Mansion Exterior

Team work

This week I focused on creating the mansion exterior. As this would be in the initial menu of the game and it establishes the location and context, I thought it would be most important to complete this background first.

Based on this moodboard, I wanted to create a dark and moody environment that was secluded and foggy. The mansion, being around in the 1930’s, would have to be an old fashioned place but also run down, being abandoned. I decided to heavily base it on the The Phantom Manor in Disneyland Paris as it appears large and foreboding, while remaining more grounded since it is much less decadent than the other mansions in the moodboard.

I initially started the process of this piece in Piskel but quickly discovered that Piskel isn’t optimised for larger detailed pieces, so switched to Aseprite, which was much easier to use and had a lot more tools.

I wanted to emphasise the fog in the environment, and I attempted to show this by making the trees lighter and blurrier the further in the background they were.

Throughout this project, I want to develop my teamworking skills, like communication and cooperation, since I feel like these are weaknesses of mine. While I do get work done, I struggle to keep my teammates updated, especially since I find it difficult to work around others and to show my work before it is finished. To work on this, I tried to give my teammates more frequent updates later in the project.

As a team, we did most of our communication through discord, as well as compiling a lot of our work onto Mirro so that we could all have an easy to access mutual workspace for when we weren’t working together in person in studio.