Personal Ecologies
Personal Ecologies was my First ever Freelance project of which i took on in 2023 working in Partnership with Arts University Bournemouth, Winchester School Of Art and A-space.
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For the Project i had to create an interactive Sandbox Game based around ecology's and the ecologies research the Artist i was working for was looking into, this meant making a game primary about Tortoises and how they interact with their ecology.
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The game starts you off as a tortoise in a blank void/Whitebox type world and your aim is to explore and interact with other objects/characters within the world, when you get near another character an animation plays and then once the animation is completed the player is then transformed into playing as that characters e.g. Tortoise to Fridge
Design
Throughout the development of this project me and the artist worked closely together to try and design this game and to do so we used a platform called Miro where we uploaded our ideas i uploaded my work for the artist to sign off on and so on.
Firstly, we started off by looking at inspiration and ideas for the game including the tortoises of a women who volunteers in her local garden and uses the borage plants there to feed her tortoises, Logos, games we liked etc.
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Then eventually i started to create the game getting a feel for the sandbox style nature that we had landed on
Prototyping/3D Models
During Development i made many prototypes of the game and the different animations that are present within the game, one particular demo/prototype i made however, was a white box Demo made with no textures as to save time on demo creation However, after discussions about how this look is just temporary and how i thought the game needed some colour, maybe some trees fences actual house to start in as the fridge etc.
However, the artist wanted to go in another direction and keep the Low Poly unfinished look to the game, eventually baseing it off research on "Superstudio - Supersurface - An alternative model for life on the Earth - 1972 " Of which i didn't fully understand but its "The 'math, logic and space' has a cultural identity based in a pythagorean/newtonian view that everything in nature can be measured and categorised. The standardised form of the grid is the image of this mode of white, western mode of thought. However, in Hamilton's works there is this performer who interacts differently with the grid, demonstrating to the audience another kind of logic for connecting the assorted sculptures on their grid plinths and even playing with the grid itself in a way that addresses its form."
Which included making new 3D models that had that grid type design, some of the models i made myself like the Fridge and the Lamp and others where downloaded from free sources and given to me to edit into a grid design by the Artist.
Animations
Below, you will see some examples of the animations i created for this sandbox game project. These animations where created using unity's Timeline system and internationally left looking clunky due to the artists likening to my Whitebox "Demo" version of the animations where the characters slid around and didn't have complex animations.
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I wanted to have the animations have a bit more life in the way of moving the legs of the tortoise, the mouth etc. However, the artist wanted to go in another direction and have the game feel "more comedical"
Final version/Showcase
