New Background related Sketches + Stuff

This week I've just been doing some preperation preparation before I jump into the belly of this beast. To start off I did a similar sort of thing I did for the last background and sketched out a quick layout scheme;

Because this background is going to be a library I think it's appropriate to keep it simple seeing as most of the things in it are going to be blocky book cases and stuff. I like the simplicity because it saves time, that is also a great additional bonus.

The foreground would have some desk lamps there to create a more "Library" feel to it. I'm not sure if I want them to provide any light or not yet though. The "chandelier" will act as the main light source for the immediate background and it will be animated so that it flickers.

There's going to be a lot of bookshelves crossing over in the background and the scrolling effect is going to come from the numbers of different isles of bookshelves in the background.

Here's a concept I did for the animation of a haunted book. This is basically a key guide for me to use when I come around to making the books, because I didn't do this sort of thing for the bats in my last background I found the unfolding of their wings really annoying to animate.

Basically these are the three "Keyframes" for this animation, because I'm going to use sprite art to animate the book I really should know what I'm doing since bitmap sprites are really hard to animate as opposed to vector stuff in Flash, at least in my experience that is.

The first frame is the default state for the book, the second keyframe is when the book is up in the air after kicking itself up.
The third key is after it reaches the height of it's flight and begins to fall back down to the floor, it shuts itself and then falls back down into frame 1.

This is essentially the same thing as above, only this animation would have two frames, one where there is light and one where there isn't.

I want the light to light up the foreground while it's on and then flicker on and off to make the background a little more spooky.

And the other thing I did was make a quick mock-up of a bookshelf, I'll eventually be turning this into a proper bookshelf, sometime next week probably but this is just to help me figure out the scale of the background a bit better.

Obviously I'll make the pattern of the books different per bookshelf to avoid repetition but that's a given.

Learning Week	CGD Schedule	Project Timeline
	Induction
Week 1	Game Making Icebreaker
Week 2	Teaching Week
Week 3	Teaching Week
Week 4	Teaching Week
Week 5	Teaching Week
Week 6	Teaching Week Dissertation Proposal	Dissertation Proposal submission.
Week 7	Teaching Week	Research into Themes
Week 8	Teaching Week	Concept Art
Week 9	Teaching Week	Create a plan for the background composition & Asset List
Week 10	Teaching Week	Create Background Layers
Week 11	Teaching Week	Create Background Layers
Week 12	Teaching Week	Create Assets
	Christmas Vacation	Create Assets
		Animate Assets
Week 13	Teaching Week	Animate Assets
Week 14	Teaching Week Seminar Presentation	Seminar Presentation Research into Actionscript
Week 15	Teaching Week	Compile Assets and Background Layers and apply Actionscript
Week 16	Teaching Week	Polish 1st Background
Week 17	Teaching Week	1st Background Deliverable
Week 18	Teaching Week	Begin planning second background
Week 19	Teaching Week	Planning second background cont’d
Week 20	Teaching Week	Begin producing static assets
Week 21	Teaching Week	Create assets
Week 22	Teaching Week	Begin producing animated assets
	Easter Vacation	Create animated assets
		Create animated assets
		Begin production on background layers
Week 23	Teaching Week	Create background layers
Week 24	Teaching Week	Compile with actionscript
Week 25	Teaching Week	Final Touches
Week 26	Teaching Week	Final Touches
Week 27	Dissertation Submission

Re-re-revised Timeline