Week 5, Year 2: Sentry Gun Look Development.

Last week, we were set a new project. Over the course of 3 weeks, we are to concept, model and texture a sentry gun. We will then take it into Unreal Engine and set it up to work as an interactive game asset.

Excited to get cracking, I was immediately overwhelmed by too many ideas. Towering 'War of the Worlds' style tripods and scuttling crawler turrets. With Pixar lamps, aw yeah!...No. 

A completely restriction free and directionless design brief can be dangerous.

So I took a step back and worked on something else for a while. Then, while on a late evening train, I started thinking about how an egg sentry would work. So I broke out a sketchbook.

When I next sat down at the computer, I created a bash kit out of some silhouettes from my initial mood board, with the intention of visualizing some alternative ideas.

But the egg idea stuck. This project seems to be more of an engine exercise than anything else and I want to use this as an opportunity to try new things. Animating the egg to 'spring open' on proximity is an exciting stretch goal and will allow for more in depth experimentation with Unreal Engine's new blueprint system.

While developing this idea, I also wanted to try and move away from my design comfort zone. Recently we have been lectured on the importance of designing for an audience outside of your demographic and I'm eager to put this into practice.

With this in mind, I decided to pursue an 'Angry Birds' style aesthetic, targeted towards children. I chose this because it came with a lot of extra design considerations such as practicality for reproduction as a toy, child safety, and readability on a small screen.

My final design decisions were very much influenced by these considerations. These added constraints were very useful as I was finding it difficult to make objective design choices without a clear goal in mind. 

I also approached several of my peers for feedback towards the finalization of my design. This proved to be very valuable, not so much in terms of picking a favourite, but in discovering what it was in particular about each design that people found appealing.

After narrowing it down as far as possible in the silhouette stages, I created some models in 3DS Max to sketch over.

My final concept is the result of many iterations and repeated simplification. My goal was to design a sentry egg that appealed to children and would be suitable for use in a game such as Angry Birds Transformers. I feel the final design successfully meets all those criteria and I'm looking forward to continuing with this project.

It should be an egg-citing few weeks. I'm not sorry.