User Interface Exploration

Development Paintings Set 2

3D Visual Development 01

3D visual developments as of now. The final visual style of the game hopes to emulate a papercutout/watercolor hybrid style, and this animation can be seen as a testbed for visual ideas. Some of the stuff we have in here looks like a real good foundation for the visual impact of the final game level.

Porcelain Age Visual Exploration Paintings 01

Project Memorabilia Prologus BETA

This is a draft to Project Memorabilia Prologus.
The animation is still rough and some models are still missing. Hopefully, it can be complete by end of April.

Doodad Sets: Bathroom and Extra Furniture Tests

These were completed some weeks ago, forgot to post em here. Guo Jun will be using them together with a house for an animation set, and I'll be playing around with texture and painterly styles on these props to see what could look best for the eventual game.

Interior Doodads Set 01

Low Polygon Models for an interior doodads set, we'll be using them for a test level.

On The Porcelain Age

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE PORCELAIN AGE

The Crafts and technology are not separated…the craftsman who creates is intimate with the technology of PRODUCTION…there is a focus on the utilitarianism of the arts as well; see Russian constructivism.

Art serves to promote and center the ethical positivism of its existence through the augmentation or birth of a myriad OTHER industrious forms of which the society focuses itself on; humanism in its form is expressed through the technological achievement of the everyday man, and the craftsman, artist, and inventor are frequently overlapped; there were no WORKERS, only apprentices of a craft, and the production line is seen as something to be automated and an utterly worthless human endeavor. There is a need for mass production in export, but it is looked down upon as a menial and ugly labor and best suited for imported labor or the use of Furnace Machines and Automatons.

Art serves as a seed, a painting should be used and appropriated in the ornamentation of technology, a sculpture as the product of an intimate technology of production that is well understood and practiced by the craftsman, so that he may apply what he learns into the creation of other technologies or pieces of craft.

THE CITY AND ITS INHABITANTS

Above: A typical household usually had a bottom floor for the selling of goods, and a workshop for the production of goods for export. Many were raised in such an environment from birth, and the city government freely gave grants and generous schemes to its citizens toward such a venture.

The City served as a harbor capital, it was known as the finest crafts city of the Empire Age, and prided itself on the exporting of masterful, beautiful works of technology and industry. Of its 3 Million Inhabitants, more than half of its households engaged in the crafts and industry of production, and its reputation as a central hub of the utilitarian application of the arts attracted constant talent from across the empire, architects, engineers, metalworkers, and of course, the artists, painters who yearned for the chance of patronage by the top industries and companies within the cities, so that they may decorate in ivory, rare paints and oils, gold and silver, their wondrous works of technology which had started to spread across the empire.

Of note was its use of coal, steam, and the fabled electricity that sparked a revolution and will to imitate the glory of the harbour City and its technological marvels, clothed in the finest gold, silver, and silks. Even when mass production was kept to a minimum, the sheer amount of people and households engaged in  self production and the strive for excellence and beauty in their own homes and personal workshops, ensured a certain quality. Many households, from humble beginnings, could one day rise into a famed workshop of its own right, and the citizens sent their children to the academies of industry, craft, and paint for free so they would continue the cities proudest of traditions; the marriage of the Human Spirit, Art, and Technology.

The Furnace Machines- Low Polygon Normal Map Experiment 01

As part of the experiments that are going on with creating a certain style and visual language of not just the constructs of the age, but of the world...sometimes I run into a few basic visual language ideas. I have always found the Industrial Revolution; the discovery and use of coal and steam a massive technological, and psychological change in human civilization.

The exploration of themes present in this overall project, focuses much on the overlapping of both the scientific rediscovery of a previous age and its ethical values, hopes and dreams, parallel to the Renaissance and the rise of Humanism; together with the cultural and technological impact of the Industrial Revolution.

Who controls the machine and the ethical issues of design and its use? We in the modern world have only started exploring this in this age...I would like to move this further back a century or so, and contemplate the impacts of both the Renaissance and mass Industry at the same time.

There are a total of 5 Furnace Machines I have designed, but for now, I will use this initial one in the creation of a larger set for us and the software side to play around with. The top image is a good indicator of how the Machine might look within the setting.

The Three Theatres: Development Paintings

 More so than Visual Language, sometimes I find a need to give a form of intellectual discourse between the acts and various existentialist viewpoints of the various characters which comprise the form of a narrative. That said, the creation of said intellectual discourse runs the risk of treading into difficult and at times, certainly damaging territory against the narrative it set out to strengthen. Whether or not this seed of intellectual discourse I have planted may find itself a recurring undercurrent of the narrative, and hopefully, the entire gaming experience, is yet to be determined, although it suffices at the moment for the sake of development.

The Three Theaters I refer to point at a certain zeitgeist extolled by the Schrodinger Clan of Cats, in that the world they meddle in and perform their acts of preservation, manipulation, and expulsion of errors within the timelines, are but a stage of unreality: for what is reality to a species whose sole purpose rests in the manipulation, dilution and in times of need, perforation of space-time and its consequences. To argue to them on the "Reality" and "Truth" of a current situation is as futile an endeavor as one might try to argue for the existence of a corporeal God. To the Cats, all that exists is the Theater, and the various points in the plot that comprise it, and like a group of editors they wield a pen in which to either augment and make solid pages of good text, or the elimination of stray verses. To this end, how far a Cat might go in his consideration of a situation and his subsequent action, depends very much on which of the Three Theaters he subscribes to.

Being born of Humanity, I thought it apt to allow certain forms of influential theatre in the earlier eras of the 1900s to form the basis of the Three Theaters that the Cats follow. They are the Theater of the Absurd, the Theater of Cruelty, and the Epic Theater.

The S. Clan of Cats: Turnarounds and Dress Development

Here are some more in depth development of the form of the Cats, and some possible types of Dress with color. Again trying to reconcile early 19th Century Dress with Sci Fi, although at this point, I am starting to see more personal and original themes with the dress code that I can start to quantify as a concrete Visual Language.

The S. Clan of Cats: Bunch of Original Sketches

I did a whole bunch of development sketches for the Cats, the above being a choice few of them, with an emphasis on trying to reconcile early 19th century dress seen in England and the Americas, with more futuristic sensibilities due to the inherent science fiction nature of the Cats. Lots of tumblr trawling...