Minor Project - Initial Planning and Influences

Find Twinkle Toes - Premise/Key Ideas:

• "Point and click" but with camera "player" movement around the room - meeting/discovering different animals and adding pages to your factfile/journal, on your quest to find the free-roaming Twink.
• The more you explore and learn the more the room environment changes, and becomes more overgrown/wild/tropical etc.  
• Cabinets and other furniture become vivariums, the bed becomes a turtle pool, plants spring out everywhere, floor changes.
• Time passes, and different animals come out as per their species specific day/night cycles. eg Stevie (leopard gecko) afternoon. You have to visit certain animals before you are able to "unlock" certain next ones.   
• You can explore the room before it changes, eg open cupboards, have small interactions, eg open the wardrobe and look at a shirt in the drawer, but come back later and now the wardrobe is a snake rack, different ball pythons in each drawer. 
• Latest stage room is more rainforest than room. 

Stylistic Influences

For the overall style I'm really drawn to the low poly almost faded/pastel look a lot of indie and iOS relaxation games are currently styled as. This is the similar market I want my project to fit into - a soothing and simple game designed to focus mainly on aesthetics and buildikng your collection/exploring and developing the world. A couple of key stylistic influences I have are Tap Tap Fish - Abyssrium, Viridi and Desertopia.

I'm particularly interested in the style of creatures in AbyssRium, how in essence they are really quite simple and blocky, but still instantly recognisable as to what creature they are. This whittled down design to clear simplicity is what I want to achieve in my own designs. To have a basic shape and add all the major defining details though textures. 

I'm also taking inspiration from real life resources and locations, where merging of natural and interior design is key. My main influences here are London's Rainforest Cafe, a favourite location for child-me, Ridgeway Exotics in Gosport, a personal favourite exotics shop that earlier in the year had a full-store redecorate and now looks amazing, filled with branches and fake vines to make you feel as if you're in a rainforest when in the store, and Naturospace Honfleur - a "garden zoo and butterfly house" in Normandy I had the pleasure of visiting in July and totally fell in love. 

Minor Project - Premise

Animals, plants and all things natural have always been my passion, so it makes sense to me for this year for me to base my project around what I love. This last 9 months I've had away from UCA I have explored exactly who I am - what I want to do, have and enjoy, and changed a lot as a person. I want to express this in my project this year. My love for animals, in particular exotics has blossomed and my collection and knowledge have both grown. 

My love of reptiles began really aged ~9 when I was set on convincing my mum to let me own a Veiled (Yemen) Chameleon after seeing a tank full of adorable hatchlings on a trip out. From that came weeks/months of research and creating a "chameleon fact file", basically pages and pages of all the copied and pasted info 9/10 year old me could find relating to Yemens from the internet, or meticulously typed out information from whatever library books I could find that were remotely useful, all stuck into a word document with some clipart images and fancy typeface graphics, printed using probably half a rainforest and about £40 of ink (sorry dad), wonkily stapled together and proudly presented to my mum with a very cheeky grin. I actually got her to the stage of looking at what stores locally stocked them, going and viewing a few, but in the end it didnt work out as she was worried about their size and male aggression and female egg-bound complications. Over the years I wanted varying exotic animals, corn and milk snakes being high on the list, but the closest I got was an albino african clawed frog I had for 10 years - "Fronk" and a lot of tropical fish. 

Bringing Dilly home

June 2017 I took the plunge and finally bought my first reptile, Dilly, a Merauke Blue Tongue Skink, after falling in love with blue tongues about a year previously. My passion for reptiles grew immensely, as I realised I was old enough to decide what animals I could a) own and b) afford, and my collection I now call m y "zoo crew" quickly grew, October gaining my first Snake - Twinkle toes the corn snake, November bringing my 2nd blue tongue and 1st ball/royal python, etc and the collection grew.

I own a variety of creatures, some more exotic than others, which total 50+ animals in my household, (not including invertebrates) the majority of which are mine, and kept in my room. 

Exotics:
3 Blue Tongue Skinks - 3 different localities: Merauke, Tanimbar and Irian Jaya
1 Corn Snake - Strawberry Snow Morph
1 Western Hognose Snake - Wildtype 
9 Royal/Ball Pythons - Normal, Spider, Bananna, Pastel Yellowbelly, Normal het. Snow, Spinner-Blast Enchi Fire het. pied, Vanilla Scream, Calico Killer Bee het. Yellowbelly, Albino Enchi.
5 Gargoyle Geckos - Both striped and reticulated
3 Crested Geckos - a buckskin w/portholes, kneecaps and fringes, a flame/tiger dalmation dashed-pinstripe, and tricolour harlequin dalmation. 
1 Leopard Gecko - Super Snow
3 Tokay Geckos - wildtypes, one high red
2 Bearded dragons - one deformed due to inbreeding
1 Yellow Belly Slider (terrapin)
4 African Clawed frogs - 2 normal 2 albino
(feeders) Breeding colonies of: Sun Beetles (fruit beetles) Pachnoda Giant African Land Snails - Fulica Jadatzi, Dubia Roaches, morio (super) Worms/Beetles, Mealworms/Beetles, European Grey Isopods, Dwarf White Isopods, Springtails.
Also monthly replenished supplies of locusts, and waxworms/moths. 

Non exotics:
6 Cats - Tabby, Black, Black & White, Tortoiseshell, Ginger tabby, Russian Blue.
2 Guinea Pigs - 1 Longhair 1 Silky
1 Russian Dwarf Hamster
8 Chickens
8 Ducks - 5 Indian Runners and 3 Crested

View of my front windowsill

Plants are also a big passion of mine, my window sills for years have been crammed full of pots of varying bonsai, succulents, cacti, and I even introduced hanging basket pots too when i ran out of room. With my reptiles, Ive been able to further expand my lov for plants and keep a variety of my animals, mainly my arboreal geckos, in bioactive setups. A bioactive setup is, in short, an enclosure with live plants and a CUC (clean up crew) culture of varying invertebrates which negate the need for completely cleaning out your animals vivarium every few weeks, the environment is self sustaining and only needs watering and leaf litter/mulch occasionally adding. 

Twink the strawberry snow corn snake

I want my project to express my love for plants and my animals, by showing off their beauty as well as being informative. I knew early on project planning I wanted it to be based around my room, the hub of my life/animals/plants, and have the environment be my room. My corn snake, Twinkle Toes "Twink", I regularly let out of her vivarium to free roam my room, corn snakes are very active and inquisitive snakes, they love to climb, and Twink is entirely tame and over 5ft long, so I feel good letting her get out and stretch and exercise, and know Ill always be able to find her at the end of the day, although in the past she has surprised me with the places shes finally turned up in, and I decided to make this the premise of my idea. 

Idea Premise: I want to create a short animation as if a demo/gameplay snippet of an educational adventure game, aimed at children primarily, set in my room and educating on different animal species as you search for Twink around the room, and have the environment around you change as you progress further and learn more. 

26/9/18 - Maya Class - 5 Minute Moom

First 5 minute Moom

Today in class I used maya again for the first time in a few months, I should really have picked it up more over the summer, I had a little difficulty simply remembering/locating controls initially but it  came back to me and I was able to very quickly position Moom. I think firstly to improve I need to find the right camera angle initially and model from that perspective as moving around the model as I tried to change the pose just became confusing as what looked right from one angle looked completely wrong from another.