Overview
Production on Ecotopia continues here at the Future Forgers project room! First off, the official logo for the Future Forgers team was completed by Amber. The environment artists, Hagan and Danny, have created a structure and started whiteboxing the layout of the rooftop where the game will take place. Yukti and Amber have created character sheets and concepts for one of our main characters, Asha. There are 3 in total, each representing a time period depicted in the game. Faris is continuing work on the agrivoltaic environmental puzzle segment of our game. Last but not least, we also met with some faculty members as well as Keith Webster, one of the consultants on our project.
Logo
After a few different iterations, Amber has finished up the official logo for the Future Forgers Team. Take a look!
Environment Art
With the end goal of making the player feel optimistic about the future of our world, the environment of this game needs to look appealing while still depicting plausible and authentic sustainable technology. To help us achieve this goal, the artists took this week to create concept art, model the basic rooftop structure and layout, and begin whiteboxing the rooftop. One thing to note is that there are plans to use shaders to enhance the overall look and feel of the final game and make the world have a slight painterly feel.
Concept Art
This week two of the artists on the team, Yukti and Danny, created some concept art to help establish the look and feel of the rooftop where the game will take place.
The first image below is a quick blockout sketch by Yukti. The main focus of this piece is as a color study using colors from a palette the art team established this week.
These two images below were created by our environment artist Danny. To create these Danny rendered a portion of the rooftop in Maya and then went into photoshop to layer in the details.
Environment Whitebox and Structure
This week we were also able to create some renders of the structure of the rooftop. The renders below created by Hagan represent the final chapter in the game when the rooftop is fully explorable. The previous two chapters of the game will not allow the leftmost section of the rooftop to be accessed and will see some changes in the assets used. Since our game is set in Pittsburgh, we are using the Webster Hall Apartments and Bellefield Towers as references for our rooftop structure.
To give more context to the images below here is a key to what each color signifies:
Purple – Community Gathering/Chilling Space
Blue – Set Dressing of Tools, Harvests, Seeds, Spare Parts, Etc.
Green – Planters, Vertical, Planters, Trees, Non-Puzzle Beds
Red – Puzzle Planter Locations and Sizes
Yellow – Implementation of new tech/current tech
Black – Flow – Stairs, Catwalks, Frameworks, Bridges
Gray – Buildings
Above Image: The flow through this rooftop will begin in the top right corner. As the game progresses the player will then move to the section with the red plant beds representing spaces for the puzzle. The conclusion of the story will happen on the leftmost rooftop connected by a bridge.
Character Concept Art
This week our artist Amber created character art concepts for two of the high-priority main characters of the game, Asha and Olive. This includes multiple versions of Asha as she appears throughout the different time periods of the game.
Asha
Asha is the mother of the player character Mirri and a core character in the story, appearing in all three time periods. The concept art below reflects the changes to her roles throughout the story of the game
2015
Asha in 2015 is still wearing her day job clothing. This helps to reflect the fact that work has yet to fully begin on the rooftop.
2030
As the story progresses we see her clothing style change to show reflect her the work she is doing on the rooftop as a gardener.
2045
In the final chapter, Asha’s hair has grayed is dressed more casually as her work has come to an end on the rooftop.
Olive
Olive is the child of Mirri and will appear in the final chapter of the game. Because the rooftop has progressed to a certain point and the vast majority of work has been completed they are able to focus more on being an artist and their clothes are meant to represent and highlight that fact.
Agrivoltaic Puzzle
On the gameplay and programming end, Faris continues to develop the agrivoltaic puzzle. This week he managed to squash a lot of bugs and make a lot of progress on the mechanic as well as add in some initial UI elements. Just as a refresher, the player will interact with a top-down view of the roof and manipulate a solar panel in order to give a certain amount of shade to some plants while allowing other plants to stay in the sun. The meters depicted show how much sun each crop needs to receive. L and R os for rotation of the solar panel and the “Move” buttons move the solar panel to that location.
Meetings
This week we met with Jonathan Walton, our faculty instructor, Serena Wang, President of the CMU Futurist Club, as well as ETC faculty member Chris Klug, and Keith Webster, a futurist and Dean at CMU.
Our meeting with Jonathan was a good check-in for the week. He gave the team some advice on how to explain our game during quarters presentations next week. One idea was breaking down our game into percentages of what you will be doing and how often. For example, 50% dialog, 30% puzzles, etc. He also said he may be able to find some playtesters for us by reaching out to his undergraduate students.
The meeting with Serena was a short one. We gave a rundown of what we are trying to do in our game. She told us to investigate a design framework called STEEP in order to discover new issues to tackle in our game. There was also an offer to get the Future Forgers team into the CMY Futurist Club’s Slack in order to get feedback at points throughout the semester.
Next, we met with Chris Klug. This meeting was primarily focused on our game’s story. We had sent our narrative document to him beforehand and he was kind enough to leave some feedback and comments for us prior to the meeting. One of his main opinions was that he felt our game may be a little too optimistic about depicting the future. Also, a point of clarification he was looking for was who our game was for. Our demographic is college-age students but he was looking for something a bit more specific. In response to this, we created a survey to help gather information about students in this age group. This includes their gaming habits, their thoughts on the future of the world relating to climate change, and how they feel about climate change in general. His final piece of advice was to make the player always feel active in the game. His suggestion was that the player character should not be disheartened by climate change and should be actively convincing other characters about the benefits of what you are doing on the rooftop.
Finally, we met with Keith Webster, with whom we consulted during our pitch this past spring. During this meeting we mainly got him caught up with the work we completed over the summer and what we’ve done so far this semester. He liked the direction we are going with our future by grounding it in reality and not moving too far into sci-fi, this was great to hear because we do want our world to feel plausible. We also asked him about the timeline of the game. He felt like our current time horizon of 2045 would be a great space to explore and would work well for us. He also left us with a few resources and people to contact to get some more expert information if we needed it.
Next week
- On Wednesday we have Quarters Presentations, so we will be preparing for those earlier in the week
- We have our first meeting since Week 1 with both of our faculty instructors
- Continue work on art and story
- Our first playtest of the puzzle mechanics will be on Friday with students within the ETC