End of MP2 Blog Post

 

Intention Definition & Exploration of Ideas:

When doing blog investigations at the beginning of the year, a contemporary artist who caught my attention was Feng Mengbo, who is well known for his works of art relating to retro gaming aesthetics with personal memories from the Cultural Revolution. When I saw his artwork, I instantly got inspired by it because video games played a big part in my life, so I wanted to create something similar to Feng Mengbo's art pieces.

I started on this video project with the idea of creating something related to the theme of fantasy, because I feel like there are many different ways that a person can display fantasy since it is a super diverse genre. Since all creatures share the same basic instinct for survival, I wanted to make my video related to the process of survival with the involvement of quests and missions. Some of the games that inspired this idea were Minecraft and Genshin Impact since both games have achievements and quests that players can complete.

Planning:

I first went to do some research about what I wanted to do, and I came across a cooking channel called "BORE.D" where a person shows himself making food as if it was a quest in a video game.

Watching his video inspired me and I wanted to create a video similar to his, where a player logs into the game with very low hunger. To get their hunger up, they have to follow a quest where they gather materials to make a cookie in order to get their hunger bar up.

I did not do much planning prior to creating my video because I had no idea what I wanted to do at the beginning. I just went with the flow and created whatever came to my mind at the time. However, as I began to progress further into the video, it was easier for more ideas to come in and I eventually had a visual representation of how I wanted the video to turn out like.

Producing:

To begin, I started working on the quest log by getting an image of a book and quill from Minecraft and adding things onto it. The image on the very right is a quest log from the YouTube channel "BORE.D" that I took inspiration from.

Next, I needed to have a character to be involved in my video game. At first, I didn't know what a character sprite was until Mr. Bomboy mentioned them to me. I decided to do an investigation on pixel art and came across this video tutorial of someone turning a Minecraft character into pixel art:

After following the tutorial, I was able to turn my Minecraft character into pixel art.

My next plan was to create a title screen for the video, similar to how a load-up screen would look like in a video game. Without looking at any examples to reference off of, I made one up myself and it turned out like this:

However, I was not satisfied with how it turned out, so I went back on it a few weeks later and did an investigation on video game title screens. After doing some research, I found this video and I really liked the simplicity of the look, so I took some inspiration from it. 

Once I finished, the newly edited intro turned out to look something like this:

When I was satisfied with my intro, I started to add dialogues in my video to guide my character through the objectives of the quest. Here is an example:

I also created a map that included biomes from Minecraft to help with the objective of the quest:

Afterward, I animated a cursor to craft the cookie on a crafting table:

Once the quest was finished, I created an exit screen that looked something like this: 

Evaluating:

As of right now, I am pretty much finished with my work, with only small things that I need to clean up before rendering. After completing my project, there is one thing that I would change to produce a better video next time. I wish that I had done more planning prior to working on this project because I had no idea what I was getting into when I first started the process. However, after getting some experience working on the project, planning will be much easier for my next project because my next project will be something similar to what I did for this one.

Integrating:

After reflecting on my work, I wish that I had taken my time with some things like creating the title screen and making original art. I wanted to get this project done before the end of the second marking period because I wanted to have time to create other projects, but I probably should not have given myself a time limit because some things did not turn out the way that I wanted it to turn out. Now with more knowledge and experience with pixel art, I would like to create all of my objects from scratch since the majority of my pictures in this project were taken from google. I also want to create a better intro in the future because the one that I made this time was very simplistic and I did not spend a lot of time working on it.