Hello

We are six Game Art Design students from De Montfort University. Our team is named Triumphant Goat for no particular reason other than the fact that we like goats and we want to do well. This is our development blog for our current group project.

We are working on a group project visualising 17^th century London before the great fire. As an end outcome, we aim to create a playable, interactive 3D environment in CryEngine, ready by May. Our aim is to enter it in Crytek, British Library and Game City’s Off the Map contest.

Just two days into the project, I reckon we’ve made great progress so far. This is a project that will require a lot of research, since nothing remains of the city from that period. We'll need to rely on written sources and etchings, paintings and drawings from that period.

Currently, we are thinking about doing a segment of the London Bridge, but we still want to keep our options open at this stage since the project is still only early in development. Heidi and Nizaam did a blockout each, it looks like an area that has a lot of potential for atmosphere.

Note: This is a bashkit so the assets are just downloaded from the internet, except the Archway which Heidi made for a different project, so the final scene won't have any of these assets, obviously.

Even at this early stage, we are seeing a couple of design challenges we need to tackle. Firstly, in such an expansive space it can be difficult to create a natural cut-off point. Secondly, the player might expect there to be people in the scene as it is depicting a bustling city, and might find the lack of people eerie, so we need to find a way to work around that.  

Our goal before our next meeting is to do more research and put together a couple of moodboards each. It would be nice to have a clear idea of what we want to look at when we get around to going to London on Tuesday.