Introduction

Previous Skills:

Before the masters course I studied at Staffordshire Uni on a BSc Games Concept Design course and completed that with a 1st. During my time there I learnt about how to create concept art for games mostly but in the 3rd and 4th year I expanded my interests to learning how to create game ready assets through the standard pipeline and the ability to program in unreal 4 using blueprints.

During my final year at uni I decided to focus on mostly expanding my 3D knowledge to prepare for creating my own fully 3D games.

My Website:

http://www.paulscottdesign.com/

My FYP flythrough:

My 2016 portfolio video:

Interests:

During my spare time I am always either creating or playing games. A lot of my games are real time or turn based strategies on my pc but I also love playing fast paced games like Doom and team based games like heroes of the storm or Overwatch with friends. I do also own a few consoles for easier access to games that can be played couch when friends come around but I like to stick more to my pc mostly.

Recently I've been working on 2 game projects, one is still in the programming stages and the other I have gotten to a point where it is can be played easily with tight controls and a good amount of visual assets. The more complete game is called Duel Jumpers and currently viewable on my portfolio under my game projects tab.  I also have a few other projects that were used to learn how to go about programming and developing my own games but I decided to move past these prototypes once I had a better understanding of the limits of what I can create. In my projects I strive to have everything created by myself so I have learnt everything required to create games as a solo developer.

Here is the current Duel Jumpers trailer: 

Project Idea:

My initial idea is to create a 3D sidescroller game in Unreal 4 which uses aspects of 3D which I would like to expand my knowledge on (Mostly hard surface and environment). The current idea revolves around a heavy use of vehicles and fun looking environments. A similar game to it would be Heavy Weapon but I feel that game lacks a lot of character in how it looks and feels and I want to expand on the features and ideas present in that type of game.

If it all goes well I want to split the gameplay into 2 different modes (vehicle and character modes) and each mode will play a little differently to give the player some variety. The vehicle one will be as described above, but the character mode will give off a metal slug vibe as I love those games and would like to explore how to create something similar.

Initial Research Ideas:

Design:

One of the 1st things I plan to look into is how to give the movement of the players vehicle a nice amount of character but still be functional. Generally I feel games from this genre have very static or boring animations for vehicles and I think experimenting with the character of the players movement could improve how it looks and feels substantially.

After getting a good feel for the characters I will then look at how to create fun level design using ideas from classic games and real life situations. For example looking at how the design of supermarkets lead people around and have all the snack foods near the end to reward impulse buyers after a long shop. Getting a nice pace for the games rewards will be useful for keeping players wanting to continue playing the game.

For the final design aspect at the moment, I want to look at why people enjoy customisation in games and what a good way of approaching this would be. I believe this will be useful for getting the players connected to the characters on a more personal level because they chose what they look like.

Art:

For art I'll mainly be looking at how to create assets that are full of character and are easily distinguishable from each other. This is a key part of the art in my opinion because a good character design can add a lot to the feel of the game and helps keep players interested in seeing what other cool designs the game has to offer. Making the characters easily distinguishable from each other at a glance will be useful for improving how quickly players can process and react to what they do.

Misc:

A look at how to create a UI that is implemented into the environment is something I think would be interesting. I think it could really improve the immersion in the world of a game when a lot of the UI is either visual changes or blending to the world itself.