Games Design Masters

Over the past week I have been doing some research for my Contextual and Literature Review essay. The title of my essay will be "Immersion Through Illustration" and the question I will be looking to answer is, "What methods can create an illustration that immerses and interests the viewer?” with a focus on how this can be done with illustration for games.  Starting out, I read through a book "Interaction of Color" by Josef Albers, whilst reading I made notes throughout that I can reference back to in the literature section f the essay. I also began to read through another book, "Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers" by Marcos Mateu-Mestre, again making notes as I read along. I will include the notes I have made so far for these books, while not everything here will be useful I wanted to note down anything I found interesting in case I want to reference back. Some of the notes are directly from the books and some of the notes are...

In this post I will go through my process of how I created my illustration, with multiple screenshots showing each stage.  I wanted to show a whale oil extraction taking place in an unhygienic room, my thought process was that although whale oil is distributed on mass, I thought there must be some unofficial suppliers who try to profit from it. I thought of a room with blood and whale oil on the floor, suppliers that do not follow any sort of regulations. Initial sketching and line-work I started with some general boxes in perspective to understand what the room would look like and what I would include. I then started to sketch out the contents of the room, the whale being hoisted onto the ceiling and various furnishings in the room. Blood covering the floor. Next I created cleaner line-work for the core elements of the illustration. I wanted the viewer to understand something is being harvested from the whale, even if they are unfamiliar with the Dishonored franchise. Shading and ...

For my initial illustration test I want to use a pre-existing game world to base it on, I decided I wanted to base my illustration within the world of Dishonored. It is a game that I think really immerses players into its setting, even just through the concept art and environment illustrations for the game, the tone is set really well. I used the website below to gather images of the art created for Dishonoured to refer back to for inspiration: https://www.creativeuncut.com/art_dishonored_a.html I also put these images together onto a mood board for quicker referencing back: I used the Wiki for Dishonored to get more of an understanding of the world, though I have played the game myself I wanted some more insight into the setting. I also wanted to understand the plague within the world more and the use of whale oil for power.  The following links are what I used to get a better understanding: https://dishonored.fandom.com/wiki/World   https://dishonored.fandom.com/wiki/Rat_Pla...

Reading a thesis on world-building I wanted to have a further look into world-building to understand the principles, and how to effectively build an engaging world. So I looked into Google Scholar for articles on world-building in games to get some further information. Even though the articles will largely concern the actual games themselves, I think I will be able to apply some of what I learn to my illustrations.  The thesis I will be reading and taking notes from is “Worldbuilding in Games: Creating a Functioning World For a Role-Playing Game” by Roope Sorvo. I have included a link following to this thesis: https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/126785/Thesis%20Roope%20Sorvo.pdf?sequence=1 Notes from reading the thesis I learnt about the terms ‘extradiegetic’ and ‘intradiegetic’. Extradiegetic is part of a story that is not told within the world, it usually refers to background information to a story or artistic elements that might help in setting overall tone. Extradiege...

Creating a mood board Before starting to sketch my ideas, I went through all of my saved images on ArtStation and put together a few of them on a mood board. This will help me in being able to quickly refer back to pieces I like at a glance.  I want to create an environment painting, so the images I put on the collage are all environments rather than characters. I have included the mood board I created below. I definitely see a theme in the type of work I like,  I have saved a lot of forests and nature based environments. A lot of what I have looked at seems to also be medieval/fantasy themed so I think this is definitely something that will inspire my work. Sketching process I wanted to start out by sketching some initial ideas and play around with making and environment. Because of the number of illustrations that I saved which were themed around forest areas, I wanted to make my initial sketch a forest. I will walk through different stages of the sketch process below. I sta...

Overview For my first project I want to create an illustration of an environment, I want to make the environment visually interesting to make the viewer want to learn more about the environment and feel immersed in it. I will do some initial sketches to get my ideas for what I want the scene to consist of, then I will do a larger more detailed painting. Objectives I will try to break down my objectives for this project:  - To create an illustration which engages the viewer and helps to build an image for what the world within would look like - To develop my skills with digital art and challenge myself creatively  - To continue to refer back to other art and research throughout for inspiration  This project is important as I think illustrations have the ability to draw players in, they can make the viewer want to learn more about the world of a game before even having played it. Illustrations are a great tool for world building and can offer a quick snapshot into a world. ...

I began to look for inspiration to kickstart my initial project and to give me some ideas. I looked at a variety of illustration work on ArtStation ranging from character art to environmental art. There were a few rough criteria I had in my mind when saving art. The first thing I wanted to look out for was art that showcased a high level of technical skill, I want to improve my skills with painting so I think referencing back to great examples of art while I work will be useful. As I want to look into world building using illustrations, I also tried to save pieces that I felt made me interested in understanding more about the character/world. Generally I wanted to save work that I liked the style of, over time this will help in influencing my own style. While looking at work I definitely noticed that there were types of art I leaned more towards. The following link is the images I have saved so far on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/cosynoodle/collections/2499248 So far I have s...