Greetings from Skyway...

 Ok, finally a look at what I've been doing for my Final Major Project over the last six+ weeks.
I'm working with Ben Williams, Rich Coughlin and Ollie Ludgrove (their work on the project can be found on their respective blogs) and we're still working on a team name.  

 I'm not going to talk about the game idea itself right now, not because it's a secret I just can't be arsed to explain. But it's called Skyway.
The initial idea was inspired by the superb artwork of Josh Keyes (whom(?) I have linked before) but has grown and taken reference from many other places and is now its own project.

 Here is an early environment moodboard I put together (featuring some of Keyes' paintings) to give a quick impression of the setting of the game:

 Next is my drawing of the current main character design. His name is Oscar Rocketcycle.

Inspired by: various Okami characters, Lupin III characters, James (and the Giant Peach (animated version)), Pocoyo, the Team Fortress 2 engineer and, the one that everyone seems to pick up on, Tintin. 

 This is Hooch, with and without shades. He is a bike shop owner and "dark green water" brewer.

This is an updated version of a design that was initially pitched as the main character but was deemed "too bad (evil, not shit)". 

We liked the character though so we changed his role and kept him in.

Can't really remember what his face is inspired by as it started as a doodle on my dissertation handbook.

His body, and possibly personality, is inspired by Flip and the other casuals from This is England 86, one of my favourite characters from the series.

 More character concepts. These two are the owners of the pier Oscar will have to rebuild.
References include Punch and Judy, Richard and Judy and Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show although they ended up looking like Paul Daniels and Germaine Greer.
I'm going to alter their design soon to make their proportions a bit more realistic as they are currently a bit too cartoony.  

 Next up is a concept of the style of the sky. The game is set in the sky so the player will be seeing a lot of it, therefore it needs to be interesting and pleasant to look at.
It's based on the battle scene backgrounds of the GBA Pokemon games and currently is actually a bit too similar so it will need a bit of playing around with before it is put in our game.

 Finally something on the technical side. I found a stupidly helpful Youtube channel by Andrew Klein which has a lot of Maya tutorials that are relevant to our project. Plus he sounds like JD from Scrubs.

Anyway, following one of these tutorials, I have had a go at normal mapping from a 3D model.

 The image below doesn't show a great success in terms of its usefulness but it does show the idea working. It is a single polygon plane (a completely flat square) but after applying the normal map and placing lights it looks lumpy and 3D so hopefully we can use this technique later on for other things.

That's all for now. More coming soon.

BYE