Friend or Foe?
Started by looking about different games, mainly 2D Isometric, usually pixel styled, with fewer details so I can have more freedom with creating the setting and the characters.
My game of choice is The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. For those unfamiliar it's an indie developed, action adventure game with randomized rogue-like elements. Visually it's quite creepy with a twisted story.
My first idea was a big montage of characters, but the work involved would have been shocking. So, I picked a 3 man main cast and got used to drawing them in my style before creating concepts. Here we have Isaac, the Angel Gabriel and The Adversary. Quite the contrast.
Concepts of the 3 just help me with the 3D build for the characters, having a proper reference image allows me to form solid topology so it animates well and avoids deformations.. I hope.
I did some rough storyboards you can see above, at this point I was struggling with a stage so I decided to at least plan out a full story. It's got a lot of focus points so that I can chop it up when I found a location to suit.
But where was the location? It was quite a problem for a while, I couldn't think of a suitable place to capture the games eery feel in reality. Mark suggested some places, so off we went.
We went to fort Dunree in Buncrana, and an eventful day resulted in some neat environments. Various assets of the rooms actually fit the same assets within the game, which was just what I needed.
To make the scenes suit the game a little more, I had to edit them in post. Following these sort of examples from Anime: Blood C and Silence Night. Movies - Predator, The Ring, Woman in Black, The Book Thief, and the Corridor. And Game series Crysis 3.
Which added up to make my anamatic! Showing the general movement and character interactions (important areas), a better visual cut up of my original bloody long storyboards.
My video wont have a narrative. So, knowing the visuals, the second important feature is music and sound effects. I'll take various footsteps, breathing, door and creature effects from the game and implement them faintly to create ambient noise as isaac explores his fate.
The 3D aspect is simple, they run off the same base model you can see the start of here. The main focus is skinning and rigging which I'll need to spend some time on. After one character, I'll be comfortable to shape up the remaining two.
So my outcome is a 3D Digital Composite, animation focused. There will be two versions, a full version and a shorter one showing the more important scenes and effects - more like a showcase.
My only real concerns are getting the lighting right, and the Adversary's laser attack. The length can be handled by having a short and long version, and the wings won't be too bad since the Angel doesn't have any close ups.
It's definitely a project I'm rather excited about.
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