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.
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