Games production: Professional Practice (Week 6)

This week I started the captain's table brief.
I decided to go with the idea of an explorer.
I used to play a game when I was younger called 'Nancy Drew - Secret of the Scarlet Hand', which is a detective game, but based in a museum of Mayan culture and civilisation.

Front cover of Nancy Drew: Secret of the scarlet hand, containing a central part of the game, the Mayan Monolith.

Here is another image from the game containing Mayan symbols, the faces especially in Mayan culture were very common, some refer to letters, some refer to numbers, but all were common within the culture.

Example of a puzzle from the game containing Mayan symbols

Mayan numeral system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals

Example of the Mayan writing system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script

Another example of glyphs depicting the gods which correlate to the Mayan Day calendar

I thought it would be a unique idea to add call-backs to traditional explorers, such as Lara Croft, Indiana Jones, etc. By adding the stereotypical objects like an explorer hat and compass, but by also adding in some Mayan Jade artefacts, which were of great significance to the Maya, this would add to the overarching narrative.

Collated reference board

This is the concept I designed for the scene, initially I wanted to re-create the entire room, but seeing as this would eat in to the tri budget, I thought it would be best not to go ahead with this idea. But I still planned out the table props and layout.
I wanted to build an old fashioned office around the time period of 1930, as this seems like a peak time for exploration, after the rebuilding of society from WW1, now is the time to go out and explore. Which makes a lot of sense, as Indiana Jones is set in the 1930s - as an additional idea, to cement the date, adding coins of the time period could help push the narrative further, by telling the audience it isn't in present day through a small feature such as this could add some story telling elements.

I started building props inside Max, I wanted this to be a project about realism and believability, so trying to model everything to a realistic standard as to not look faceted would be a must. It was really difficult to optimise some meshes, especially the lamp, compass, telescope and globe. Mainly because these objects contained a lot of cylinders and they are difficult to optimise.

I went for the second desk option within my reference.
I did like the first desk I found, but realised it would be too small of a space to lay objects upon and would look quite cluttered.
At least with this desk, it would have a nice parallelism with the windows that I am going to boolean into the walls.
The wall is also made with a wallpaper image that is free to use from the website Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/illustrations/background-pattern-texture-leaves-6737492/ by user drabbitod.
I used this design because it was perfect to represent my theme of exploration, exploring the dense jungle to get to the Mayan temples.
I took this in to substance painter and made a trim sheet out of it, consisting of the wallpaper and wood trim inserted - I helped the process by creating this material ID.

Wall material ID

Wall trim

Design by drabbitod on Pixabay

While texturing, I sourced some textures, including a map of central America, made by Rigobert Bonne and Jean Lattre. - https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4390.ar170300/
I believe it would have taken me a while to make a map from scratch, so I tried my best to find one within the public domain that I could use, preferably an older map to make it more authentic.

https://theantiquarium.com/products/central-america-colton-1855

Originally, I thought about using this map, but decided against it for a few reasons. Reason 1 being that it was too small to cover the area I wanted on my modelled map, there would have been lots of dead space around the edges. My second reasoning is that it wasn't geographically accurate enough compared to the previous map. Though having colour on the map would have been nice, but it wasn't necessary as I wanted something more accurate.