Final Submission Summary

So I've come to the end of my Masters, I have finished off the Mortal Engines room to a standard which I am pleased with all I have to do now is put my work up in the Exhibition and hope people enjoy it. The main aim of my Masters throughout the year was to improve my own skills and knowledge of environment design in general with a special focus on lighting. While also adding to and improving upon my portfolio, with the hopes that it will lead a career in the industry.

I started of my first Semester looking at how lighting affects player decisions in games, this lead me to create The Corridor environment which was one the only playable I made throughout the year. The reason for this was to see if lighting would have an affect on player decisions in games, this meant having people with different levels of gaming experience test it and gather feedback which I then summed up. After receiving feedback from everyone and watching people play through I feel like curiosity has a lot to do with affecting player decisions, players will often make a decision because they are curious and want to see what could be on the more dangerous side.

My second Semester was all about large scale Environments and reminded me a lot of my work for my BA, for this project I got in touch with a few industry professionals for advice and guidance. This project was titled The Oasis, which is a town set in a arid desert environment on another planet. The main reason for this piece was to work on my lighting and values on a scene, so I decided to create the town and then show how it would be lit during different periods of the day. Which helped me discover a lot of new tools and techniques in the Unreal engine which I would then carry onto my other project, I also really sped up the pace at which I was creating work during this project.

For my final Semester I wanted to create a detailed interior scene which would be functional within a game, so this mean making sure it was optimised and that the models I was creating were up to industry standards. This meant spending more time on each model but I think it was worth it in the end and it really helped me improve the quality and speed at which I was creating 3D assets. The environment is based on the book series Mortal Engines, which is a universe where the cities of the world have all turned into massive moving machines fighting for dominance over a dying world. Since I have been studying and living in Preston for the last 4 years I decided to create a working/social room within the moving city of Preston, which led me to creating the Bar/Harpoon room which you can see.

Looking at everything I’ve learned during this course I think I have developed a much greater understand of Environments in games and the process and research which goes into the development of them. I’ve discovered that people can be greatly influenced by the lighting of a scene, whether it is a movie or a game and that lighting should be taken very seriously. Also that layout can greatly affect a player’s experience of a game, if you rush and do not spend time developing and understanding your environment you are creating then this can have a negative impact on the players. Now I am at the end of my project I have 3 fully finished Environments and i'm in a position where I feel like I have developed my skill’s to an industry standard, so that I can pursue a career in Games.