Mood boards full of inspiration

Along with writing down the basis of my two concepts I decided to start collecting a large amount of imagery for inspiration as I had a lot of visual ideas in my head that I wanted to get down and the simplest thing for me to do was just make lots of mood boards full of pictures to help visualise my ideas. that may influence my design concepts.

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IDEA 1

MAIN IDEA

I had a very clear idea in my head of what I wanted my game to look like so for the first mood board I decided to look into different games that used a black and white colour scheme and had simplistic game play. The ones I found were 'Darklings', 'The Invisible Swan', 'Limbo' and 'Contre jour'. Style wise, Darklings is probably the closet to the design concept I was thinking of so it will be important for my to play this game, review it a little and try to make sure my designs aren't to similar to this games. 

After looking at certain games that have stuck with a 'black and white' theme, I then starting researching and finding imagery of lighting that uses a similar theme as I wanted to focus on certain types of light that I could use throughout my game to capture a certain feel and mood. One of the main things I looked into was dim lighting in a dark room and this was to help me picture how the shadowing would work with this sort of effect as my game is based around the player only being able to see a small part of the map due to the light being given off my the character. I also made sure to look into more vibrant 'lights' as well, such as neon as added a more colourful element could completely change the feel of the game.

The next part of the process for me was trying to picture what the two main characters of my game, 'Dark' and 'Light', were going to look like, I had no clue whether I wanted a human looking character or something a little different like the Darklings's character (seen on the right) so I just collected a bunch of imagery of characters I knew that had a dark or light quality to try and find inspiration. At the moment I am leaning towards designing a creature instead of a human looking character but to be fair I am still a little in the dark about designs at the moment. (pun not intended) 

I had a rough idea in my mind of what sort of style and environment I wanted by game to be set in so I compiled yet another mood board with images that I could use for inspiration. I really liked the idea of my game being set in a fantasy forest which with give the game more of a mystical feel which is what I am aiming for. One of the main forest's I looked at was from James Cameron's 'Avatar' as is depicted a beautiful jungle environment that was set on a different planet so it has many different and bizarre species of plant which are visually stunning.  Other images I collected were mostly digital painting based on imagination. 

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IDEA 2

For my second idea I had a pretty clear idea of what design I wanted to focus on so I did some research into 3D and 2D side scrollers with a certain style I was looking for. I looked at the games 'Below', 'Child of light', 'Lost winds' and 'Transistor'. Game layout wise I think Transistor is the closet to what I had in mind, a over head view with 3D elements thrown in instead of going with a typical 2D side scroller but style wise, I am looking more towards lost winds for inspiration, especially with the under ground levels.

When I was thinking about and writing up the story for my second idea I had a very clear image of my head of what kind of female character I wanted to be as my main protagonist as I already knew of three pre existing characters that had a similar feel to them and that I had taken inspiration from. 

The characters are Ellie from the game 'The Last of us', April O'Neil from the 2012 series 'Teenage Mutant ninja turtles' and Clementine from the series of games called 'The walking dead'. These girls all have very similar qualities to them, a rational fear of the creatures they go up against at the beginning but during the course of the game/series, become stronger and far more mature.

When thinking up the game concept, I knew I wanted it to be set in a old mine and I did have a clear idea in my head of what this looks like but I thought it was important to make a collection of images anyway that I can use from references later on in the creative process. I also did a similar thing with the industrial futuristic city I had in mind for the setting of the game. After this I did a little image research into games that have used mine's in them and I found quite a mixture of different style which will definitely help me for inspiration later on.