The Beginning... 4 weeks in...

Ok so about time I started a project diary for my honours project, guess I just wanted to get things clear in my head, but that may never happen. That sounded depressing but it was ment to be jokey....

Basically when I finish uni I want to go into the inudstry working on characters, preferably modeling them so the best way to go about this is to do my project on character creating (for games).

It is common knowledge that a character is a very important aspect for a game and during my research through lots of jounrals and books I noticed almost a catch 22 situation with designing for games. Basically, if I can explain this right, my idea for research is that users want to control the game, eg control how their character looks to get them more immersed in the game, but artists say the way a character looks depends on the history of the character which affects the story of the game and effecting the story of the game negatively effects the immersive expereince. That might of made no sense what-so-ever, I don't even want to read back over that, but hopefully you get the general idea of where I'm heading.

To quote a book called 'The Art of Game Characters' "A player will be more engaged by your imagination than by their own".

So whos right? Should we A) Ignore the users and create a character based on background and story.

B) Let the users create and character they want even if its homer simpson in a Call Of Duty game?

C) Create a character that doesn't tell you much, and let the user just use their imagination to creating a character in their heads or to place themselves in the characters body? (To make sense of this just think of Masks)

Ok so theres my focal point.

As far as Modules go - Done lots for concept development, been basically destroying my large collection of magazines for a scrapbook and printing out images for inspiration (mainly the amazing models on Dominance War and the great guys at Polycount). I also took a trip to London last week and went to the V+A to take photos of sculptures, these artist project character into their creations superbly so I got lots of ideas there. Also on a seperate note I went to fashion exibitions (yes that sounds odd, but my girlfriend is a fashion designer so it wasn't my idea to go) and had a good insight into how they project character through clothes, so photos of clothes will be going into my scrapbook soon enough. Some of these clothes gave me wonderful ideas for crazy characters too (some fashion designers minds are in such an insance place) so thats something im going to look into more. Alongside the scrapbook im working on a book of anatomy, something I wished I had worked on years ago because it is so vital to character creation, so that will be another hand in I guess if it contributes to my final output. As for the concept sketchbook... still havent started this yet, but I guess it comes in an order of scrapbook to sketchbook, but I have had a few moment of madness with good ideas so Ill sketch some things out tonight.

For the dissertation modules I've just basically been reading lots of books and journals and making notes on the idea I described before, not much I can say on that for the moment.

With the Pre-production module I'm having a hard time seperating it from concept development in my mind, specially because my final output is going to be along the lines of three different character models in realtime (not sure animated slightly or not) and I know the pre-production for character creation is mainly concept development...

I need to get a bit of a move on with Professional Practice, mainly just need to start filling in all the helpful sheets we got for this one, would clarify my thoughts more.

Anyway I've typed enough for the moment and I'm hungry.