Mike M's Capstone Development Blog

To solidify ideas for the Minified Shock, we set about finalizing the location and story. After much heated debate and conversation, the Hotel setting was confirmed, and we developed a wonderful backstory that ties in a great deal of the gameplay elements. My main concerns with regard to the setting, aside from the creation of assets themselves, is the kind of mood the world will have. This concerns everything from the colors to the sounds. My main inspirations behind the location's atmosphere come from a mix of things, from the original Bioshock to Stanley Kubrick's adaption of the novel The Shining. The of my tasks was demonstrating my general vision of how the hotel could be developed from a gameplay perspective. How can something normally so formal and orderly in construction make for interesting level design? I set about creating some rudimentary block-out rooms to demonstrate m intent.   Once this task was complete, the remaining of my tasks this week co

Immersive Shock Studies For our second week of the ideation phase, I put my full attention on the third of our ideas: The Immersive Sim. The key challenge with this game is the vastness of its interior spaces, and the act of creating a narrative and setting that is simultaneously engaging and within scope. The setting also had to conform to a selection of other standards that allow for an intertwining of gameplay elements, narrative and location. The list of possible settings went from 25 to 2, and it was on for these two that the connecting was done. Lost City The first idea we had was a lost city that the player is exploring. This allowed for a variety of gameplay ideas regarding both level design and mechanic justifications. The big challenge here was coming up with a distinct architectural style that read as "ancient" but still felt vaguely advanced and mysterious. Abandoned Hotel Our other idea, which holds the most promise, was that of a long-ab

The first real art task was to create viable art styles for each of the three games we were prototyping. Breaking the task down, I decided to focus on two this week: The parkorror game- a first person platformer with scary monsters chasing you constantly- and the management sim- a strategy game in which you must run a police station. I started with the horror game. Parkorror Given the genre, I felt it would be a worthy endeavor to make the art in the game an homage to some of my favorite films. I wanted to capture the campy creepiness of black and white horror films and episodes of the Twilight Zone.  I wouldn't be able to use the color ideas of my experiments, but the flat, simple style could still be applied. Things would have an air of realism with a slightly stylized twist, and I could still have some fun with the contrast between black and white, which in my opinion is responsible for the coolest imagery found in black and white films. Here are some example

Welcome! This is the start of Michael Manfredi's Capstone Development Blog, where you can get a closer look at the artistic progress occurring on the Phantasm Team. This week, the main priority was about finding a simple style that lent was appealing to the eye but had a speedy workflow. I wanted to emulate the intense colors present in images like these, by Dominik Mayer and Halil Ural, respectively: They provide striking color and contrast. I did some experimentation with color clashing in these brief thumbnails. Finally, I did some tests in Unreal to see if the style could be emulated in engine, and I think despite no post processing edits and basic building block objects, the results were quite successful. After these experiments, I think we can utilize this style effectively by having semi detailed modeling and simple, color focused textures.