Elements of games design, part five: planning and concepting

 I find my understanding of developing ideas from my previous courses and things I have learnt last year have gotten better . I’ve never jumped straight into a final and always start with thumbnails and initial sketches for 2D, then develop them and decide what I want to do for my final. Last year I mainly worked with just traditional media to understand how to develop my ideas and know I can start properly working photoshop into my workflow. I’ve started to make my thumbnails smaller so I can concentrate more on composition before anything else, but also paying attention to separate elements from different angles which could be used. I’m starting to see how I should treat my 2D workflow the same as I would with graphic design. Especially for projects which involve vehicles and characters. I tend not to do this as much with 3D, which I should do; I need to have a good idea of what I am going to do before I start it. This will stop me getting too far along with a project when I realise a critical mistake which will make things harder and slow me down. For my character project I intend to draw exactly what I’m going to make beforehand and do this for every project.  I need to remember to go back to my design document every time I finish a big step, so I can really work out what to do, instead of just having rough ideas in my head and getting caught up with them.

I found that with my internship I plan more and make sure the simple things are correct before I move onto anything else and my boss checks it at each stage. I also find that because I know I need to have a deadline done to get paid I start things as soon as I get them. Even though I’ve always known I should do this with uni work I did used to get distracted, and now even after a bit of experience I feel more focused towards planning and time management. I think after my internship I will find it easier with less work and focus on improving rather than getting things done

Planning is very important in any kind of design work, I know how to do it and yet I don’t put as much focus on it as far as actually getting the ideas down somewhere. Sometimes when I’m at a location for 2D my work is kind of spread around my sketchbook as I’m moving location, wanting to get something down and a better understanding by drawing a few thumbnails at a certain place, then quickly do a development drawing and then moving to the next area. I need to do more thumbnails on photoshop afterwards using different elements from completely different areas. This will take practice because it can be hard to make some interesting elements look like they belong in different places and complement other ideas and certain perspectives.