This week marks the last four weeks of my Final Major Project and let me tell you it's a bit scary to be honest. Three years have really flown by.
Anyway this week has been set aside to work on the art book for this project. This art book is the main part of our project as it's what we are marked on.
We have named this book 'The Folklore Journey' as it's very simple and explanatory yet not over complicated and confusing. This book follows the story of Kiyoko and her travels.
Kiyoko is the main character which Georgia has designed. We have designed the characters and creatures in this book as if they were part of a game which gives these characters more context.
In the game Kiyoko is a young girl which travels through Edo era Japan at the start of the game, here she meets and comes across a number of characters and creatures some of which she may have to help and others which she may have to fight. All of these creatures are listed in her bestiary.
The next level of the game Kiyoko travels to Alaska and meets a tribe of Inupiat people. The creatures become more dangerous in this level and there more puzzles.
The last section of the game Kiyoko travels to the exotic land of Ancient Greece where she comes across some of the most monstrous creatures in the game. In each section of the game Kiyoko has a companion which can help her with puzzles and progressing through that level of the game.
We designed a load of pickups and the 'safe zones' in the levels to make sure the characters make sense and are in contest.
When we began making getting the book started we initially imported all the images from each folklore and got them set up in a layout which we thought was most professional and displayed our work the best. After all the images were laid out appropriately we started adding the text. We decided to keep the test fairly simple and to keep it to a minimum as we didn't want the writing to take over. We wanted our art to be the main focus of the book and the writing containing some simple information on the characters and a description of our process for each.
Below are some screenshots of the first few pages of the book. We were surprised how the book looked a lot more professional and finished when we added text and by the time we had it finished we were both very pleased with the final result.
As we are now waiting for the book to be printed we plan to go back to a lot of our designs and improve certain aspects of it. I plan on using the last three weeks of our final major project to go through the feedback I have received from my mentor Will Coyner and take his advice when improving my designs.
Next week I'll be posting some of the feedback I have received and the improvements I've made to the designs.