Hello, I’m Megan, I have just finished my second year Extended Diploma at UCA.
When creating my work I wanted to look at the environmental storytelling of a game. This was the first time I have done a project based on environments and not just character design. I had a lot of fun learning about what actually goes into creating not just an environment but how storytelling is included in the design.
I wanted to create a design that made players look around and wonder “Why is that there?” And to create a world that players would look at and become interested in the story from the designs. I created the designs so that the current world that the player gets to explore is bright and colourful, but the new world underneath that is slowly showing through is a mix of dull white and greys. The idea behind the design is that the current world is not quite right, the colours are either too bright or not what was planned, such as the clouds being a pinkish red.
What inspired my work was a lot of different designs and styles from multiple 2D pixel games. With some pixel games, a lot of the style is limited so I wanted to add as much detail as I could without the environment becoming too overwhelming. Unlike the original concept drawings, a lot of smaller detail was taken out but not enough that the final pixel design was any less detailed. I had only ever used pixel art once for a previous project and that was for making a character sprite. For this project, I had to re-learn how to create pixel art on a larger scale which meant having to find the right pixel size for both the environment and the character. The only problem I had was not having the characters scaled correctly to the environments.
The characters had to be created to fit this world, so they were created with bright colours in mind but not so bright that they would blend in with the environment. They often had a darker or less vibrant colour in their design so that a player would be able to notice them and not walk past them.
Want to know more about the project? Here’s the website created for it:
Extended Diploma in Art & Design - Year 2 - Canterbury 
Rika Vincent-Rous | Pre-degree & Foundation Studies
