A1: Noir game

 Le Noir Jeu

9/1/2024

What does "Noir" even mean?

Noir is a genre of stories that are normally in black and white, originated in the country of France. You can tell this because the word "Noir" is literally the word "Black" in the French language.

Examples of Noir in movies and video games.

Noir was a genre most common around the early 1900's, due to the lack of colour in televisions back then. Noir is also commonly paired up with "Detective" shows.

L.A. Noire is a game made by Rockstar Games in which you play as a detective doing detective things, such as finding clues at crime scenes, interrogating suspects and witnesses and tracking down criminals.

  

Hollow Knight is a game that is entirely done with shading; in this case being only black & white. This relates to the brief due to the fact that Noir is a genre that also limits itself to black and white.

Limbo is a game that is also done with shading. This relates to the brief due to the fact that Noir also follows the colour limitations.

12/1/2024

The Positives & The Negatives

pros:

Noir is very reminiscent of times of old, back when television lacked colour, very nostalgia era.

cons:

Noir has been filled to the brim with detective style shows, making them feel almost bland and familiar.

   

The uniqueness of this media

I believe what makes this form of media unique is how many limitations there are. 

16/1/2024

About Cars

Since we have decided to make our game into the 1950's, we need to make everything look like it's from that timezone.

Here is a mood board of automobiles from around that era searched for using Google. These vehicles had very long bonnet which is where the engines are stored. They also had grills that were there to empty out the vehicle of harmful gasses. These tie into the brief because they will be used as platforms to progress and beat the level to continue to the other levels.

18/1/2024

Our group had set up our work on Trello. Each person has their own role to play in the project.

we have also "researched" buildings and items for our game as a team.

i made a newspaper stand. i also made up newspaper headlines with varying levels of comedy.

This is a newspaper stand in maya. To make this, all i did was get some cubes and i would scale and/or rotate some of the cubes. I hadn't use any of the tools available, however I'm sure i mtght use extrude, multicut & edgeloops in the future.

This is an Unfinished model of my veichle: Also done in maya and by changing the dimensions of cubes. the only difference was giving some of the cubes almost no visibility to replicate the look of an automobile, and I squashed a cylinder to create the bonnet. For the roof, i used edgeloop. If I was to build this again, I would have used extrude.

This is a muffin model made in maya. I used half of the cylinder's edges and shrunk them down so it resembled more of a wrapper. for the top, i used a sphere which i squashed into a shape i needed for a muffin top.

Here is another item i worked on; a can! instead of just putting a bland cylinder with an oval, i extruded the cylinder and experimented with it to make it look very familiar to an empty can.

Down here is a Game Design Document made by Brandon Box.

However, i believed it was a bit lackluster, so i have typed up my own document during some of my spare time.

Something always goes on, doesn't it?

In our group, Brandon was the one who had the game, so any accessories and other things we did had to be sent to him. but on a fateful day, his Unity project crashed while he had alot of unsaved work put into it. It wasn't fixable, but we made an attempt to chip in our own ideas for the location of the decor.

Here is a piece of concept art done by hand. These are a couple ideas here that I had in mind of using.

in the levels. the brief expects us to have a game in a Noir style, so the group concluded "We should made a detective game because a lot of Noir media are detective shows!".

One issue that arose was my lack of experience in maya, for I have spent more time building models since i didn't use extrusion. At least I know for next time that I should probably use it more in my models. 

This is an example of a model. This one would of taken less time if I remembered to extrude it.

Here is the final Trello board.

Here is a revamped Newstand model. This was created with extrusion, which was used to add the second block above and to add a hole into it. Using extrusion, I found modeling much more easier with extrusion compared to the initial plan of just using shapes.

   Here I have changed up the look of the stand a bit to look nicer. For this, I used an Edge loop and raised the top of it so it looks more like a roof. I haven't found any problems with edge loops (so far) and found them and I wouldn't mind using them more in the near future.

My original plan was to make a newspaper, however, it looked a bit weird as one, but I figured out that I could use it as something else; an A- Frame. This would be used to promote stories from the newspapers to encourage sales. I made it by adding an edge loop and scaling to make this model.

Behold, the iconic duo! Now with papers! I made them by getting a cuboid, created some copies and assigned to them a different texture so they more easily stood out.

Post Mortem:

What went Right

Although flawed, I believe my models matched the brief for the game. I also believe my concept art has improved compared to every other time I did art.

The Game Design Document had went well, since everyone actually gave their own thoughts on it. 

What went Wrong

 We had a lack of communication; Our group (And the previous groups(which all had the same people in it)) was having serious trouble with sharing information. Although this wasn't rectified by the end of the project, I have learnt going forward that we need more communication within all team members. 

As for the game itself, the controls are frustrating: to start, holding down (Normally to move back) does not make the player move back. Instead, it makes the player violently spin around on the spot. not only that, but the physics are broken because the character can reach impossible speeds simply from jumping.

 Final Thoughts:

Although there were some decent ideas in concept, it mostly came out bland, safe and unexperimental. What made it worse was definitely the lack of communication, which prevented a final game.

Also, I think
the game should of taken place in Las Vegas.