Concept design
I gather as much reference and information about the concept of interest, I play with visual iterations in case I want to improve its shape or if the shape doesn’t exist yet, I design it entirely. I can also break down concepts and explain the concept visually.
Serenity / Esthesis Character Concepts
The Angel concept from Esthesis
I gathered image references of bird wings and skeletons, different types of wings and their functions, and I even explored the idea of how a human being would look like if it would have wings.
Functionally, I found it’s not feasible for bipeds to have wings. If you have an interest in the topic, give me a message. We can have an intense chat on why bipeds can’t have wings, and talk about this mutual frustration together!
Post mouse – cyberpunk pipes and clock design breakdowns
The pipes were made for the possibility that the mouse character would pass through pipes, and how we could combine them, so the mechanics would be fun. I also explored a level of breakage, just so I can imagine how it would look like if worn.
Game design
Mechanics and map design
Good mechanics keep the player motivated to continue the game, and explore it further. To do that, they need small rewards along the way so their journey is pleasant, and big rewards so they get pleased with ending a level and passing a milestone.
Small rewards could be small achievements, visual cues or gifts discovered along the way, even stories that they encounter along the way. In an exploratory game, you are rewarded for looking around by finding documents, hidden gems etc. In a fighting game, maybe as you get better in the art of fighting, you get a reward by amping specs of endurance, flexibility or other skills.
We can also induce feelings around a subject, and enforce them. Which means that without thinking much about it, we influence our viewer’s lives, whether we induce fear towards a subject, or curiosity.
We separate games from real life, but what unites us is the power of constant learning. As more frustrating an information gets, as more we step away from it. As more pleasant it is, as more dopamine we get, which means that everything that is good in life, whether is love, drugs, or curiosity for a subject, when we crave for it, it means we are addicted to it. To get close to a person we need to understand their speech patterns and how they relate to their state of mind. Whether we want to learn or not, we subconsciously do it, and we cannot survive without it.
Now after babbling about the meaning of life, this is an example of my work in game design:
- Serenity – environment mechanics and map design.
- This was part of a slideshow I made in the first weeks of the project, when we were trying to shape the core of Sculpture garden idea. I took in account how players could interact minimally but still significantly with the environment and the sculptures.
References
Below you can see the reference images used for the map design to support the core idea. Note that these are reference moodboards for inspiration, and not my own renders
Level Design
This is a collaborative concept jam I did in the game electives at The Animation workshop, together with two of my classmates. We brainstormed the idea in around 4 hours, and we made a pitch for it. The two images below are the state diagram (written level design) and the map design I did of the survival game’s core idea.
