Extended Practice Hub World Design and Development

I then moved onto looking at the designs for the hub world itself and started by designing the portals that will be used to get to the different levels, I started by looking at the Chinese design, which is a level that will be on the first section of the game, but will not be one that we are making currently due to time constraints. In the end I went with a very traditional Chinese design and went with this arch below, exploring different colours that could be used, but in the end the red design with the black mixed in worked really well and I love the end result.

I then moved onto designing the Egyptian portal, as I had already come up with lots of different door designs this was fairly easy, but I tried to mix the designs up and test out different designs. In the end I really liked the third one as it was an interesting design that will stand out against the other aspects of the hub world and the Egyptian world and I tried to incorporate that blue design again running through, so that it was consistent with the other designs.

I then put together mood boards looking at different ideas for locations, and when we had already spoken about the idea we knew that we wanted to go with a forest type location due to the fact that it could be very old then with tall trees that stretch up far higher than normal, and it would create a very beautiful and mesmerising atmosphere for the Koala's to live in. I first put together a mood board of real forest, trying to gain some inspiration from them, how they form naturally and the general movement of the trees. I then looked at some existing digital paintings that people had created and found some beautiful ones that really captured what I wanted to create in a gorgeous way.

We then both sat down together and came up with very basic designs and sketched them out quickly, this gave us a good idea at how we could start to build the environment, focusing on how the platforms would be located throughout and where the portals would be.

We did these quick sketches together first and then Sophie went away and made them neater and ensured that everything was visible that needed to be shown. The designs are really good and overall we knew which one we wanted to take forward fairly quickly.

Sophie then produced the final design which we both decided was the strongest and then developed some colour swatches so that we could get a good idea about what kind of colour palette was going to be used on the hub world when it came to concept art. Overall our favourite one is the last. We feel that the last one works the best, making the tree look old and more like it would be more of a swampy kind of forest, but the hints and tones of red could be used over the forest itself, making the look of the hub world beautiful.