What is a brief?

Unit 78

Generate Concept Art Ideas for Computer Game Graphics

What is a Brief, your own brief and market research?

A brief is a set of instructions given to a person about a job or task. For the topic of gaming, this may be very short and may let the person be creative, or the brief may be very in depth saying exactly what the client wants.

Someone's own brief may include an idea someone has been looking into, including some concept art, an idea for a game, scripts, textures, locations, mood-boards and more.

Market research can be done a few ways. One way is for someone to look into what games are successful at the moment, and maybe create one of those types of games. You can also look into what makes those games successful such as a game's progression system, mechanics or modes. 

Generating Ideas

The very start of generating ideas for a game starts with brainstorming. Start to think what game you think you would enjoy making, or a game that lots of people would enjoy. Then you would start to think of game assets such as character names, back-story and their goals. What the player's character will try to achieve and how they would go about doing so. Writing information or sketching characters can then progress your idea of the game until you have a basic idea, which can then be put into more detail.

Some people will find generating ideas much easier after finding inspiration from music, television, films or other games. This is known as research. Many people find inspiration and then collect lots of images and put them into a mood board.

Thumbnail sketchings can be very useful to a creator because it lets the creator show what they have created to others and ask for people's opinions to make the character more likable. 

This is very similar to concept drawings. Concept drawings are basically drawings of anything in a game or related to a game. This can be a character, enemy, weapon, location or object. Concepts can also show for example the progression of a character in someone's head.

Copyright Act
The current act is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The law gives the creators of a game or game assets in this case, the rights to control the ways in which their material may be used.

Libel

The terms 'libel' and 'slander' are commonly referred to as "defamation." It is deemed as a wrongful act to harm another's reputation by defaming them or their product/services. 

Females in Gaming

Females in a huge amount of video games are often portrayed negatively by exaggerating their sex appeal to please a mostly male audience. A very obvious character which has been exaggerated is 'Lara Croft' from the game series 'Tomb Raider'.  Most female gamers find this offensive and this must be taken into account when creating female characters.

Equality in Gaming

Lots of different races, genders and religions have been used in video games but not all games portray the topic positively. Some religious individuals may find the way a game promotes a religion offensive, which is another thing which must be taken into consideration.