To kickstart our week, my team and I aim on creating a demo game space - not one that is playable, mind. We knew that establishing a strong visual direction was crucial, so we began by creating moodboards. We used primary photos from our trips into London, as well as images from our collective Pinterest page.

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With our moodboards as our ‘compass’, we delved into the exploration of various lighting options for our demo game space, as well as creating assets and testing out our PSX shader, inspired by PS1 gameplay on an old HRT TV. We had a lot of trouble with the shader this week, but we’ve managed to get it up and running (for now). We have experimented with ambient lighting to set the overall mood, and dynamic lighting to add depth and realism. This was surprisingly well recieved on our Instagram. It is important to note that it all does look a bit off - most likely because we don’t have textures yet. Below are pictures of our demo Inner City game space… something I had the challenge of solely working on whilst Ali created assets for our Outer Rim. This week, I created 5 different buildings for our Inner Rim, as well as 3 types of TV sets and a radio.

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Once we were satisfied with the lighting, my attention turned to the task of designing the full map for our game space. Below is a 3D render I set up of what we hope our space will look like. I made sure that there was a clear distinction between the Inner and Outer rim, and that every corner and exit is blocked off - players can only travel where we need/want them to go!

Throughout the week, our team had a continuous cycle of discussion, feedback, and iteration. For example, we were originally planning on having fixed camera postions that the player could not change. After playtesing actual PS1 games with our colleagues, we found that this camera style was quite simply despised by the majority, so we’ll definitely be changing that!

Towards the end of the week, I set myself the personal challenge of creating the base for The Tower of Babel. I was heavily inspired by the BT Tower and Babel at the Tate Modern, combining elements seen in both. This was then 3D printed and I hope it will be something we can show off during our showcase events.