Research

 Semiotics

Exploring Locations in Games

Game Concept Design: 1st Draft

For this session, I made a game concept design inspired by the look of a classroom. In the image, there are broken chairs and tables on the floor, a broken ceiling pipe leaking water, a screen with the news playing and a skeleton sitting on a chair.

Game Concept Design:2nd Draft

Next, after receiving feedback from my peers about my concept art, I changed some parts of the design just slightly. However, they liked the skeleton sitting on the chair and said it was a good idea to hint what happened before the player entered the room.

Inspirational Practitioners: Ken Sugimori

For my inspiration, I decided to choose Ken Sugimori, who is the designer of all the Pokemon in the first games, because the Pokemon games are what I'm taking inspiration from. I want to try and use his art style that he puts into his pixel sprites. For my style of making the sprites, I wanted to free-hand it and use the graphic tablet and the pen to design the sprites. However, some of them had to be done by placing each pixel one by one instead of freehand.

Video Game Composers: Junichi Masuda

For my research in audio, I wanted to look at Junichi Masuda who is one of the main music composers in the Pokemon game series. His music is mostly battle music, but his music can tell what sort of location the player is in and what situation the player is in. Since the places in Pokemon are based on a real life location, the battle is made to sound like what type of music is played there. For his battles, they create the sense of tension at the beginning and go into a repetitive theme that allows the player to think that they are in the situation themselves and feel a sense of heroism as they are playing the main character. Some his notable works are:

HeartGold & SoulSilver Champion Theme

Pokémon B2/W2 - Champion Iris Battle Music