So far our enemy design is looking okay first we were given a short brief and from that brief we made a draft no problem then Ryan came back and he said well you know the design got a lot of new updates so we dug in we broke down the brief and what we were left with was a clear pile of requirements but that's not a second draft so how do we turn this list into a drawing welcome to the ConceptArt Playbook I've teamed up with the game designer to create a series of 30 ConceptArt challenges to tackle today's challenge is to revise and especially if you're new to ConceptArt or maybe you've never worked on a team before it's really hard to know the difference between making changes and actually improving something and the danger I think is when we get into the question of shapes these silhouette paintings here by Neil Beleavens are really nicely drawn but when I look at them out of context like you're looking at them right now there's really no way for us to determine which one is best we can zoom in here and that you know there's all sorts of fun details and maybe you find yourself drawn to this one number seven and maybe I say you know actually I'm really digging number five that is a very subjective judgment call but for your revisions let's focus on something that's much more concrete the text here's the list we created in the last homework and in my experience game designers they're sort of the fun experts and then we have the writers well they're the narrative experts but our job as artists is to join these two ideas by making visuals the visuals become the way we deliver gameplay and narrative wrapped up together so even though Ryan's design includes a fair number of visual requirements these blue ones here in the middle I'm actually going to think of those as more recommendations than requirements I'll keep them in mind the high-priority items here are the narrative and the gameplay which leaves our task to synthesize these bullet points and to kind of a clear simple essence a great first step is to shorten our list by eliminating what we could just call freebies because some of these bullet points are already associated with spiders so our design doesn't really need to do any extra work spiders climb walls everybody knows that same goes for biting same for leaping that just happens on its own we're designing a spider it's gonna do those things I'd go so far as to say creating sticky traps also not really a problem but having a ranged laser attack having sensor vulnerable eyes those don't happen automatically okay let's go to the next column here I think since we're working with a robot spider it is by default high-tech it's a spider so it's probably gonna be lightweight that makes it generally vulnerable and I think just it being a spider that meets all these criteria we just listed just sort of makes it offensively oriented to begin with now having eight piston legs that is a little tricky I can tell you from experience that if you design a creature in a video game that has tons of tiny little legs they're tough to animate they have a ton of polygons and they might end up just being so tiny on screen that all that extra work isn't even worth it so even though a real world spider obviously has eight legs I'm gonna leave the specifics here as a low priority so I'm gonna say this is not automatic now in the narrative column I don't think either of these things are automatically associated with a spider future or some sort of oppressive government to me there's really no link there so what we've done is we've really shortened this list because as soon as I draw any spider we can already assume that most of these things will be accounted for and we are left with essentially puzzle pieces what we need to do next is to think of something else that people understand is associated with these functions and there's actually a really fun board game that exercises these exact muscles if you've never played it before code names presents you with a grid of unrelated nouns and your job while playing this game is to link them conceptually but you can't really communicate with your partner you're only allowed to say a single word but what you have to do with that one word is to link these nouns that are on the play field so in this setup let's just pretend my goal was to link the words Hollywood and spy those two words are pretty unrelated now think about that for a second what could you tell a partner with one word that would link those two ideas but what I might say is 007 because when I say 007 they know I'm talking about James Bond and again they're not looking at this all they see are all these nouns and I say the word 007 and they look around and they think okay which of these are related 007 they'd say oh okay Hollywood I get that that's probably one of those words and spy so what I've done with one word is I have linked two unrelated concepts if I wanted to link mammoth and horn I might say tusk if I wanted to link worm and carrot they don't seem obviously related but I could say underground and when we look at the rest of all these things most of them could not be considered underground but worms live underground and carrots grow underground and that's what I'm doing here the remaining concepts on this list are not obvious fits for a robot spider but there's a chance that I can think of something or multiple things that relate them to one another and so I'll jump forward here but what I came up with is the security camera because we know that security cameras are sensors they identify people sometimes we associate lasers with security systems and then when it comes to oppressive governments well they make heavy use of surveillance and so the last remaining things here are these these visual ideas that were sort of a keep in mind and honestly that means that I'm gonna kind of take these off the table for a minute but the important thing is that we have a bunch of the ideas checked off by just being a spider and then the remaining hard to fit ideas were linked to by being like a security camera so here I have the kind of important narrative idea the important gameplay ideas all relate to each other at this point I am satisfied we have a robot spider that is like a security camera I'm relying on cultural associations to explain the design for itself and so in the final result here what I've actually done is I've combined the laser and the eye those were both important gameplay elements but I was thinking about a spider it's so far away it's really small I don't think adding an extra laser is gonna really help anything and so since I was looking at this reference of security camera I'm thinking about laser security systems so that won't why not just roll them into one so here we have a spider that reads enough like a spider for us to understand that would climb on walls and climb in the ceiling doesn't really need eight legs to do that and I've totally changed the proportions around so we're previously my last spider had a big but this spider has a big head because what I really wanted to stand out visually was the thing that is gonna need a little explaining it's a spider you get that it's a spider that's fine the part that's a little weird is that it is also security camera that shoots lasers so on screen I wanted to make that as big as possible and have a chance at communicating what it needs to if I had kept this realistic spider proportions it would still work but by making this bigger it's just a little more obvious so your homework is to continue with your brute enemy design take those bullet points you came up with in the last challenge figure out which ones are gonna be a natural fit and then you're gonna be left with some that are not a natural fit that's where you get to be a designer think about some way to signal to the audience with a visual association how to have it speak for itself and then make a sketch now this is not easy work so don't worry if it doesn't flow right away we are gonna learn how to do this better with each challenge so cut yourself from slack have fun and I'll see you in the next lesson