D4M: Final Post!

So I finished up my final for Design for Media class today.

I created a website that compiles together all of the work that I have done on this project. You can check it out here.

Shadechat Preview from Michelle Rakar on Vimeo.

Backgrounds

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D4M: Starting Up Backgrounds

This week I worked a lot on the concepts for the final backgrounds. These will be all of the main backgrounds that show up in the game, since they are the main areas visited. I also tested out some concepts for coloring the backgrounds; I'm most likely going to stick with the second style.

Background Sketches:

Background Color Concepts:

 

This coming week I will be focusing on finishing up these backgrounds, putting together the graphical user interface. The final compiling will be started as soon as those portions are completed.

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D4M Final: Character Development

So I decided to change my overall schedule and focus on the characters for this week. So I'm pushing back all of the background work to next week; I also plan on having actual finalized color palettes next week. This week I worked on the character expression sheets. All of them have been completed as seen below:

Ralphie Ragger

Adrian Ragger

Scott Ragger

Celia Ragger

Kharen Ragger

Zandra Saku

Terra Gaea

Mar Keys

Natalia Hanes

Abi Lane

James Bowens

Charles Houston

Kieran Price

Shade Chance

Here is the updated chart:

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D4M Final: Week 1

So it's the second week into the final project for my Design for Media class. This week my goal was to create the full storyline and some character and background sketches.

Storyline

Ralphie, a high school boy, discovers an online chatroom known as Shadechat over the summer after his Aunt Kharen's death. Ralphie is the son of a well-known detective, Adrian Ragger.

Shadechat is a chatroom in which someone talks to an anonymous person, and it is not known who or where they are from (absolutely no IP addresses are saved or anything, and it is impossible to trace the person talking). This site is basically set up where it will randomly pair two people up to talk. Once someone logs out, the other is not notified, it just immediately redirects them to a new person. Word spreads that the people on the site are from the dead. The site is connected to the spirit world.

After a few times of using the chatroom, Ralphie eventually decides to try and communicate with his Aunt Kharen after reading through his dad's unsolved cases in his office. He finds out some information from her and decides to try and solve this unsolved case.

Ralphie eventually ends up talking with some new people on Shadechat and even meets with a couple of them in person at some points. Natalia and Abi are the two who Ralphie talks with most often. At first, Ralphie's friends do not believe him. Eventually, his friend Zandra decides to use the site. After some time, she eventually goes missing and Ralphie and his friends must figure out her whereabouts.

I have established more of the storyline, but I will avoid spoiling the entire game.

Character Sketches

Some basic character sketches. None of these are very finalized, they're all still just planning out ideas for the characters presented throughout the game.

Here are a bunch of digital sketches for the mugshots. I plan on finalizing these a lot more and adding whole expression sheets within the next couple of weeks.

I also made a basic size chart of the silhouettes of all of the characters that appear.

Here's a basic layout of what I imagine the game screens to look like. There will be a drawn out background, a character mugshot, a text box, and the date and time of day in the top right corner.

Background Sketches

I did some basic floor plans for all of the major areas that are presented throughout my storyline. Since this is a detective game with an ongoing mystery, it will take place all within one small town: North Harbor.

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