Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. Not so happy, yet much happier.

This week (for Hazel and Carrie) was dedicated to concepting. Hazel and Carrie are the concept artists for this project so Hazel felt it was important that we spend a good solid week getting all the concepts done and out of the way.

While Hazel and Carrie worked on the concepts Ellie and Chris worked on polishing up their whitebox assets that we had said we were definitely going to be using, Liv worked on some tilable textures and Jacob worked on the whitebox and the surrounding landscape.

We decided for efficiency's sake we wouldn't actually spend a lot of time doing different idea variations and would instead mostly do illustrations of the scene, check them with the group and then simply change them if needed.

Here's the concepts Hazel has been working on this week:

We haven't done any coloured versions of these, partly to save time and partly because we already have the moods of the 4 levels done and there's not much colour variation in stone walls and candlelit interiors!

During this week Hazel also worked on our final written storyboard with all the text and speech from the play we want to use.

Carrie's concept work thus far is as follows:
King Duncan

Lady Macbeth

The Audience members which will be a crowd of duplicates

 And the Witches' silhouettes, to complete character concepts;

 and for environments: the Courtyard

and the Theatre in its empty state.

Colours were decided on for these ones since, especially for the environments, Carrie found it easier to work with colour and finalise things. The colour for the courtyard would not be exact since there is already a colour palette to work with and it would change on each loop of the level, but for the theatre it is slightly more important since it is a little separate from the rest of the level and may not have the same palette.

The Hallway, Banquet Hall, Doors and a version of the Theatre with the audience seated are in progress and Carrie will finish them next week.

Ellie took the rough white box assets she had made and created high polys for them using ZBrush, some of which she created a few different versions of in order to have options for different materials (e.g. wood, metal, and clay bowls). She then retopologised these assets, and is currently mid way through the process of baking them down, ready to be textured next week.

There were some fairly major changes to the whitebox when it came to Jacob's workload this past week. After speaking to a tutor, we decided to drastically change the start position of the character too a lot further back while also having the starting view of the character frame the castle itself each time you spawn into a level.

First of all, a rough sculpt of the terrain was made in engine. This can then be textured, however, there's some clear stretching on the UVs of the terrain so some research will have to be done into fixing this or at least preventing it from happening again so we can just remake it.

Above you can see the new starting position and the way the terrain frames the castle itself as the level starts.

We also increased the length of the corridor you'll be walking down to reach the stage room...

As well as increased the size of the courtyard (150%) which then led to us having to increase the size of the 'entrance hall' (pictured above).

Chris began working through his whitebox assets, remodelling, unwrapping, baking and texturing them one at a time, rather than modelling them all, then unwrapping them all, etc. Using the whitebox assets as a base has accelerated this process significantly.

This week Liv begun work on the tiling textures for the stage area. They produced the diffuse maps for both the wood flooring and stone wall. They plan on taking the stone wall into z-brush to ensure the normal map has a good amount of depth.

All hail, Macbeth! That shalt be King hereafter.

We began on the first day brainstorming ideas and trying to settle on a theme; it was 50/50 between a Midsummer night's dream and Macbeth.

The Macbeth ideas came out the strongest and we all agreed to go through with Macbeth. We planned out a level idea and different jobs were assigned for this week. Since our game was going to be led more by narrative Hazel volunteered to write up a script and do a storyboard to give us all a solid idea of how it was going to look and how the narrative would tie in.

 The premise of the game is that its a looping level. One room will change each time round to play out a death from the play. We also decided to incorporate the Globe theatre by having the room you act out part of the play in a part of the theatre. The game isn't necessarily based in the real world so the theatre will look intentionally out of place.

Hazel also began some concepts for Macbeth:

Since Macbeth is set in the real world, historical accuracy is quite important making the characters believable. Since there were relatively strict guidelines not that many concepts were needed to arrive at the final idea.

Hazel then created a schedule to plan out our entire project:

During this week, Ellie worked on producing assets for our whiteboxing, with a focus on the smaller props such as goblets, bowls, decorations etc.

These assets will help to populate the whiteboxed rooms, allowing for much quicker concepting than simply painting each object by hand. After the whiteboxing phase is finished, these base models can then be polished and used to quickly create the actual assets.

As one of the character artists, she also began to work on refining her base mesh from another project in order to be used again in this one, working on fixing any off anatomy.

Once finished, this base mesh will allow for the characters to be made much more quickly than by creating several meshes for each character from scratch, especially when time is of the essence. The mesh may currently be female, but it can easily also be morphed into a male body.

For the first part of this week, Liv set up our Pinterest boards for us to use to gather our references. They concentrated mostly on gathering references for the landscapes and the castle as they are focusing on Environment art. Further on in the week, Liv experimented in engine, figuring out the way we could loop our level with a simple blueprint and also looked into ways that we could animate falling rubble as the castle crumbles. They also began to try and flesh out the design of the castle, using photos Hazel provided the group with and their main inspiration. They have started to put together several small plasticine models of the rough shape of the castle to be able to develop solid and more detailed concepts from.  

Carrie worked on the style guide and mood concepts.

The main colour progression will be from warm and saturated to cold and desaturated - vaguely following the series of 7, 5, 9, 3. The actual design of the corridor will be similar to 4.


We're going to be having regular meetings to ensure that we do stay on schedule and achieve everything we want. Next week will be a little more active with some of us working on the whitebox (to detailed completion) and some of us working on concepting everything that we can. We've also set aside a week to create one of the rooms to completion (with all of us working on it) so that we can work out how long it will take and also the standard/benchmark we will be aiming for throughout our game.

Chris worked on creating the larger assets for the whitebox, creating props like chairs, tables, cupboards and wardrobes.

It was Jacob's job to focus mainly on engine work this week. He created a really basic whitebox to get across the rough idea in what we were going for with out level design.

Above you can see the intended starting point for our level, which is were you will start each time the level loops, changing slightly each time.

This is an aerial view of the start of our level leading up into the castle courtyard portion of our level.

From the courtyard you change enter what we've dubbed "the entrance hall" (working title). This is where you'll enter different doors depending on which loop of the level you're in. Each will lead to a different room.

This is an extremely rough look down one of the corridors that is through one of the doors from the previous screenshot. At the other end, you can see the room it leads to.

To the right of the above screenshot you can see the door that is visible in the distance of the previous screenshot. Through this, you enter a room (different each time) which is also a stage, looked on by a theatre which we intend to have full of guests and even possibly the witches in the top box/room visible in the theatre above, as if they are orchestrating the whole thing.

When shall we three meet again?

 Macbeth (full title The Tragedy of Macbeth) is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. Set mainly in Scotland, the play dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for its own sake. 

For this year's Off The Map project our team will be taking on the theme of 'Castles' and choosing to portray the events of the play 'Macbeth'. Our game aims to take the player through an unsettling cycle level which deteriorates gradually and reflects the state of Macbeth's mind. Throughout the game you will enact four of the death scenes from the play, prompting Macbeth's mind (and the level) to become increasingly distressing and threatening. 

Our team consists of 6 students:

Hazel Brown
Jacob Green
Carrie Taylor
Chris Bullock
Ellie Tulloch
Liv Ortega

Our project lasts 10 weeks and we will be documenting our progress through our blog!