Gabbie
circus enviroment

With my game I decided to go down the art route and it is

more of a visual walking sim rather than a more interactive

version, my main focus on the circus look was to make it

seem warm and or mildly creepy with it being set up to

look like the show is just starting. I started with the idea of

creating a circus because I enjoy bright lights and the

atmospheres they bring. Also, I shortly after saw the lack

on circus themed games out which is kind of depressing

because circus games are fun. As a walking sim I was going

to make this a walk and act as a detective finding out what

happened to the missing freaks in the sideshow, but I

stayed with focusing on art style which allowed me to learn

how to use substance to texture the assets that I made in

Maya. All of the game was practically made out of the

same material to create the art style I wanted. Everything

being made out of plastic allowed me to create the popcorn machine texture myself which would’ve been more difficult to create if everything was textured like regular objects. Giving everything a similar look allowed me to finish texturing a little faster than if I was going through the regular route. I did manage to complete my initial goal in creating a circus environment and I think that the coloured lighting helped pull the scene together creating an atmosphere of a show about to begin like when cinema lights go off and the only light is coming from the big screen.

 

 I think that the dungeon scrawl layout I put together I managed to stick to well with the main shape and placement of benches and walls being pretty In line with my initial plan with the main difference being that I replaced the curtain with a wall with doors instead. When creating assets, I think that the ones that gave me the most problems were probably the stand that holds the canon as well as the benches. My personal favourite to create was probably the little clown nose which is practically completely useless and harder to notice but I still enjoyed being able to put a clown nose on scale guy. Also being able to add my dog as an easter egg on the coat stand was fun to do. I had an asset list but later on I ended up ditching half the stuff on it like the fortune teller and ended up adding extra stuff as well which I forgot about adding when the initial list was created. Stuff like juggling pins, balloons, a human canon and the smaller lights I forgot about and created when I realised that my scene was looking a little barren. At the start the biggest problem looked to be in creating the tent which I managed to create by having the side panels put in manually building the wall and the roof being a big cone. This worked relatively well. However, I do realise that if the player had to leave the tent, it looks extremely odd, and the top of the top portion isn’t even textured fully with it just being white. One of my issues I thought I would have when texturing is that it might look a little too matched with everything being all white, red and gold but the curtains black gradient adds a little contrast as well as the purple lighting acting as both a spotlight and a difference in colour from the walls and everything else being the same colours.

 

I believe my biggest downfall of the whole project was in my lack of knowledge when it comes to both maya and trying to add an interactive character which I ended up giving up on as the tutorials I found were incredibly long and didn’t seem to work on how I would want it to work in my own game. luckily whenever it came to maya I could ask either joe or my classmate Nate to help me out. During my pre- production I also was able to create 3 separate characters that would be part of the circuses main cast. I didn’t make a character of the players character you play as in the game as I wanted to leave it ambiguous for players to be able to decide on their own what they wanted the character to be. Although I did technically make the players character a guy as that is what most players decide they want to play as. The characters I did design can be see in context and research, characters section where it contains references and for the snake charmer, I believe there is also some research available on freakshows and circuses as a whole which explains some things like how the modern circus was created, and the animals and how they have been abused and still are getting abused which lead me to find out about the holographic animals that are used in Germany using projectors to show off animals that appeared in the original circuses such as elephants and horsed but he projectors can also show massive goldfish that look like their swimming around the arena which is much more humane than the horrors that go on with the real animals and its also a show that is incredibly unique in this day and age. it also talk’s about freakshows and how they as a sideshow of circuses went around basically hidden until a customer paid, this already is a kind of cruel to the people known as freaks as they wasn’t allowed out and whenever they were able to see other people its because they paid to gawk at them.

 

Something I think I did decently was with the art style, the style that I liked and went to achieve didn’t fail, the plastic texture that I went with after trying with a slightly more realistic version went better and it makes it easy to see that the props were textured for this scene specifically. This also got me to learn that I can create straight lines in substance by clicking where you want you line to go and hold shift and click again at where you want the line to end. This I only found out after I did multiple props which meant that I went back afterwards to re do the lines on things like the chair which looked really jagged before I learned about how to do the lines neatly. Creating models in maya wasn’t overly complicated with my main issue coming from the UVs but I basically UV automatic everything. The exception was the bench, but joes helped with that, so it was fine in the end.

 

The first form I created on the games concept was relatively easy and the majority of the votes were in the favour of liking the idea which meant that I went through with the concept. I do know that if the people taking the form were random and not my classmates that the votes would be a lot more varied and honest but for the sake of this the forms results were decent enough. The questions themselves were very simple with questions as simple as their thoughts on the concept and then the most complicated was if it sounded like any games they already knew of which some people did come up with other games the main comparison being “we happy few“ or if any of the concept was confusing and asked then on opinions of changes if they had any in mind.

 

In conclusion although I wasn’t able to finish everything, I set out to do I still feel like I was able to complete enough and I do think that overall, my game turned out looking decent and the visuals aren’t too bad, for whatever I make next I want to focus on learning about lighting and maybe more character design works with complicated costumes and a futuristic style if I can get the chance. The class just got z-brush, so I also want to be able to try that out as well as it seems fun. Also, for future projects the ability to add more detail into my maya models hopefully also learning how to UV map better not just relying on automatic because I know that that method doesn’t work for everything I come across. mostly though with any future projects I want to be more invested in what I’m doing and motivated to work on it because i like what I’m doing, not just because I have to get it done. I’m happy to have been able to finish this scene mostly by myself, learning more and more about the software’s I’m using which means I don’t need help as much and if it continues this was I hope to not need help in the, majority if what I’m doing as time goes on.