Research

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Week of 6th March

Planning

Design the setting more. Research each as I get to them

What the world looks like now, including faction cities/towns
Important locations
Finalise the species and mock up designs
On friday, finish write ups for the week
independently, mock up 3d character models. Why - takes ages, need a long period of no distraction, more resources at home too

Research

Firstly, I'm going to finalise the ideas of the species before everything else because they are going to drive the culture. As stated in the ideas phase: the four main species are Beastial fishmen who had their minds destroyed by the genetic manipulation, intelligent but vengeful fishmen, peaceful fishmen and untouched humanity. To kick start the process, i'm going to do a few, very rough sketches of them and then I'll decide on names.

Species

The Brinemen (Ferocious Fishmen)

Very rough initial sketch

Lore

I got human anatomy wrong again (I should've used reference), however the face is pretty much the focus, I gave this guy thick rubbery lips for the deep sea affect, with blacked out eyes because they wouldn't be used the same way in the deep ocean and thin teeth like angler fish to relate to its environment.

The name is proving to be fairly tricky, so i've adopted the perspective of: "who would name them". The humans who made them or the human's of now who have to deal with them? Then there's also the idea that each culture will have a different name for them: because humans would fear them whilst the vengeful fish people might pity them. So therefore, I took to the idea of what the player's occupation (most likely to be a mercenary) could call them. That thought process lead me to name of brinemen which i imagine will get shortened to just Brine. Not amazingly cool, but it gets the point across I think.

Vol'raan (Vengeful fishmen)

Here i'm starting to research what humans would actually need to survive entirely under the ocean, along with added flair to seperate them from the next fishman race. To this end, I found a very useful website. Before i start explaining what I found from this site, i should've done this for the Brinemen first so when it comes to final designs i'll impliment what i learn here. The first point is that aquatic animals need a body part or organ that can allow it float, from my own information I know that can be achieved through air intake (not useful here) so I have to think of an alternative. Dorsal fins are used to make sure the fish stays top facing up when swimming.

Abraham Sapien (Hellboy, 2004). We can see that his eyes are very wide and blacked out, his lips are a contrasting red with his gills being lined on what appears to be his cheekbones. You can also see webbed fingers.

fish.

squid

Sketches

First iteration, weird eye brows, uninteresting face, didn't really like

third iteration with different photo that doesn't look grainy.

Second iteration, dumb looking helmet, hated it

Explanation of design choices

I started with the eyes to make their intelligence first and foremost. I neglected to include mouths however to strip away their voice and therefore an element of humanity. The two cheek sections are gills, so that it is feasible that they exist in water. I don't know how it works, but I'll say that they produce voice from their gills instead, but they lack lips so sounds like p or b are impossible for them. The head crest is reminiscent of a jester's crown which can be looked into as an allegory to their common name: fool.

Third iteration, funny little head thing, emo eyeliner that sort of 'wisps' down his face.

Third iteration but more detailed.

Lore

Now for the name: My thought process for this started with: "well they would've had to have made a new language easier spoken underwater". I started thinking about what is easiest to pronounce underwater, which happened to be mostly vowels and letters that aren't the result of a build up of pressure: a c e f h i l m n o q r s u v w x y z. Now I can make an amalgamation of those letters. Vol'raan sounds good, lets go with that.
So, how do these guys live life? What do they do? What are they like?
I like the idea that your life isn't defined by who you are, so (and this will be applied to every race) they typically live everywhere and do what they want. They are unable to live outside of water without a breathing apparatus, so they are more commonly found underwater.

Celerian (Peaceful fish men)

For now, I need to lay down the foundation of who these guys are and how they differ to the Vol'raan. Firstly, these guy's genetic manipulation went perfectly, and they were willing thus they harbor no ill will to humanity. Additionally, I've always had the idea that the Vol'raan were locked to being aquatic where-as these guys are more amphibious, able to survive at length on land as well.

Sad squidward vibes

Eyes are done and accidentally made them look more feminine, but I thought i'd go with it

Drew long eyelashes, added detail to the head fins.

Drew and detailed the neck and shoulders

As for the name, they are active on land too so I don't need to single out letters. Firstly, I go to google translate and translate related words into latin for inspiration. One of which was 'speed' which is 'celeritas'. I quite like the 'celer' part but I need to be careful as to avoid making the name sound like a vegetable. I translate a few more words before realising I can go with 'Celerian', which is very helpful for my next section: Location and culture.

Locations and culture

I know that the game would be open world, so i'm going to state that the world is about the same size as Assassin's Creed Odyssey's map which is , according to gamerant, is 230km². I chose Odyssey because at least half of the map is open ocean and I think that any larger and the world will feel empty, any smaller and you wouldn't feel the scope of the world being sunk.
So at this current point in time, the world is a big empty ocean.

I think there should be a neutral hub, where every species co-exist in a fragmented sense of peace. This is so that the player can see and learn about all of the cultures whilst also seeing how they interact with each other. This hub would likely be the biggest town/city in the game and feature varying shops and services. It would not be safe however, due to the clashing of ideals, opinions and morals of factions, gang violence is rife within the shadowy underbelly of this city. The city itself should probably have a section above water and underwater, maybe an air filled underwater section and also a flooded area for the Vol'raan. Now for where, it could be in the middle of the map, allowing easy access from anywhere on the map, this would be a good option if you need to come back often however this would take away from the feeling of venturing out in the far open ocean and diminish the risk from going out. So I would actually have it in the corner, meaning that you can go really far away and it feels more special when you are in the hub, sort of like Saint Denis from Red Dead Redemption 2.
So now, the map is a big ocean with a city in the corner.
I think there should be a large area that used to be a city, but the buildings are crumbling and have become home to a new ecosystem of flora and fauna. These buildings could have rope bridges connecting them and some of them could have been renovated by varying factions. Speaking of, the buildings could remain in a constant state of contest, with factions residing within this decayed city taking buildings, getting them taking from them, buildings having massive battles fought within them. I would imagine the residents would be isolated to this area, meaning that factions in this city don't have influence anywhere else, unless they aren't based in this city.
In addition to this, a large island formed from a mountain should also feature within the map. Villages and maybe a small town of humans and Celerians could be on this island.
To best demonstrate my idea for the map, i'll do a very rough drawing on ms paint.

Included in this, is two more locations, A vol'raan only city and an Abyss zone, which could function as the hardest area in the game. With some of the more important locations now detailed, I'm going to develop the factions

Factions

For this, i'm going straight to the Warcraft franchise's setting, Azeroth, for faction inspiration. The two obvious factions in this setting are the alliance and horde, however I want to delve deeper and research the human factions which (at my current knowledge) include Stormwind, Gilneas, Kul'tiras, Theramoore and what remains of lorderon (not much). From playing the game, you can tell they all had their own themes and culture. For example, Stormwind is typical western fantasy, autumn farming and big castles, compared to Gilneas which is pretty much just bloodborne, large gothic buildings and cockney accents where-as Kul'tiras feels much more 'folklorey' and focuses a sailors lifestyle and superstition. Another setting with clearcut factions is Fallout, specifically the 4th one because that's the only one of played. Rather than location like Warcraft, fallout 4's factions are based on ideals: Gunners are a military like mercenary guild, the institute have an end goal, which is a unique trait, since the rest of the factions just try to exist. I actually think that the best thing to research are the real life equivalent: gangs and mafias. My mind immediately went to the prohibition era and the birth of organised crime within America. When looking for a reliable website, I specifically avoided any dramatic recreations or sensationalised stories, so I landed on History.

Practical

Initial sketch for the Vol'raan. Influenced by my ideas garnered from research into aquatic adaptations.

Initial sketch for the Celerian

Reflection + setting so far

This week marks the start of development for this project and I feel that this has been a solid start. I pretty much know where everything is, the species have a basic design that I don't hate, the game map has been layed out and I've got a decent foundation to build off. Overall, I'm happy with what I've done and I'd say I'm on schedule. I would say I need to do more research into more varying ideas, so next week i'm going to look more into climate change and the potential changes earth could endure and how the previous humans tried to stop it.

The setting that has been written down and is official so far is as follows:
Earth is flooded, humanity co-exists with 3 races of fish people, Vol'raan who are typically violent, waterborne and somewhat reclusive. The Celerian who are amphibious humans and the Brinemen, simple minded abyss dwelling beasts. There are factions however none have been detailed, they exist within the ocean and a few cities and islands.

What still needs to be added:
The origin of the fish people (genetic manipulation) needs to be expanded
specific factions

Other stuff to be done that isn't practical:
Gameplay
Gameplay (combat)
Gameplay (What you can do/goals/why you would do that)

Week of 13th March

Planning

Finalise the setting, begin with gameplay mechanics

Finalise species design
Design a main character to stand in for the player character
Create some factions
independently, refamiliarise ocean simulations, fluid simulations and anything else that may be needed to use. If finished, start with modelling and rigging characters. Why - less time wasted in production phase and modelling characters I find to be very time consuming and requires focus I wouldn't be able to get in class.
Design how the game actually works, such as open world, what you could do in it, whether there's a story or not, what is your goal etc.
Design combat: how it looks, feels and plays.

As well as this, I need to research what climate change would actually do to the ocean itself.

Research

Factions continued

I need faction ideas and names. In Red Dead Redemption 2, two of the main gangs are named after their leaders (Van der linde gang and O'driscolls) but there are also others such as the Lemoyne Raiders where their name is derived from where they are based. Read Dead Redemption 2 is a good game to look at because Rockstar definitely did their research; most gangs are based on real gangs that used to exist. The Del Lobo gang for example, seem to be inspired the Five Joaquins Gang,

So after this bit of research, I sort of know how gang/faction names are formed. To make life easier for myself I'm gonna start with a faction that lives within the decayed city, so I actually need a name for this city. Atlantis is cliché, so no to that, but I wonder if there are other, less known sunken cities we've forgotten about, and if we've forgotten about them, its likely that we've given them a new name. So I found this website called Explorers Web and an article from them about sunken cities. Funnily enough, the first entry, Thonis-Heracleion, I thought had a cool name so i'll mess around with various anagrams until I get something I like.
Therenis
Cleonis
Theron
Hierokon
Thiron
This isn't working ,so I go to a different route, a more cold name that designated rather than given. I say that, but then I immediately think of 'Innsmouth', the primary location of H.P Lovecraft's Novella 'The Shadow Over Inssmouth' and thinking of the fish people that start to appear and the fish people in my setting, I can't help but feel this is a perfect homage. There is the arguement that R'lyeh is more fitting but I feel like that's a bit too on the nose. So this decayed city is now called Innsmouth. I could play into this lovecraftian take, and call this faction something like 'Innsmouth horrors', but then that doesn't sound all that great. So I get stuck again, I look to other means of naming them, such as ideals. Lets say this faction is violent, and they are after money and infamy. They are composed of Vol'raan and Celerian but no humans. Innmouth's vengeance is the name i'm settingling with, they are in innsmouth because they are petty and don't want humanity to live in their old homes. An opposing faction could be one of humanity trying to retake it, they can be called the Scholars, based on the idea that they want to learn about the past from the city. I think there could be another faction in the city, scavenging on the spoils of war and preying on the weak and wounded. First name I thought of was the unimaginative 'scavengers', then 'ravagers' which i'll go with for now. Other factions can include a purely Vol'raan one called something like 'Desolation', varying minor factions on the island and hub city, which I also need a name for. After a brief moment of thought, i remembered the name: "Celerian" so I think the name 'Celeria' works well for the hub city. To finish off the big naming session, the island can be called Kotoa which according to a very quick wikipedia search, means home. Fitting. and the big Vol'raan city can be called Volaria.

Map so far

Climate change research - oceans

If the polar ice caps melt, that means that earth is warmer now; what would that do to the oceans?

Practical

Finalising the Vol'raan design with an official concept art

Weapons: I found this discussion and the mention of push daggers made me think of streamlined fist weapons. I oragamied some random paper in my bag to create the effect I wanted. It looks really silly but gets my point across, the grey scribbles is where the blade would extent up the hand and actually attach to the wrist, allowing for slightly more dexterous hand movement, but there can be variations that start at the hand as well

Started with a very rough stickman pose and head shape

Redid the head and drew the rest of the body

created a new layer to add detail, moved it beneath the outline layer

OK I did tonnes and forgot what specifically, however you can see a lot of layers, i drew some stuff on the wrong layers occasionally and the glow was achieved through a very soft and translcent blob of white.

At this point i take a step back and realise that i don't really need to do a final piece of art if i'm happy with the initial sketch, so i put this on hold. This does mean i'll re do the brinemen concept art though.

Practical research with blender

So I know for a fact that I need to remember how ocean simulations work with blender so I'm going to make a quick little scene with one in. I remember that they function best with planes so I add one in

I add an ocean modifier to it, which makes it massive and adds waves to it. Currently it does not move with time

I scale up the waves and make that monstrosity. Not quite what i'm after so I lower it back down again

I keyframe the time of the animation so that we can see the ocean in motion. However, you can see that the simulation speeds up and then slows down again, which we don't want because oceans don't do that. I will sort that out later because right now I want to focus on actually making it look like water, to do that I go over to the shader editor

This is the result of what I put together. Gross. it doesn't even look like water.

To fix that, let's identify what's wrong:

the way light hits the water doesn't change with the movement of the simulation; the perceived crevices don't move
It looks more like pond water
It is the wrong colour

Ok so that looks much nicer, still pond water though

To fix that first issue, I see an option on the simulation: Generate normals. I know that normals are used to tell the renderer how light hits an object from what we did in unit 2, so I check that and... I do not know how to use it from there. I go back to the shader editor, add a normal map node and apply that instead of the bump.

I do not know if i'm even using those normals that are generated, but I like this result so I'll keep it as is for now. The next thing I want to tackle is making it deform more and look like an actual ocean. I don't see an option to do that however, so I literally just scale it up and somehow that works. Now however, the shader doesn't quite look right; its too reflective. Reflectivity is caused by light hitting an object and bouncing off at a consistent angle, to do this an object needs to be quite smooth otherwise light would bounce off in different directions. This is one reason why puddles and pond water is much more reflective than the ocean, since pond water is typically more flat where as oceans have waves which make the water look 'rough'.

I go back to the shader editor and fiddle around with a lot of stuff. (go back and talk about what stuff does)

This leaves me with an ultamatum: keep like this, since this is quite styalised, or go look at actual ocean reference

I sort of like how this looks, but i'm not satisfied so I go and look for tutorials. I also do look at reference, one of which inspires the composition of the render later on

I end up using this tutorial to fill in the gaps

I follow it closely, and get this. Not quite what I want. Obviously the foam has overtaken everything so I need to decrease the amount of foam somehow.

I do that by reducing its coverage and the result is on the right

I add to the resloution and I actually really like this! It looks quite nice and styalised

I fiddle around with more settings to make it look a bit softer

To fix the slow start and end, I highlighed the keyframes and set the interpolation to linier

Thats the bulk of the simulation done, now I just want to finish off the render

One thing of note that I did. I randomly thought "hey lets do more with the generated normals" so I plugged them into a bump and it didn't look great, so i plugged it into a normal map and the result looks weird from some angles but great from others

Without that

With

Another thing to note, the render times with an ocean thats big enough to fill in what looks like a horizon is pretty massive, so I will probably end up limiting the amount of open ocean shots I do.

Preview

ocean sim.mp4

Final render. Note I reduced the amount of sampling so that it didn't take 4 hours to render, so pretend its at a higher resolution

Short little reflection:

It looks good, far better than the last ocean simulation I did, I'm happy with it. The render time could've been a bit shorter though? Earlier i mentioned that a big ocean would eat up the render time, however I think I found a workaround. If I simply make the ocean take up the space of all of the repeats, I've got the same size with only 1/25 of the rendering time (I had 25 in total repeats). This also means that I can afford to increase the resolution to make it look better for the shots are as close to the water as that is.

Stand in character for the player

This character would be the person you see on the box art and cinematics that represents the player. They need to be ambiguous so that the player can look at this character and think "that could be me" or hopefully "that will be me". Therefore:

fully armoured or clothed with little skin showing
A somewhat gender neutral figure (not overly masculine or feminine)

Reflection

This week could've gone better, what i have done I believe has been done to a high standard however I haven't done everything I needed to, in particular; gameplay. This means I'll have to quickly do the gameplay and then go straight onto the storyboard

Week of 20th March

Finish gameplay mechanics, spend the rest of the week planning the cinematic.

finish off gameplay
Brainstorm potential shot ideas
Plan the cinematic
Shotlist
storyboard (both onsite and independently)
Continue modelling and rigging characters. Why - I wouldn't be able to focus on this in class.

Gameplay

Since I don't have to make this game, I can go as ambitious as I want.

This is an open world sandbox game where the player creates a character starts as just another person within the world. NPCs of various factions and affiliations litter the world and the player can have a whole host of interactions with them. A lot of quests are radiant and generated, however there would also be set questlines that can take the player in various situations.

The combat is going to be inspired by soulslike, but a bit more forgiving and changed to accommodate an elder scrolls like game. Which basically means that you have a bit more health, dying makes you respawn at a close discored location, whilst also reversing time by 5 minutes.

Player character continued

So my initial idea was a full diving mask upgraded to be more efficient and sci-fi looking.

An awful drawing I did as a quick little experiment, I like the concept by it looks far too generic to be a main character stand in.

Final result, a kinda boring pose but I really like the design and the drawing quality is much better than before.

Storyboard

Potential shot ideas:

vengful fish man turning around to face the camera with a big underwater city behind him
human test tubes
Submarine being raided by vengeful fish men
Brinemen doing something
building blowing up
Volraan infighting in an overgrown building

Currently I'm just drawing potential shot ideas, it is out of order and very rough.

Actually planning the cinematic:

What I've noticed is that I'm having a hard time thinking of ideas because I don't really know how the cinematic is structured. I essentially have the stylistic choice of Starcraft 2: Legacy of the void's cinematic trailer/Demon's Souls remake opening that is a linier story meant to represent the atmosphere and how it feels to play. Or I can have Cyberpunk 2077's montage contextualised by a news report which sets the atmosphere and mood, it ultimately has the effect of making Night city seem alive. To figure out which style, I'm going to ask a simple question.
What makes these cinematics good and why do they work for the game they represent?
Let's start with with Starcraft II: Legacy of the void. Firstly, it starts with the blizzard logo drop, expectations are set sky high instantly, then we get some exposition through a narration that basically says that the zerg (called the swarm and currently shown in frame) overtook the narrator's people's world (the mentioned people enter the shot so we know who he is talking about) but his people were strong enough to stay together, therefore they stayed strong as a people. Instantly this tells us a few things: Numbers are important, the protoss (race of the narrator) are individually pretty strong as well. This is accurate to the game, Protoss do in fact have some of the strongest units, however they cannot do much on their own. Moving on we get more exposition in slow motion that is mostly related to the lore of what this expansion delves into (Protoss are telepathically connected basically), it ends when one of the warriors (known in game as zealot) ignites their blade and the slow motion ends into a series of action shots. One thing to take note of; every shot flows into the next. An event happens in one shot, then the shot changes and we can see that same event, but the camera moves onto something else. this does multiple things. It connects the battle, we know what's going on but it feels like everything is going on at once. It feels the juxtaposition of controlled chaos. This not only represents how the game plays (since the player has a top down view they can see everything happening in the battlefield), but also from a story telling perspective, this shows the effect of the telepathic communion; hyper efficient warrior guild... basically. This sequence gets bigger and bigger until eventually a black hole swallows the two biggest things and we are left with a single soldier against an army. Then a pylon is summoned (90 seconds after it started being summoned, attention to detail) and suddenly loads of zealots get summoned (something else that is featured in the game) as the narrator tells you that what the cinematic is all about: reclaiming the homeworld. The cinematic ends with one final charge and some poor zerg getting cut into the title card.
So what makes this good (ignoring cinematography, sound design etc.)? Firstly it represents gameplay under a cinematic lens, pretty much everything is accurate to the game. Theoretically, this fight can happen in the game. The other thing that i think makes this a good game cinematic is that it also feels like how the game plays; its structured as a linier story, which starcraft is (the campaigns are and the matches are as well). This point of mine works a better when compared with other examples; lets use cyberpunk 2077.
As stated earlier, cyberpunk 2077's opening is a montage contextualised by a news report. It shows various happenings in Night City, various things the player can get up to, various sites of interest etc. . It is not structured in a linier format; its all over the place. This shows the chaotic nature of Night City but it also represents how the game is meant to be played. You go out and see something interesting, so you explore it and suddenly your helping some guy with a grenade for a nose. You finish that and now an AI is having a mental breakdown and so now you've got to help him. It's a non linier opening for a non linier game, whereas LOTV's is a linier opening of a situation you can find yourself in within a mostly linier game.

OK... so how does that help me?

Now that I've actually looked into how why the openings are structured, I can decide on how to structure my own. To start with: a recap of the game

open world, more vast than dense but not to a boring degree
sandbox (non linier)
You are not a hero
combat is difficult
there are some horror elements (brinemen, genetic manipulation gone wrong)

Therefore, it lines up with Cyberpunk's style better, but I think that's a bit too chaotic, it doesn't fit. Therefore, I think its best to look at a third example and blend it with cyberpunk's style: Demon's souls ps5 remake. This is actually a few scenarios given time for visual storytelling; (skipping over the initial exposition) the first is of a knight that represents the player tackling quite a few enemies but struggling to do so, in fact he even gets smacked in the head. This represents the difficulty of the game whilst also showing how it is played. This is ended rather unceremoniously after he is smacked and launched into another shot, then some phantoms appear at his side (which I think represents multiplayer) and one of them shoots the camera in a homage to the original cinematic. The shot changes to another situation where that same knight is surrounded and more of his phantom friends appear, but then the dragon god appears and roars in front of the moon in a very cool shot. Although I think this is the weakest of the cinematics I've talked about, I like the multiple scenario approach where they've been given some time and weight. I think the scenarios are too similar to each other for what I'm going for, therefore if I blend the two styles: using the variation of Cyberpunk's with the time and weight of Demon's Souls', I believe i'll have a fitting structure for this game. Which after this much thought, i'm looking forward to putting down:

Opening exposition on that cliff to show the world has flooded. Also show the hub above water in the distance, player starts in the hub and in one sequence show that it is safe but not exclusively so. Transition into a submarine which after a moment gets attacked by the brine. Player repels the attack and the submarine reaches the decayed city (Innsmouth). Volraan infighting ensues but they notice the player so they team up on them, player takes care of them with some difficulty. (optional, building blows up which transitions) into the player swimming upwards, trying to escape the brine. they clamber up onto a small ship and then the player fights some off in a massive storm. There could be a big flash of lightning before the screen cuts off into a title card. (after working on the shot list, i'm adding an optional bit after the flash of lightning) the flash of lighting transitions into a series of quick action shots: Player fighting volraan on the ocean floor, the building blowing up could be here, a volraan in front of Volaria turning to face the player, test tubes, Celerian infighting, some poor celerian getting executed in an alleyway, brineman attempting to maul the player and finally the player arriving to a homely looking place and collapsing. Title card.

With this done, I can work on a shotlist to see if that is a viable plan.

Shotlist

I do not like traditional shot lists, in fact i don't like shot lists in general but i know they're helpful so i'm doing one anyway. I'm using my own one more suited to Blender's environment. Shots are more like scenes, however I am more focused on what can be created in one go and one render, therefore a shot is a single blender save/render.

shot list v2

With that done, I know now what I need to make and what I don't need to make, the only other planning required is a storyboard of particular shots, which I'll probably just format as drawings. Getting reference video for the fight choreography would be very helpful but something I don't know how possible would be to achieve

Reflection

This week felt pretty fragmented and wasn't organised in a way I liked; it felt very chaotic. That being said I am pretty happy with the amount that got done. Starting with the gameplay, this isn't as detailed as I imagined it being but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, so I can afford to not let that be so detailed. Moving onto the player character, I hated the first draft but liked the concept, developing that further brought me to the final design which I really like (even if the drawing is a bit naff) and I am looking forward to modelling them. The story board was more a shot concept generator, if I have a spare moment i will end drawing important shots so I can pre plan them before production. I think most importantly however, the cinematic actually has a plan! The shotlist was made and I'm pretty happy with it, it has less shots than I thought it would and there is a very high chance I'll end up tweaking it to get rid of some of the down time and make it feel more connected.

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