Industry practice - Environment pieces and Project evaluation

 Asset production

This week I will be starting to draw the final backgrounds for the visual novel, this will include both of the environment designs that I have made so far, and any other environments that other members of the group have designed. In order to do this, I will be following the same art style that we decided on at the start of the project in order to keep in line with the style being used for the character sprites and the UI.

To start this process, I will be deciding on a colour scheme for each stage of the environments in order to properly incorporate the character sprites into the environments, even if the colours are different, having some form of overlay will allow this to happen more easily. 

For the finalisation process, I will start with the most used environments over the course of the novel, finishing with the ending scenes that are only present in one part of the game.

The first environment I will be finalising is the bedroom environment, as this background will be present over the course of the entire game, featuring at both the start and the end of each day, no matter what decisions you make over the progression of the day. This is also the environment that will have the most variations over the course of the game, as it will become more or less cluttered depending on what decisions you make throughout the course of the story, also the colours will change depending on what you do.

Bedroom

Of the background scenes, the bedroom scene will be the most used environment throughout the visual novel as it will be the background used at the start an end of each day of the novel. It also has three different variants reflecting the current state of the main character, the light bedroom scene being the good screen, the dimmed colours for the second variant to show the main character's state of mind is not great but not completely unsalvageable, and finally the dark scene, this one will be for when the main character is in as bad a frame of mind as possible and will most likely be used for one of the bad ending scenes.

Park

The park scene will be used as the background for one of the good endings, for this reason it doesn't have any variants reflecting a more negative state of mind as it will only have to accompany a positive state of mind.

Therapist Room

The therapist room will be the first environment that I draw that was designed by a different member of the team, for this part of the project I will be using the concept art given by my group in order to create the finalised background for the therapist room. This is also a background from one of the good endings, so there will only be one version of the ending screen.

In comparison to the original concept art for this background, I wanted to add a bit more of an open feel to the room, as the original concept didn't have any windows, and the room felt a bit thin, so in my final piece, I decided to tweak the look of the room slightly, making it wider than the original design, and also adding a window to the right wall of the room in order to make it feel like natural light can actually get into the room rather than all the light coming from an artificial source.

Bus stop

The bus stop scene was originally designed by a different memeber of the group, but as the original concept art didn't really match with the rest of the backgrounds in terms of the angle given, I decided to tweak the angle the environment was viewed from as it was originally a more aerial view of the bus stop which would make it look like the characters' sprites were floating in the air when they appear in the scene. For this reason, I have changed it to a more front on angle, following a more traditional environment angle seen in other visual novels

For the second part of the scene, I added a bus window overlay to the image, which will help with the idea of the characters having gone on a bus rather than it just being said, this scene will be used for another of the endings for the story, for this reason, there will only be one variation of the lighting rather than there being dark variants too.

Library

As one of the scenes that would show up multiple times over the course of the visual novel, I gave the library scene multiple lighting variants depending on how the main character is doing mentally. When I was designing this scene, I didn't want to add too much clutter to the bottom half of the background, as this area is where the text box will appear when characters are talking, so I didn't think it would be too important to have detail down there, saving more time for drawing the other environments.

Dance Studio

The dance studio background is one of the major scenes as this will be one of the ways the main character is able to deal with their mental health throughout the course of the visual novel, rather than being and ending scene, this will be a hobby that the character is able to partake in by choice in order to improve their mental health, for this reason, I decided to not give it a darker variant, as the scene will largely be a positive impact on the direction of the visual novel

Lecture Hall

The final scene that I designed is the lecture hall scene, this is also a very important scene when it comes to the progression of the visual novel, featuring in most days of the novel should the main character decide to attend lectures, this scene has two lighting variants to reflect the main character's state of mind.

With all of the environment backgrounds now complete, all of the components required for the visual novel are finished so it can be all put together by the team leaders.

Scene speed paints:

Review:

I'm very happy with how all of the environment pieces turned out, the use of lighting variants to reflect the state of mind of the main character will be a very useful visual device to help let the viewer of the novel understand how they're doing and if they're on track for getting the endings that they want to see. If I were to change anything that I have done for this part of the project, I would spend some more time on the original concepts for the environments, however this was not possible due to the reallocation of work and changing of team positions.

Project Evaluation

As I have now finished all of my allocated tasks for this project, I will now evaluate everything that I have done over the course of the process, what I think I did well and what I could have given more time to. 

To start off, I think all of the tasks I was allocated by my team for this project were done to the best of my ability, and I'm very happy with the designs that I came up with for the project, and all of the final pieces that I was involved in the illustration of turned out as I would have liked. If I were to change anything from the design process, I would like to have put in more time to the design process of some fo the environments, but as I ended up having to desing more environments than I was initially given to design, I was unable to put the amount of time into each one that I would like to have done, the main ones being the lecture hall and the library, as these were meant to be designed by other memebers of the team, but due to them having to take on other tasks that they weren't originally meant to be doing, this was left to me.

As a team member, I definitely feel like I could have communicated a lot more with my team mates than I did. Especially in the earlier stages of the design process, as I feel like this would have helped me to avoid some of the previously mentioned problems. 

Overall, I know there are things that I could have done better in order to help with the overall process of the visual novel design and creation. But the work that I did do, I feel like I managed to produce it to the best of my ability with the time that I had and the resources that I had.