Legal Constraints

Legal Constraints

My character is based on a type of enemy from a video game series, The Elder Scrolls. The reason I chose to use the already existing character as a basis is because they are incredibly annoying to fight in the games they are featured in. They aren't exactly powerful but they're a nuisance as they come out of nowhere and they can be several at a time which makes it more difficult to fight them. The character themselves are called Dwemer (Dwarven) Spiders and are automatons which dwell in ancient ruins which were once inhabited by a powerful race of elves. The spiders were used for various different reasons and the Dwemer, the race who created them, were incredibly advanced and light years ahead of any other race or culture technology wise. Eventually the Dwemer all disappeared apart from one after 'tampering' with the heart of an Aedra (extremely powerful divine-like beings) and it isn't exactly clear what happened to them, and the only reason one survived is because he was on another plane when the mass disappearance took place. The Dwemer became so advanced and powerful that the Gods/Divines felt threatened by them as their magick was becoming more powerful than theirs. T

My character is similar to the ones from TES in the sense that it is a mechanical spider but that is all. I'm not exactly a fan of spiders (having arachnophobia) but I find the TES characters quite interesting in the way they work and would be quite useful and helpful as a sidekick. My own character is different in the way it acts and attacks, and also has a different design to the ones from TES.

I don't believe I could get into any legal trouble as all I'm doing is using a similar character to ones in one of my favourite video game series. I highly doubt Bethesda, the creators and developers of TES, were the first to come up with the idea of 'mechanical spider-like automatons' and would really have no reason to take action against me. I would also like to add that there is a lot more detail to the ones from TES than there is in mine. You can clearly see that the design is quite different and the only real similarities they have is the fact that they're: arachnid-like, are mechanical, and have some sort of 'steam punk' sort of feel.

Below is a side by side comparison of my creation and my inspiration.

Production Log

Production Log

In our first lesson, we designed initial rough sketches of robots we could use for our project. I designed a few different sketches and I tried to make them all very different so I had some sort of 'variety' to choose from. I sort of know which design I was originally going to go for and didn't really have to think twice about my final decision.
In our second lesson, we had to create 3 different view points of our chosen robots, an ariel view, a side view, and a front view. I spent the entire lesson doing these and had to spend about half of the next lesson finishing off my final view point.
Half way through the third lesson, I began to scan in my sketches into the mac and saved them to my documents.
Our fourth lesson took place after half term and my first course of action was to correct the sketches as 'perfectly' as I could. This took me a little while as I had to scan in and correct my drawings several times. After this I had to cut and paste each image to make sure that they were right next to each other and lined up as well as I could. After that, I had to add guide lines to the photoshop to show that they lined up.
In our fifth lesson, I created the image planes to place my sketches on which will work as a guide for my modelling.
The next few lessons were spent creating the model itself, sculpting shapes in order to make them look like my robot.
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After several, pointless lessons of not really getting anything done, I decided to completely change my idea to one of the other concepts I came up with, something a lot more simple. The reason why I decided to change which concept I was doing is because I just had too much trouble with the original idea. To the point where I felt that it was virtually impossible for me to do. Some of the ideas I had for it were just too advanced for me and it was not worth spending hours trying to do something I couldn't succeed with.
I restarted modelling completely, and went with a simpler design. My newer design is a lot simpler and easy, it occurred to me that an easier design than everybody else's isn't exactly going to show off my 3D modelling skills. However, I would rather do an easier design and get it done on time, than choose a really complicated one and not get it done. One of the reasons I found the original spider-like design to be too complicated is because I just couldn't get certain parts of it right. The body of the spider was just always weird and too big/bulky, the legs also were extremely difficult to get symmetrical.
Starting anew, I made the body of my robot and made the 'legs' for it too. I then created a screen for the robot on it body too. I did this by putting in a small rectangle into the body of the robot and going to mesh > booleans > difference, this process creates a cut out space and i inserted another rectangle into it in order to be able to change the texture of the screen to something more 'screen-like'.
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It has been a while since I last updated my production log and I'm not entirely sure what the process has been. I have obviously created an entirely new robot and I like it a lot more than the old spider-like design. The new design is actually finished which is more than I could have ever said for the old design. The new design isn't exactly the most amazing - it certainly is not complex in any way and I don't really expect the highest of marks for its brilliant design. I designed in a way I knew I could do and get at least a pass for it.
Essentially would happened was, I worked on the robot lesson after lesson and eventually got to the point that I couldn't think of what else to add to it. I needed a couple more assets and parts to make it pass-worthy. I decided to add something sort of wacky like a satellite dish - although my robot is from the future, the satellite dish is their as a sort of throw back to those retro robot designs from the 80s and 90s. It really doesn't need to be there but I thought the world it was in could be similar to that of Cowboy Bebop's. What I mean by this is that the world in Cowboy Bebop is futuristic but still the culture is still very similar to that of when it was made (late 1990s). The robot also has a massive console on the front which has controls on it.

After I created these extra parts, I began the stage of texturing. Texturing my robot wasn't extremely difficult as my robot is very rectangular and didn't really require much 'mapping'. I still had to do some but it wasn't much.

I eventually just had some touch ups to do and I'm done. My robot is now finished

Task 6 - Constraints

Constraints are more or less the restrictions for polygons or faces which are used to construct shapes. Polygons need to be rendered to make look good at all and rendering can take up a lot of space and a lot of time. The more polygons that must be rendered, the longer the game will take to load. Because of this, many developers tend to try and balance the polygons with the time it takes to load and how good they actually are. A game with a lot of polygons which are rendered to the best they can would require a very good, expensive platform. PCs are usually the platform with the best graphics as they are upgradable and have very good hardware available to make games have better graphics and improve them. The more polygons there are, the bigger the file would be, which isn't exactly great if someone doesn't have a lot of space on their platform. The Xbox One and the PS4 have 500GB each whereas a PC could have any amount of space a user could stick on using external hard drives and stuff like that. The higher amount of polygons something has, the more time it will take to render and when something takes too long to render, people usually split the project up and get multiple people to render parts so the process is quicker. A polygon count is the number of polygons which are being rendered each frame.

Some games today are made to resemble those of yesteryear and have similar graphics to the popular games of the N64 or the NES. These games used 8 bit graphics and were usually 2D scrollers. The reason why some games use similar graphics and art styles in the modern day are probably for a variety of reasons. One of the prime reasons could be for nostalgia, many gamers today grew up with these low quality, 8 bit games and have a soft spot in their heart for them. A game like Gunpoint (2013) is quite similar to a game like Nightshade (1992) in terms of art style and story. Sometimes games are made with graphics like these as it will be less demanding for a PC to run and the company that is developing it may not be very big and would have trouble with making a full scale game which keeps up with other modern games in terms of graphics. Also the genre that this game is in isn't particularly popular and thus may not have a very large audience. Ergo, I doubt that a indie developer such as Tom Francis (Gunpoint) would want to spend too much money on making a game he doesn't know is going to sell much.

Another game which has a very limited graphics style and isn't particularly amazing in regards to how it looks is Hotline Miami which came out in 2012 and is based on the movie 'Drive' (2011). The game is similar to Gunpoint in the sense that it is a fairly modern game which uses older, outdated graphics. Like Gunpoint, Hotline Miami was developed by very few people which is why it could have such 'low-end' graphics or art style. Again, like Gunpoint, the graphics could have been minimal as the developers didn't know whether it would be a success and whether or not they could make any money from it, or it could have just been the art style which suited the game. Hotline Miami is very popular and has even spawned a sequel, and although it doesn't have the same love as the original game, it is still very popular. Hotline Miami is very gory and violent game which centres around the activity of an unnamed man who fans refer to as 'jacket'. Jacket receives various voicemails on his answering machine which tell him to go to certain places and massacre whoever is there, all targets being either mobsters or cops. The game is a 2D top-down action game which again, reminds people of a  number of similar games from 20+ years ago. An example being the original Grand Theft Autos.