Reflection

In my first blog post for this project I stated:

"my perspective, lighting, digital painting,anatomy, environment art and ability to create artwork of quality in a short period of time – are all no where near where I want them to be. I'm going to have to really push myself this year if I want to achieve a professional level by the time I graduate."

My goal was for my art to be at a professional level by the time I graduate.  I feel I've achieved this - to an extent.

During semester one I made sure I was constantly improving on my art fundamentals via daily observational drawing and timed life drawing sessions which not only helped improve my environment and anatomy skills but also helped me to train myself to draw greater quality in shorter time periods.  I do however wish I'd dedicated more time to developing my perspective and lighting abilities as, though I feel they have improved through the occasional study, I feel they have not developed as rapidly as my other fundamentals this year.

My 2D asset creation skills have also certainly developed over the course of the year.  I feel confident in working in a variety of art styles which is an extremely important skill for a junior game artist to have as they will likely be working under an in-house style developed by a company's art director.  The speed of which I create such assets has also drastically improved without having to sacrifice quality.  This is also an incredibly important skill to have due to the tight time constraints of a game art pipeline.  My animation skills have also improved significantly which was an area I felt I was severely lacking in.  Our Global Game Jam game, Revenent - which I worked on as a character animator- was even nominated for this year's BAFTA New Talent Award!

However, as I am currently finding out through the joys of job hunting, it is extremely difficult to land a job as a games artist without examples of 3D asset creation in your portfolio.  Despite this, I don't regret dedicating this year to developing my 2D skillset as I feel the improvements I have made have made in this field have been worth it and I'm quite happy to dedicate my post-graduation time to improving my skills in 3D software.

I should also note that, though I didn't state it as a goal at the beginning of the year, I've seen a lot of improvement in my technical and game design abilities.  Though I worked with a programmer on the project I took responsibility for optimising the art assets, implementing scenes and setting up the general framework for the game.  I'm in no way ready to go off and make games by myself (and to be honest I love being part of a team too much to do that anyway) but I'd like to think that this experience will aid me in becoming a much more efficient developer as I believe it is important to have at least a basic understanding of the workload of your team members for collaboration to be really efficient.   I also learned a lot about game design, have a solid grasp of its basic fundamentals, I now appreciate how challenging it can be to get across ideas to other disciplines and fully understand how important it is in the creation of engaging experiences - No matter how pretty an art style is, without some level of agency in a game world players will lose interest quickly.  I didn't anticipate just how much code and design would contribute to the atmosphere of a game (you can't just stick some fog on top of a scene and call it spooky!) and I feel I have a much greater understanding and appreciation for these disciplines as a result.  

My main regret in the project is not using Unity as opposed to GameMaker.  Though Unity may have been arguably more difficult for an artist to fully grasp, it is a lot more industry standard than GameMaker and I feel I would have learned a lot more from a technical standpoint which as a result would have added to my employability.  

Regardless, when I first came to Abertay University I had never even used a graphics tablet so I'd like to think I've came a long way in my time here.  In four years I have experienced working under a variety of different game art roles, gained a lot more confidence in public speaking, experimented with a lot of different art styles, discovered my passion for game development and- thanks to the skills I have learned at university- have two shipped titles under my belt before even graduating.  As an artist I still have a long way to go before I can really call myself successful and I know I will be constantly learning and improving my skillset throughout my entire career, however I am confident that I have the potential and determination to get there.

Ritual - A Micro Postmortem

Below you can watch the final gameplay footage for Ritual.

In September of 2014 I saw a lack of 2D horror games on the market and wanted to know why.  I knew I wanted to make a 2D horror game and I knew I wanted to help get rid of the stigma that suggested they couldn't be scary.  The result was a short prototype for a 2D horror game entitled Ritual where the player takes on the persona of a sister looking for a little brother in a haunted school.  To get him back she must undertake a ritual that opens three portals to a demon realm that must be closed within a short period of time - whilst being pursued by the game's antagonist.


What Went Right

1.  Art Direction

The art direction contributed to the horror atmosphere - a gritty colour palette, the use of overlays that created visual obscurity, the use of art assets conveying environmental storytelling and the incorporation of uncomfortable, saturated colours to represent danger.  To ensure an effective art direction, the general art style was developed via the creation of "art prototypes" consisting of a tree asset rendered in a variety of distinct art styles.  Viewers were asked which styles they felt were most suited to a horror atmosphere and this process was repeated with further iterations until the current art style was chosen.

2.  Merging of art and game design

After playing a lot of horror games and reading lots of academic literature on the subject, I concluded horror atmosphere is key in inducing fear in a player.  This is due to the cognitive science theory of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion which, when applied to horror games, states that when a player feels stress in a horror game - usually due to jump scares or a high difficulty level - the surrounding  horror imagery/atmosphere causes them to mislabel this stress as fear.  In Ritual this stress is evoked through the implementation of timed gameplay sequences where the player must close portals to a demon dimension within a short time limit. Aside from an appropriate horror art direction, horror atmosphere is evoked through triggered events (animations, sounds, jump scares) strategically placed throughout the environment (see the purple rectangles in the screen cap shown below).  These arguably successfully conveyed appropriate levels of tension as having images unaccompanied by sound and vice versa sets the player on edge for faster paced areas of gameplay i.e. scares such as the chase scene.

3.  Scope

At the beginning of the year I was extremely ambitious and the following diagram was created to represent the initial level layout:

Whereas the current level layout is represented here:

Knowing when to scale back was invaluable. It left three weeks for the polishing of art assets and condensed gameplay down to less than five minutes, a convenient amount of time for the showcase which also depicts how horror atmosphere can be created in 2D games even in a condensed environment,

What Went Wrong

1.  Not enough focus on promoting the game/myself as an artist

Throughout the project I didn't have much of an online presence for the game, failing to take advantage of popular online game development trends such as the #screenshotsaturdays hashtag on Twitter.  Whenever I did I failed to communicate what exactly the screenshot was of or what it was for (I had quite a few people contact me who were interested in the project but couldn't tell what it was about!)  In retrospect having the game logo or my website URL overlaid on released screenshots would have been very beneficial.  Developing a self-brand further would have also likely have aided my online presence.

2.  Technical Limitations

Halfway through the project I was no longer able to work with the initial programmer and "recruiting" a new programmer who had not been as involved was difficult as time had to be spent going over ideas.  Having an audio designer and programmer who were essentially working for free was also problematic as I felt I didn't want to take more time from them than necessary which hindered iterative development in game design.  For instance I really wanted to play with the idea of breaking the fourth wall in the climatic event for the game however I was more concerned with having a playable prototype than experimenting with gameplay elements that would have required further time-consuming outsourcing.  For this reason there are also still a couple of (non-game breaking at least) bugs in the final build that in a regular development team environment would have likely been fixed.

Conclusion

I feel Ritual had a lot of potential that I couldn't reach as I have only just begun to scratch the surface of this topic and I would love to work on a 2D horror game again with an actual team behind me in order to fully utilise all the techniques I have learned this year in horror atmosphere creation.  It's a really exciting time to be a 2D artist in games as we are seeing the likes of games such as The Banner Saga, Child of Light and Rayman Legends that truly harness the raw horsepower of high fidelity visuals and smoother frame rates that 2D development allows for. These attributes to a game development pipeline result in shorter game art time-frames and allow for extra time that can be used for artists to truly utilise and develop the a games art styles.  Developers of 2D horror games- who typically stick to a standard pixel art style- can make use of this and it is hoped that more professionals will become invested in this area of game development and create successful, truly atmospheric 2D horror titles.  As a result fans of horror games will have a larger variety of horror games to engage with and the creation of “scary” 2D horror games will no longer be viewed as “impressive” by critics- It will simply become the norm.