DREAMSTATE
DreamState is the concept of an open world, fantasy RPG. The goal for this project was to establish visual designs for a would-be game, exploring world building and characters creation. The primary focus lies within the character concepts and customizability of role-playing games, with an exploration into prop design and environments.
The University of Lethbridge senior Advanced Studio class features a group of students who work on a semester-long project of their choice with an exhibition at the end of the semester. This week-long event features stations of each students' completed project, presentations by each of the students, and showcases other projects from the student body.
Covid-19 however took the physical exhibition from us and instead all presentations have been showcased online.
Presentation
Planning
The idea for this project originated from another class assignment in my second year at the University. It was a creative writing class of sorts and one of the units was to write a 3-act film concept or a game concept. With my goals to already be working for games or animation my choice was obvious. The inspiration I took from my favourite genre of open-world role-playing and adventure games gave birth to my literal dream game.
Full character customization, endless build choices in weapons and combat, all based in a fantasy world. I always tell my friends I am a sucker for cute things, which I tried my best to relay in the creation and designs for the assets of this game.
Original concept for "DreamState"
Process
There were two main goals for this project; learning new digital painting techniques and exploring creativity that I have felt distanced from over the years. University was a challenging time for me and my art. I hardly created anything of my own because it made me feel guilty, that if I wasn't putting my effort and all my time into my schoolwork then it was a waste.
I decided to break the project into categories, in the same way work would be divided in a studio to try and distribute my stress. The environments I tackled first, as it was something I was new at and knew it would take me the longest. The characters I worked on second because although it was my stronger suit in art I wanted to challenge myself to create diverse characters and fun designs. The weapons and inventory props I did last because it was something I have done minimally in pieces in the past and I knew it was something that could be sketched out quickly with one design leading inspiration to another.
It is clear that the pieces included in the final presentation appear... incomplete. There is in fact no shading or rendering done to the arts present in this project for now. With the world shutting down in March 2020 it smacked the creativity and motivation right out of me. I left the project at flat colouring for the presentation because of this. However, I do have plans to properly render and complete most of the pieces here as I grow with my art and find a colouring style I am most comfortable in finishing this project with.
Gallery
Click on an image to view descriptions.
Conclusion
With the completion of this project, the completion of my degree followed. Four hard fought years of sleepless nights and hard creative work concluded with a challenging yet refreshing project. Having broken down each working category I learned background and landscape painting is hard, breaking out of a comfort zone is hard, and creating fantasy medieval-inspired weapons is extremely fun. Also I am a sucker for cute things (see Fox NPC, my pride and joy).
I would like to thank you for viewing this project and reading my thoughts through to the end, it was an adventure I will always remember and hopefully look back to from time to time.
mediaSoup
MediaSoup - the name of our what-could-have-been exhibition. The name was chosen by our class through brainstorming and voting elimination. Below I will include a link to our web version of the site as I would like to include my peers on this page, because I owe a lot of my success to their feedback and friendly competition.
