Early Stages of Development

Diana Barta
Illustration and Visual Media

Before I started this internship, I thought I only had to design the visuals for the environment, but because we are a small team, most of the aspects of the game that fall under environment design has become my responsibility. I had to learn Unity to create the terrain and building the environment with the props from the 3D modelers. Since it falls under my role of designing the environment I got to expand my skills, and also because it is a start-up game studio, otherwise, at a bigger company I would have stayed specialized in creating the illustrations. I found that this new software can open up the possibilities of what I can create in 3D as I have had a bit of struggle to model using Maya. Unity, however, will allow me to play more with lighting and textures that I have been able to explore. 

Even though we are developing a game, right now our process is focused more on marketing to get to the next stage. Even though I am designing the environment, I also have to keep in mind to create things for marketing. I have to prioritize that, which means that even though the things I am making wouldn't necessarily work the best for the gameplay, it is appealing to the audience. Right now I have to create visuals that convey the essence of what the game will be like, even if that means using different approaches to creating the promotional material, for example, painting in the backgrounds. However, in the future, when we get to that stage of the game development the team will have to properly create the game. 

It is very eye-opening to see how important it is to create marketing materials to gain investors so that in the end we will be able to develop the game. As we are creating these marketing materials, we have to understand that the people who view them may not be so familiar with the game development process, so it is essentially to understand their side. For them, maybe the visuals are the most important because they don't realize that the mechanics of the cars play a big role in how you perceive the game and if we do it right they overlook it. That is why we have to make sure things like collision (if the car hits a tree, it does not go through it) are working properly otherwise they might view it as a big flaw in the game, even though in reality it is easy to add those into the game and in the beginning of the game development it is not our priority as we focus on how the car moves. Therefore I have realized how necessary it is to put yourself in the consumer's and investors' shoes and try to understand how they view the game developments progress and what they think of as a flaw in the game or the essential part of a game.