Mock-Ups

More recently, I've finally properly had time to be inspired and begin serious thought about the game idea. It is, perhaps, a bit odd to base design entirely around the aesthetic of the game first and foremost, but I don't see anything especially problematic about that. The aesthetic in this case will inform the structure and layout of the engine and, in turn, the way in which the player interacts with the game - so I feel it's important to keep both the appearance and the gameplay in mind together during these early stages.

My biggest worry in starting this project has been animation. This is something I have incredibly little experience with and, in spite of artistic ability, not something I've ever tried much. As such, my first exercise was a simple walking animation, which ended up developing a bit more over the course of a sleepless night. Overall, as a first attempt, I'm pretty happy with the result, though I need to look into simpler ways of setting up animation in Photoshop - having to fiddle with both layers and frames is just too, well, fiddly.

Next up, I went with trying out a simple background. The idea here for me has been to create the flat background layer-by-layer in Photoshop and import these as textures into 3ds Max. What happens then is that I can cut geometry into flat planes that display the texture and manipulate their depth. Finally, I can bake VRay lighting into the finished diorama, which gives it a much more realistic 'papercrafty' look, much like the original Palais Garnier dioramas.

I didn't have a lot of time, so this mock-up came out pretty sloppy in the end. My original intention to keep all of it painterly like the originals was soon scrapped in favour of keeping it more visually interesting and less time-consuming to produce, so I went back to Photoshop tricks of using textures and photo collages: