Artwork and Animation
Remember when I said the character was a girl I had met? (Well, you’d remember if you were actually in the class that day already.) Anyway, most of the characters and scenes in the games I make are people I’ve seen and based on places I’ve been, even if they are set in the past.
I’ll take pictures of places like this country road to give to our artists.
If a character is supposed to be from a certain tribe, I’ll take pictures, with their permission, of course, of different people from that tribe. If a character is supposed to be a sixteen-year-old girl, I’ll take pictures of a few teenagers. I might like the shoes one person is wearing. Another person just might have a cool style.
Today’s first mission is to get up and take photos or videos to show your idea.
Here is a link to using a Windows computer to take photos or videos.
You can also use your phone. Walk around your neighborhood. It could even be in your house. One of the Crossroads games teaches about budgeting and the player searches every room to find the unpaid bills.
Feel free to edit your photo. If you don’t know how, we’ll show you. Select the best photos and upload those to the folder shared with your team.
You can also take videos. For example, at Warwick Public School last year, one idea the students had was to create a game “Ghosts of Warwick” about haunted places in their town. They got permission from the superintendent to have one of the girls on their team, who could have been a track star, she was that fast of a runner, to sprint down the empty school hallway as if she was being chased by a ghost.
Your other option for artwork is to just draw it out. Just so you know, we only use artwork that was made on a computer. No matter how beautiful your paintings are, if you are going to work in game design, you need to learn how to use a program like Photoshop, Gimp, Blender or Maya. You could start with Microsoft Paint. In fact, we even have some artwork done with Microsoft Paint in Fish Lake!