First Thoughts:
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! There’s so much choice!
The Edge Chronicles
Before breaking up for summer I
discussed with my Tutor Nigel perhaps doing some environmental/ level design
based of one of my favourite childhood book series, The Edge Chronicles by Paul
Stewart & Chris Riddell. The Edge Chronicle books are some amazing books!
That really captured my imagination when I was little and it still does today.
The stories of The Edge Chronicles
take place in the fictional world of The Edge, a vast cliff with no apparent
bottom. The majority of books are grouped into trilogies, with each trilogy
focusing on one character. The series covers a 600 year period, divided into
three "Ages of flight". The power of flight is a major theme of the
books, with each age defined by the current technology used for air travel. The
series is notable for its detailed flora and fauna, along with the maps of various
locations in the edge. (From Wikipedia)
Upon the Edge there are several
specific environment types that I imagine would be fun to make concept art for
and to create within a game engine. The books are illustrated so there’s quite
a bit of reference, however if I were to pursue this I would definitely change
and experiment with the style. The fact that there are illustrations and it’s
already a world imagined up by somebody else would give me more time to
concentrate on the aesthetics of what I create, however I feel perhaps my peers
may be unimpressed and feel I couldn't create my own world from imagination. Of
course I could I have 101 bouncing around my brain most of the time, I would
like to discuss the benefits and negatives of using The Edge Chronicle World or
creating my own some more with my tutor when I get back.
Environments
The world itself is a cliff, half
of which is Forest, The Deep Woods and the Twilight Woods so there would be a
lot of fauna design involved. Capturing the mood of each of these environments
excites me, The Deep Woods is a Perilous forest full all manner of beast (even
some of the trees have teeth), your supposedly safe if you stay on the path.
The Twilight woods cause anyone who's in them to long to lose their mind, there’s
no way to tell the passage of time, most who enter don't leave, but it’s also
the only place to collect the most valuable substance on the edge Santphrax aka
Solid Lighting.
Then there is The Mire, a desert of
some kind of goo very hard to cross, this separates the Woods from Undertown
where most of the human/ humanoid inhabitants of The Edge reside, it’s a large
shanty like town, with the odd old traditional house or tavern here and there,
but it is constantly in the shadow of the floating City of Sanctaphrax which is
built upon a large floating rock that is anchored to the ground by a colossal
Chain (a cool concept to draw). On the City are more extravagant buildings most
of which are for academics who all study different types of weather.
Past Old Town is the end of the
edge where The Stone Gardens are situated, these are stones that grow out of
the ground and expand in size and grow in buoyancy until they fly off. These
same stones are the ones used in Skyships to keep them afloat as well as the
one Sanctaphrax is built upon.
Okay so lots of cool unique and
individual environments for me to potentially play with, with bucket loads of
story to give them depth.
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