The Open Book–Diving into the Literary World

Welcome back to my blog!

This week, I am in Tokyo, the center of diverse architectural styles. While I’m spending time exploring different places like alleyways and Mount Fuji, I am also trying to find inspiration for the compositions for castles within my games. While this won’t be 100% parallel with my project, taking inspiration and compositional ideas from the real world can be effective in creating in-game environments.

Additionally, this week, I had almost no access to a laptop, so a lot of research was done on my phone. Thus, I wasn’t able to start my Unreal Engine main menu, but I did find several tutorials that could help with my later progression.

Before starting my scene, I have to first identify the style of the game, from the main menu to the rendering. To do this, I’ve researched ways to create main menus. Upon researching, I’ve found three ways to create the graphic. I could use an animated 3D render to create a similarly styled menu screen as the game, or I could draw a gif animation that acts as the main menu, squeezing small parts of each environment that I will be making. The last and worst option is to draw out the graphic, which will be more boring than the other options. An example of the 2D animated menu can be the Balloon Tower Defense 6 Main Menu, as the monkeys in the scene move around and the mountains in the distance do too. 3D scenes are a lot less common but can be found here and there, like Valorant’s pre-game loading screen. While an animation of a 3D Valorant agent model is played, the background has a very free feeling to it as it depicts mountains in the distance with leaves blowing in the wind. Ultimately, these all convey different feelings and could be used in places outside of the main menu. However, for my game, I decided to use a 3D animation for the main menu.

The 3D animation will be featured in the same artistic style as my game, which I found to be best in a 2.5 dimensional cartoon style. After researching, I’ve found the following video that has a side-by-side comparison between realistic and cartoon styles, and an in-depth explanation on how to create the same effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZH4jCO4ZM&ab_channel=MattAspland

I ultimately chose this style because of its appeal to younger audiences, which will be fitting for the purpose of my project. I found that deeper messages are made more fun with a cartoon style as I visited the Ghibli Museum. Young children to young adults were all in awe of the aesthetic beauty of the animations. This style, however, will be a challenge to create in 3D, but with plentiful resources on the internet, like https://www.artstation.com/artwork/J9Bgm0, I will try my best to commit to sticking to the style.

In conclusion, this week, I took notes on the represented books and researched for resources that will be helpful during development. This preparation will be particularly helpful for next week, as I start to establish my project within Unreal Engine.