Part 2 - RRS Discovery

The following decisions were made after a feedback session with Chris and Mike.

 I knew when I chose to have the ship stranded on ice that i would have to change parts of the project so that it would be consistent in style and make sense, and one of those things was the ship. The Victory was not built for arctic conditions and therefore had to be changed, research into Ice breaker ship brought up some amazing stories that added to my environment. The Discovery is my choice of reference ship as it is in Dundee and has an Arctic museum as part of the expedition, but for the story I am learning about Captians Scotts other ship - the Terra Nova.

I now want to include the type of cabins and tents that Captain Scott and his crew would have set up when they docked the ship.

These are my first attempts at whiteboxing the scene. I have had some feedback from Heather and be updating it with her advice and my knew knowledge when i return from Dundee.

Part 1 - HMS Victory

Im going to explain how and why I decided against my first bunch of ideas. Some of them I liked so much that I started planning the next steps and took reference pictures.

What I mean by "Can i be creative with it" Is can i take the environment and add story or history so that it will be more interesting than it is in reality.

 My decisions have also been based on reactions. I told friends and family my ideas and if their reactions were not "Wow i want to see it" then it went in the bin.

So it came to this, the HMS Victory. It ticked all the right boxes and i was really excited about it. I could afford the journey and the time it would take to get there and back, I have friends that know about ships, (so their feedback can stop me making obvious errors) and i had lots of story ideas to make the environment more interesting and suitable for a game.

Of course this idea still had its problems, the main one being the scale, but i thought the good thing about the ship is that it should be pretty easy to scale it up or down depending on time as i can block off areas by collapsing floors onto each other or having the ship crashed, stranded or flooded.

Then I thought, if I wasnt going to include a large portion of the ship, which floors would I want to keep?

I chose the Orlop deck because it is the below the waterline, this means that is is totally artificisally lit and during a battle the deck could possibly be the first to flood, but wouldnt be damaged by gun fire, which would be a good way to have two totally different atmospheres on the deck. 

This deck has good atmospheric potential. There would have been hundreds of hammocks hanging from the ceiling, cages full of live stock, eating and living areas and all the biggest canons.

Of course I travelled to Portsmouth and took hundreds of photographs, researched the general history of the ship and how it functioned, and took measurements.

I decided to have the ship stranded on ice, and these pictures kind of show why i thought this would be cool, its already so much more interesting than just a ship or even just a stranded ship. I can have the ship half sunken, broken into two parts, flooded in parts, or totally frozen. I love the potential. 

Research for obvious reasons.

Figuring out techniques to change my original refere nce photos to once with the appropriate atmosphere and colour schemes.

Making sure frozen and icey effects are achievable by searching forums for already tested and successful techniques.

Research and Ideas

 Finding Inspiration

I started with watching documentaries from the variety of topics on the History channel.

Taking notes and considering each subject as a game evironment.

I took my camera with me on every job with the casino crew and every trip.

 Here is a selection of the photos I gathered:

I chose 3 ideas and listed their pros and cons.I started telling people about them to get some reactions, they were not great, and i knew they wouldnt be, because if im honest, i didnt like them, i was just panicking that i hadnt chosen anything.

I tried making it personal and brainstorming ideas relevant to my life.

Back to finding inspiration. After reading a selection of game books, magazines and the Portal and TF2 presentations on VLE, I thought, I’m doing it the wrong way round, If I design the game first, develop the narrative, characters personalities and some original game play ideas then the environment should as if like magic, appear in my brain.

Brainstorming and narrative planning.

As the environment is all I am able to make, I started looking at games that tell their story through the environment. Here are some of my game play and environment plans. (Not that I expect you to understand them).