Charity Silhouettes

Nine quick silhouettes started in Alchemy. I'm particularly fond of how silhouettes 2, 4 and 7 turned out, and so I added quick colours to those, to flesh them out a little more.

7 Virtues: Brainstorming & Research

I decided to create my character around Charity, as I saw a lot of opportunity for exploration. Particularly, the themes of sacrifice and salvation stood out to me as strong themes, and the idea of nobility was interesting because of the seeming contradiction of charity and lavish wealth. Although in the context nobility refers to the actions of the charitable, it was an aspect that warranted noting.

After brainstorming ideas, I decided to gather images for reference and inspiration, starting from the theme of guardian, something which I thought combined the ideas of salvation and sacrifice - being ready to give your life to give someone salvation. There are obvious religious parallels in that, however I decided to branch elsewhere, looking at nature and the charity that it provides to all inhabitants of the world, even at its own detriment (deforestation, landfill, etc.)

When researching natural clothes for clothing ideas, I came across Nicole Dextras' "Little Green Dress" project, in which Nicole crafted 21 dressed out of only plants and berries to highlight the issue of sustainability in the fashion industry. The range of colours and textures were particularly striking to me, and I plan on using them as inspiration for my own character.

When taking a closer look at Dextras' dresses, many of the berries and leaves have already started to decay, given the time taken to make the dresses. This brought my back to the idea of sacrifice through charity, and that nature, through our sustenance, is being slowly eroded. Alternatively, I could also pursue the idea of man-made products polluting the environment, perhaps incorporating imagery of landfill, deforestation, and the like into my character's clothes or body.

Media Lecture Series: Gina Jackson

Last fridays Lecture was held by our Visiting Professor in Games Industry and Business, Gina Jackson, who talked in depth about value chains, variations in the Indie scene, big data, and also fusion.

Particularly interesting was her breakdown of the value chain, highlighting the importance of the distributor, (the lowest risk role in the chain) and the format holder, who are often forgotten or excluded from many people's perceptions of cash flow in the industry. In addition to this, Gina highlighted how each individual game matters less and less as the chain progresses - stressing that the developer and the retailer think very differently about their games.

In terms of Indie developers, Gina also noted that commissioners, including those seen in crowdfunding, sometimes replace publishers, particularly with the dawn of digital distribution. Continuing on from that, she moved onto "big data;" the use of data collection software, particularly in alpha and beta stages of development, to gather information about what players actually did when playing their game, as often what players think and say they do and what they actually do are very different.

Fusion was a smaller aspect of Gina's lecture, but she touched on the idea of fusing different forms of media, such as books and television, noting the importance of new ideas and fusions when pitching a game idea.