Final Thoughts, Description

When planning this laketown I have a ton of notes all over my sketchbooks.
It's a lot of random words and sentences I want to describe my laketown.
Instead of creating like a document I thought I'll just post it here.

Squeaky and creepy. Creepy noises. Creepy Shadows.

Old fashioned. Abandoned.

Some doors will be open to explore the spaces. 

Some doors and bridges will be closed and broken to limit the player.

 Near the beach there could be a smoky swamp, fade into waters.

The player will see bubbles and debris floating about in the water and along the swamp to show the destruction and rushed leave. 

Burning out fireplaces, candles and oil lamps.

FOG.

Boats, some in the distance some still tied up to show neglect. 

Crooked houses. 

Built randomly, no restrictions in place. 

Wooden.

Only candle light and oil lamps. 

Semi realistic.

Make it scary.

Bridges, and raised areas so boats could maneuver freely between the buildings. 

 Must look like it was once alive, busy. 

Have a marketplace.

Have little things tell a story.

Altars. 

Blood stains. 

Bodyparts? laying around. Or at least shoes or some clothing that could fall off easily. 

Stains on houses etc left by the monster.

Maybe a lot of footsteps very visible going off into the island, to show a lot of people left at once through that route. Could have marks of being dragged visible in the distance as well.
Not very advanced.
Clothing style, very basic, warm, specific for the trade. Not for dressing up.
Architecture style, it will be very chaotic, no style at all really buildings created just for people's needs.
What time of year and day, it will affect the position of the sun. I will see what works best once I have everything in place.

Posters to communicate the danger? Information about when the sacrifices would be made.
Will be able to look into some houses through their windows and see some things.
Make it feel like the people were still there recently.
The houses on the outskirts of the Laketown will have barricaded windows to show that people feared something from the outside.
Have flowers and things left in front of some houses to show people were dying one by one.
Signs of being dragged away, fingernails on wood and blood marks... these kinds of things.
The player will be the the only survivor and maybe have flashbacks.
Maybe have narration to help tell and understand the story. Just like Tomb Raider you'd hear the players voice when he notices things around the environment.
Have a shaky camera at some points.
Paths will be different sizes and some will feel very claustrophobic between the buildings.
A fence, spikes and all that around the laketown, again to show that they tried to protect themselves from something on the outside.
Signs to show for people not to be outside and close the shutters when it gets dark, to show there was some danger out there.
Candles being very small, looking like theyve been burning for a while now.
Have weird things on window cells trinkets and candles and dreamcatchers to scare the monster away kinda thing.

I like the idea of rugs on the walls near the beds. Looks very. awful, but fits in i think :')

The aim of the game will be for the player to find out what happened, through the clues I leave around the environment. The player will need to explore the environment and that will push him to do so.
The end would be at the tip of a long pier with an altar at the end, used for making the sacrifices for the monster. Maybe I'd have an animation going off at the end killing the player too...

To do list!

My memory fails me sometimes :') 

So I can have awesome ideas and not remember it in two days so I thought this time I will have to write down everything I want to model etc. so I can model it and tick it off as I go along. 

This way I can also keep everything organised and not waste time modeling it twice if I forget that I've already done it. 

So I created two lists. One is of the buildings I need to do, and the other is with the little things I need to model to fill the houses up with. 

Test - Watch Tower

Here's just another test I've done. 

It's a watch tower, I thought I will have these standing on the edge of the lake town. To make the player think about why they could be watching the lake, obviously because that's where the danger is coming from.

I have taken inspiration from the watchtowers I've seen when I was a child. When walking around the woods I used to come across the hunting watch towers. They were very basic ones to fit two or three people. Built between four trees or standing on four "legs" with a little shelter but mostly open so you can see the prey. I remember climbing some of them with my friends and I felt so scared, because they were very wobbly and felt like they'd just collapse. 

The basic structure made me think that it'll be a good fit for the laketown. So I went ahead with the idea.

The roof, the roof, the roof is... Wait what?

I spent quite a bit of time on figuring all the different roofs I want.

But what will make it is a good texture.

I spent around 2-3 hours on this to make it perfect, the way I want it.

I started with cutting up squares of the previously photographed and collected wood textures. 

I then shaped them into roof tiles, one by one. And afterwards created a shadow for each one, to make it look a little more 3D.

Once I had a variety of different roof tiles I started laying them out one by one to create the whole roof. I wanted it to look very imperfect that's why I've done it one by one and to be honest it was worth it. In the end I really like the outcome and will definitely use it well. I have changed the hue and saturation of it in a few different ways and put them next to each other on the test huts I made to see how it'll look and it looks great. Means that I can re-use it a few times ^^

Tests - Huts

I've started doing little tests with the huts, that was about halfway through the research and they weren't based on anything in particular yet. I just wanted to see if any of them work.

The initial thought is that the second and fifth house look a bit too oriental. So scrap those.

I also did this little test to see how many things I can make and simply duplicate, resize and move to make different looking houses, all to save time. Working efficiently will be the main part on this project. I managed to produce a lot of different houses in a small amount of time.It means that I can create a little more variety of houses and the environment will be less boring and repetitive.

Also this test is a reason why I started looking at the structures of the wooden houses. Because they just don't look right. My tutor said that the scale is way off and he was right.
So it's something i need to work on.

Fishing Gear

It being a lake town.
There will obviously be a lot of fishing going on.
So I had a look at all sorts of fishing gear, it's something I'm very familiar with because it's my dad's huge hobby so it wasn't much about finding out how to do it but collecting the imagery for reference, this was the easy part for me ^^

Obviously I had to keep in mind that it would be a very basic kit. So no technology, just a stick and a string with a hook at the end of it really :')

Floor Plans

I felt like I need to figure out the layout of things before I start doing anything. 

The initial drawings I did were a little too, controlled, after a short discussion with my tutor he did make me think that a community like that must be a little more organic and less organized. 

The way the buildings were built and the roads were placed must be a little more random.

So since then I've been trying to do things that way, a little less thought through. 

To make thingsa little easier, and speed up the process a little. 

I looked through the maps of cities to find some good looking layouts.

I traced a few of the good ones in photoshop and stuck them together. 

From here on I just need to figure out how to make it into a maze ^^

When I was tracing the maps there were roundabouts here and there.
It gave me an idea, I kept them because I thought it'd add to the story if I had little shrines around the space. It doesn't have to be sculptures or anything huge but little things, just to make you think.

I liked the idea of having one "main road" that would be damaged which would force the player to find a way around.

I looked at a lot of towns and cities big and small. I was hoping that there will be something useful there. But I could not be more wrong. The structure of the roads and buildings is made like by the ruler. Everything is so straight at 90 degrees, and well laid out. Waste of time :') So I  started travelling very randomly around the map and picked bits and pieces.

In the end I've had a few traced layouts I liked.

I then began combining bits and pieces together to create my floor plan.

Now I just needed to figure out what buildings should go where.

I drew the houses square and in line but in the end i will have them standing randomly. Here I just mainly wanted to figure out the bridge layout.
The shaded spaces are the two marketplaces I wanted to have where most of the shops would be placed.

Colour palette

Colour and light is very important in any environment so I spent some time on figuring out a colour palette for it.

 I collected imagery I liked and pulled the specific colours out of them.

A bit of greens because aged wood seems to have quite a bit of it on there. Brown and blue because of the wood and water it'll be on. It should all be really dark and scary with just a few highlights, thats why there is so little of bright colours.

I want to really set the mood with the colours I use and the fog and particles that's why this part of the process is very important for me.
I want the colours to be very desaturated anyway to make it that little bit darker.

Research - Architecture In Wood

There were a few books in the library about the architecture in wood but most of them were about modern architecture which is of no use to me. 

I found the book by Will Pryce which is SO SO USEFUL.
It's mainly photographs of very interesting buildings from around the world, old and new.

I love the detail and the structure on some of them so it will definitely pop up somewhere in my work.

When looking at the different buildings I tried not to look at the overall look because more often than not you can tell where abouts from the world the huts are. I looked into the detail and tried to pick out the little things I found useful and photographed them for a reference.

I loved the way that some structures were bound. Some were tied together, some were tactically cut in places and placed in ways to support each other.

Another useful thing that popped up were the interiors which are always great to keep for a future reference.

In some of them I liked the unusual shapes and clever use of supports.

I also found some useful drawings with explained support for the roofs etc. which is something ive been looking into earlier. I think if I use proper supports and layouts it will make the houses more believable.

Tokarnia, Poland

I remember visiting a museum with my parents when I was little. 

It's a really amazing place, there is this village back from years and years ago that they've just preserved so you walk around these little houses and mills and things looking at how people used to live back in the day. 

It's quite amazing because the tools and all the furnishings are there and you just wonder, how did they manage I wouldn't be able to live here. It's weird how the standards change over the years. 

It's very useful when creating a similar space so I don't over complicate things. 

Because lets face it, people didn't have much years and years ago. They only had what they needed. A bed, a table, a bucket, some chairs etc :') It has to be kept very simple.

Another thing is that you realize how important religion was in peoples lives. There are little religious things all over the place. It's like people feared something constantly so they needed to protect themselves, there are either religious paintings, or sculptures or crosses on the wall. Also outside you see the same things every so often. And this is definitely something I want something around my lake town because that's exactly what I want my player to feel when they're walking around my environment.

Venice

The immediate thought when thinking of what could inspire me, where I could start my research was Venice.
Keep in mind that my lake town would be a lot less advanced less elegant and organized but similar in ways.
Both would have a ton of bridges. And treating canals as roads and, boats going through the canals and town and under the bridges and squeezing through the tight spaces.
I want my lake town to feel really claustrophobic in some places. Spaces between the houses and things.

When I was flicking through the different images I realized that I have to start thinking a little differently, because I saw an image of a washing line with clothes drying on it. And it wasn't like we'd see it stretched across the garden, they have no gardens, it was stretched across the house. It's those little things that make it feel believable and inhabited by everyday working people. It's the clever problem solving I have to keep an eye out for.

Dijon

LAst year, I went on a road trip around Europe, one of my many stops was a town in France called Dijon.
It was a lovely little place with amazing architecture, there was old and new all very detailed, a place very worth visiting!

What I found useful is looking at the crooked wooden houses. They all seemed to be built really tightly, because they're squeezed next to each other.
They are all also very crooked. Uneven doors, and windows, nothing seems to be straight or even on them.
Overall I like the shape of them too ^^ they seem a bit random and that's what i need in my Lake town.

Norway

I looked at architecture in Norway but it wasn't so simple.

All their buildings look so modern. Amazing, but not very useful for this project.

I had to be specific and search for old wooden huts. 

What I've found is mostly photographs of old falling apart little huts in the middle of nowhere, which was perfect as I want mine to be very imperfect. 

What I liked about them is their simple structure. Some were obviously more complicated but most that I looked at were very simple. And I think I want a few houses that will look like that. So they look like they're there just for a purpose of living in them, not decorative etc. But beautiful in their own way ^^

Lake-Land, Finland.

Beautiful, beautiful place!

But I needed to concentrate on looking at the wooden huts and not at the nature and the views so.

I thought it would be more of a, suspended houses style, because of its name but it turned out that it isn't. They're all firmly standing on the ground. 

Still a useful reference I suppose, they're still really nice wooden houses.

The Hobbit - Lake town

The first obvious step into the reearch was looking into The Hobbit's Lake Town. 

I found this article/documentary which scared me a little, but at the same time was very helpful...

http://www.itsartmag.com/features/the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-making-laketown/

For the purpose of making their Lake Town they created the following:

50 buildings

8 bridges

6 towers

All buildings etc were dressed and scaled differently to have a big variety

they covered 200 000 squared meters of ground

There were 1500 buildings visible at a time in some of the shots

2 000 000 planks of wood

150 000 000 roof tiles

1749 walkways

When i listened to that i was a little scared that mine wont be anywhere near as complicated and therefore not really good. But then i remembered that I'm not making it as big and most of the pathways will be broken so you wont be able to explore everything so duplicates will be less obvious. I CAN DO IT!

Apart from that I looked at the style and things. 

I like their crooked houses that look like they're about to fall apart really. 

They're all for living purposes they're not very decorative. 

I like the raw untreated wood. 

What I am planning on doing is exactly what they did about the numbers of buildings and things they needed to make it feel alive. I will be duplicating mixing and matching things in order to work as efficiently as I can and creating the best result.