Environment Design: Teamwork and storytelling

Choosing the sub-theme:

Choosing our sub-theme was quite a simple task. As a group, we all really enjoyed Japanese culture and the only issue was getting in touch with Max, one of our team members. Turns out he had to leave the course due to personal issues which, now having this new information, allowed us to have a better understanding of how the group would work. We all quickly then chose Feudal Japan as our sub-theme as we all already knew a decent amount about it and could really engross ourselves in it.

Choosing who does what:

Again, this was another rather easy task as we all wanted to do different things in the environment, so we split the scene into four parts: the world, the building, inside room one, and inside room two. I don’t have any screenshots for this as it was all spoken. I chose to do the building and the outside area surrounding it, as I was very interested in the research into the blacksmith structures. Jas was the world-building as she enjoys landscapes and was also the most confident, so gave herself a harder job as she wanted the challenge. This meant Niki and Brannon were to each choose an area inside as they saw fit since they wanted to show the fight inside the blacksmith and were making weapons as their hero assets.

Choosing the story:

We decided on the story pretty quickly and it was very nice getting together as a group and forming this story: there is a small village in Feudal Japan that has a very close-knit community as it is in a valley of hills, on top of an overlooking hill there is a blacksmith that supplies the village its goods. One day the village was attacked by an Oni demon, and as he wrecked his way through the village, the blacksmith was caught off guard on his tea break and hurried to get ready for battle. This story is told through the assets and environment, my asset being this family tea set on a bench, and the assets of my three other members being weapons that are displayed or have been used in the fight. The environment is shown throughout the area being weapons or armour on the floor clearly from fallen men with blood splatters on the ground. We also have very traditionally Japanese structures to make sure we get the Japanese theme across. We chose an Oni demon as Yokai are quite prevalent in Japanese culture throughout the ages and have a lot of interesting history surrounding them, and we found it was a very unique way to show our themes.

Feedback:

Throughout doing my work I kept my group up to date with screenshots of my progress asking how they thought it was coming along.

After basic concepts were done I wanted to see what my teammates thought of the main building, and I chose the building they wanted to make as they would be the ones designing in and around it.

After making the blockout, I wanted to ensure that everyone liked the placement of their areas so conferred with my team members. Beforehand, in person, we had briefly discussed hero asset placement and everyone seemed happy with it.

I had issues with my teammate’s work and so I fixed it, I checked in with them to make sure this was still okay. I wanted their input to make sure I did it in a way which still matched the rest of their work. Once I fixed that issue, I moved on to modelling in the world.