Salford City CollegeEccles Sixth Form CentreBTec Level 3Extended Diploma in Creative Media ProductionGames Design

Unit 78 – Digital Graphics for Computer GamesHA3 – TransformationProduction Log

Name Patryk Kleczkowski

Date: Week 1 – 18/11/2013

For the first week we have been introduced to the unit, what we need to do, how to do it and what is expected of us. We started off with choosing what genre our character should be from, we had a range of genres to pick from, including things like medieval, steam punk etc. I personally, have picked Sci-Fi. Then we were asked to research into the genre we have picked and I have searched for several different pictures which present Sci Fi in an interesting light for me to take ideas from for my character. Then we were asked to research further into the game genre, i.e. the details of what is included within the Sci-Fi genre, and finished it off with writing a synopsis for our game, similar to the description of the games at the back of the box, the synopsis was intended to be as short as possible but as descriptive as possible. Those 2 tasks were done by me for the first week. For future weeks I would focus on work related to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create my ideas and illustrate them in a near professional ways.

Date: Week 2 – 25/11/2013

For the second week, we were asked to do more written work in preparation to create our own character. I have started to create a character profile, which explained what the character looks like, how he dresses, his origins, his family, what he likes and dislikes, what is his character etc. Basically, explaining every bit of his character to present him into a very descriptive and detailed way towards my audience. It was important for me to do this correctly and up to a good standard since it gave the basis of my character to me so I knew how to draw him, his body build etc. Then we went onto creating and taking care of this document as well as a schedule, this and the schedule are created for me to being able to organise myself to a near professional level and know when something needs to get done etc. The production log was created for me being able to review what I did as well as record what I did. At the end of the week I have also started a little bit of production for my character.

Date: Week 3 – 02/12/2013

For the entire of week 3 I have been working on my production, looking through multiple pages of Google images to find the best fitting sci fi character to trace

over and take ideas from as well as a suitable and interesting background for him. I have decided to first do the background, then work on my character after it is finished. I have decided to use a background from Star Wars and trace over it, delete certain elements and thus create my own scene with this. I have used Photoshop to edit everything out and used tools such as magic wand and rubber to delete certain elements such as the death star. Eventually however, I have decided that this background will not do as it would be very hard to trace over the ships and make them look different to Star Wars Star Destroyers. And therefore I have abandoned this background after removing things like smaller tie fighters, the Death Star etc. I have returned to Google images to look for something

better but couldn’t find anything good. Eventually I found out that I had a quite good thing in my folder. I have decided to use it instead and officially scrap the old background from Star Wars.The new background looked as follows:

From this, I felt that I could do something nice and good and I started experimenting with it. I have decided to create a special logo of the ‘nationality’ that the character is from, and therefore I went back to Google images to look for good images that could be combined together to create something nice. I have started off with looking for something related with Earth, since the story of my character and the world he is in consists of humanity being united and being known as The Terran Confederacy and looking for alien life for first contact. I have eventually managed to find a quite good image, and then I edited the background out and started to look for something to put it together with. I have went back to one of my favourite Sci Fi games called StarCraft II and tried to source something from there,

eventually I have found a good candidate. A logo from a faction called Terran which I based my name upon.

I have edited out the logo, pasted it onto Photoshop and tried to incorporate it with the other piece of logo creating the following effect - >I was quite happy with the results, for the time being I thought that this was good enough and I didn’t want to spend any more time on it anyway. I have moved onto editing the background to make it viable for my character. I have used several different layers, colour dampening and depth to create a logo that would fit a theme a little bit and later on could be adjusted to further fulfil my needs.

Date: Week 4 – 9/12/2013

On Week 4 I have very heavily

concentrated on the general production process of creating a background, devising a character and then making it all happen using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. First off, I have started to work over the new background that I have picked to be behind my character, I started to think about how to adjust the background to fit my needs, how I want to mould it in order for it to fit with my character and therefore look good. At first I have decided that the blue background could be gone and then I could stick another planet in there to make it look better. So I went through Google images and picked one of the Neptune images, then I have erased the blue background from the picture using various tools, including the magic wand tool, quick selection tools and working over the edges with the rubber tool. All of this allowed me to get a quite good results without destroying anything else on the picture, then I pasted the Neptune picture into the background but found out that it is actually very unfitting and without the background the picture look ‘ripped’. And therefore I have decided that removing background was a bad idea and decided to do something else.

So I have stuck with the same picture, but instead didn’t wanted to mess with the general background, the only thing that I decided to do this time was to extend it, make it longer and then stuck my character onto it, then move it into Adobe Illustrator and trace it over and edit it there. I have used the clone tool and certain sections to extend the picture to make it more viable, the hardest part to clone was the planet as it had to be very rounded and had very specific textures that if I would clone wrong would be very easy to spot. Therefore I have spent quite a lot of time on cloning and extending the picture. After I have created the background I have stuck my original character on it and messed with the clone tool some more to try make the planet look as legit as possible with a quite good outcome at the end which made it quite hard to spot that a clone tool, or any tool, has been used to adjust the picture in any format or shape. I have also deleted the logo from it seeing it as not good and therefore discarding it. I made this decision for various reasons, first off, the colour scheme was completely different, and second of all I felt like the logo was quite unoriginal, I wanted to create my own logo, draw it then computer generate it but thought that I do not have enough time for this project to devise such ‘accessories’ for my character and decided to leave it without any logo. After creating the background and pasting my character onto it I thought I was finished with Photoshop work and could move onto Illustrator work however I still felt like I was not satisfied with the results. I have therefore started to look, again, for something better that would fulfil my satisfaction and that I would feel like I did a good job. After about an hour of searching I have found a perfect image from a game called StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty:

I felt really drawn to this piece of artwork and therefore I have decided to use it for my own, I have started to remove certain elements of the background, I removed the main character, the man in the yellow combat suit from it and used things like, rubber, clone tool, blur tool and quick selection tool to do so in a good and near professional matter. Then I have removed the buildings and the units at the back in the background, I have mostly used the clone tool to borrow textures from surroundings and replace the things I did not want. This allowed me to efficiently remove most of the things I did not want and therefore prepare the image for tracing.

Then after I was finished I pasted my character onto the image and positioned him in a way that I would find the best. I was really glad of my new background and after many experiments that I already did was glad that I could finally move on and be happy about the progress made. Inow understand for the future that to be effective I should plan ahead of myself and do morethorough research before deciding on a final idea and what to do.

After all of this work I have moved onto Illustrator and I started to trace over every object, I started off with the planet behind the spaceship as I thought that would be the easiest, then I started to do the cosmos, then the ground, then the ship and finally the character which had the most elements and therefore took the most time. I traced everything very carefully. Throughout the tracing I constantly was thinking about the colour scheme that I would use, I went for the very simplistic black and white colour for my background and then for a little bit more vibrant and ‘pointy’ colours yet still within cold palette. I tried to make my character stick out of the more greyish colours in the background, the main 2 points of concentration for my audience that I choose were the ship (relates to his story) and my character. The tracing

took me quite a lot of time and it was because I forgot to implement an idea that I have learnt before and that is used on a professional level, i.e. not drawing around an object, just making massive squares around points of interests that I want to trace and then using the layering system to manipulate it in a way so that various textures would overlap each other, such system allows for saving time and making the tracing perfectly executed. I forgot about this but started to do it by the end of my work, I wanted to redo most of my work with this system however I was out of time completely and therefore couldn’t come back to it. For tracing I have used the standard pen tool and then the colour palette to colour the traced areas. In this week I have finished my production.

Date: Week 5 – 16/12/2013

In week 5 I have mostly concentrated on collecting pictures for my production log, writing a review of my project and fleshing out my production log in general. In my review I have asked myself several questions, including things like: Have I read the assignment brief correctly, have I did the tasks in correct order etc. This allowed me to review my work and therefore find out about the disadvantages and advantages of it. I have also wrote more details in my production log and took additional pictures to flesh it out.