This worked well and we started agreeing on names which sped the design process up as we could actually start designing the characters. Below is my process of giving the characters a biography along with any ideas we thought would be good for that character.

Having the characters names somehow helped us to get a better feel for them. Virginia became an American, born in Virginia who was being brought to England by Charlie to meet his family, Odette became a spoiled brat and Grace became a modest and well mannered maid. This helped me to create more detailed but still fairly rough biographies for all the characters (pictured below) which in turn allowed me to create fully detailed versions which will accompany the characters in later posts.

I finally revisited the story a while later and typed it up neatly. It is now much more detailed and portrays why the zombie apocalypse happens and what the Davenports do to survive.

A New Project

At the beginning of our third year of university we were given a completely free reign assignment where we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. These kind of projects are obviously the most fun as you can let your imagination run wild and think up game ideas that you would love to see in real life. Wanting to save the idea of my most recent project for my final project this year, i wanted to do something different and perhaps work in a group, so with the help of my two peers Stuart and Bas we started to design what we thought of as 'the perfect zombie game'.

We are all fans of zombie games and so have played most of the mainstream zombie titles including Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Resident Evil and Call of Duty: Zombies, yet we felt none of these games encompassed everything we wanted in one game. Some games excelled in graphics but lacked in story, whereas others had great characters but were missing an incentive to make the player want to play. 

Before we started designing we wrote down the games that we thought had a lot of positive features and which we would like to take inspiration from. For me, Resident Evil Outbreak was a huge inspiration, although the game suffered from bad controls and no recurring story throughout it's levels, it had brilliant character design and a unique take on the apocalypse where you were simply a civilian caught up in the madness and you had to rely on other people to guarantee you safety as well as being a bad ass. 

Our Initial Concept

Although we all wanted to create 'the perfect zombie game' it quickly became apparent we all had conflicting views on what perfection really was. Ideas ranged from a full sandbox game to a linear story to a mass of characters to just a core group of survivors. It was hard work trying to write down just one idea we agreed on and it started to look like this project was doomed. However, in a moment of jest, Stuart proposed a zombie game set some time in Queen Victoria's rule. Instantly we were all interested in the project again, ideas started flooding in and we agreed on most of them. 

The moment we changed ideas

Our new idea had a lot more possibilities and you can see how many we came up with above. We decided the game would be a third person shooter with elements of survival horror and some elements of comedy. The moody lighting and scenery would give the horror aspects whereas the comedy could come the sheer absurdity of some situations, for example we decided early on we wanted an epic final boss battle against a zombified Queen Victoria on top of a zeppelin and a penny farthing getaway was mentioned more than once.

Below is a spider diagram of ideas i drew up to give us a better grasp on what we were aiming for.

Happy with the direction our project was heading in we decided to split up tasks for each group member to do so we could play on our strengths. Although we would all have input into most ideas such as character relationships, scenery and level design, we split the work so that Stuart was in charge of 3D modelling, Bas took on finished concept art and I was tasked with designing the costumes and writing the story and character bios. But first we had to actually design characters and a setting and i had to come up with a story that we could base our ideas off of, but I'll talk about that in my next post.

Sock Monkey Mania

Hello again blog, sorry I neglected you over summer... again.

So I'm back in Wrexham for my third and final year at university. I moved back up here a few weeks back before university actually started so I could hang around with my housemates and just mong out in general. 

Since I've returned I've already been taught an unforgettable and priceless skill, that skill being how to make sock monkeys!

Sock Monkeys/ Animals are stuffed animals made from a pair of new socks, creating a cheap but effective toy or gift for someone. Being the cool kids that we are, me and my fellow housemates all made a sock monkey, although seeing as i have a lot of friend's and family's birthdays in October, I decided I'd make quite a few more... Below are the photos - prepare to be amazed (or not).

This was my first attempt at a sock monkey and due to the psychedelic pattern of the sock, it has earned the name: 'Hilda the Drug Monkey'. Although she looks creepy as hell, I'm proud that I managed to create her with absolutely no sewing experience. Although to be honest I was pretty much sitting on my housemates lap whilst she spoon-fed me the instructions. My next sock monkey was a drastic improvement.

Production Photo

Finished Monkey

Like I said before, I think this monkey is already a drastic improvement. I was much happier with this monkey not just because it looked better but because I had also done this one all by myself. This monkey was sent off to my little sister for her birthday and apparently she liked it so much she now takes it to bed with her :)

This monkey was a present for my mum for her birthday just two days after my sister's so my skills improved quite quickly. Although not particularly visible, the stitching on this monkey was neater, the mouth was sewn on straight and he was stuffed a bit better.

Latest compared to First

My most recent creation is probably my best so far and went to my good friend Amy for her birthday. As you can see, my most recent monkey looks much better than my first attempt (even if it looks like a dog) and although these toys aren't exactly video game art, they are still pretty creative and gave me something to do this last week, but with no more birthdays in October i doubt I'll be making anymore of these little guys anytime soon, so expect more conventional art soon!