Essay process（Wednesday）


Ask the designer questions


First designer: Game environment designer Saija Wintersun

I ask：

Hello, I am a postgraduate student studying MA Games Design at the University of Central Lancashire, and my research focus is environment design. My lecturer Jim Thompson recommended you to me. I am very interested in your work such as Sniper Elite 4, and I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few questions about your work and process?

First question: I saw a scene in Sniper Elite 4 that combines nature and architecture very well. Would you be able to tell me how you draw inspiration for the scene from the real world?


Saija Wintersun answer：20:32

Hello! I'm happy to help! It's been something like 8 years since sniper 4, so l don't remember many details from it.

The level I worked on was an Italian fishing village, so there was a lot of existing reference. Mainly I used Google maps to look around the places and found the little details that make the place special. When I worked on the DLCs, the locations were much more imaginative and not so limited to real life. The easy tricks are usually: exaggerate the scale whenever you can, add detail in all levels: large (structures, landscapes) medium (player-sized dressing) and small (details like decals and visual storytelling) and pick a few camera angles to look at when you work.Ideally those are the same angles the player will look at the environment.

I hope this helps!


I ask again：

Thank you for your reply! This is a great help to me! I have one last question. How do you balance realistic scenes and design scenes? Sniper Elite 4, for example, is set on the beautiful Mediterranean coast of Italy. Italy strikes me as romantic, but as far as I know the game is set during World War Il, so is the overall style more apocalyptic or medieval? Retro or innovative? How do you judge this?


Saija Wintersun answer：

Our sniper games are always meant to be historically accurate so there's no balancing required. It's not apocalyptic or medieval. A location can still look romantic even in WW2, as the architecture hasn't really changed.


I answer：

Ok, thanks again for your reply! I have learned a lot from it. I will continue to think about it.



Second designer: 2D Artist Generalist: Lara Frank


I ask：

Hello, I am a postgraduate majoring in game design from the University of Central Lancashire, and my research focus is game scene design. I have seen your works on the Internet, and I am very interested in your painting style, and I find that you are good at landscape concept painting. It happens that my design is the modeling of the natural environment of the game, and I am currently drawing 2D concept painting, so I have a few questions to ask. I hope that after you see the information, you can take a little time from your busy schedule to answer me, I will be grateful.


First question: 

I see that when you design the background of A mobile game novel based on the original Netflix Series "Shadow and Bone", you usually draw multiple angles of a building, and I would like to ask you, during the process of drawing the background building, Do you usually draw from the whole to the parts or do you think about the various angles first and then integrate the external structure?


Second question: 

Many of your concept paintings are very impactful, such as the game "Project Tanna-Corrupted Light" there are two paintings of mountains; In the Music Video of 2020: Meredi Above, there is a painting of a building collapsing and a light breaking through it. Have you drawn inspiration from the scene that exists in reality?


After Lara Frank answers, I'll ask: 

How do you stay creative? What do you do when you hit a bottleneck?



Third designer: White Paper Games - Oliver John Farrell

I ask：

Hello, I am a postgraduate majoring in game design from the University of Central Lancashire, and my research focus is game scene design. I have seen your works on the Internet and have some questions I would like to ask. I hope you can spare a little time from your busy schedule to answer them for me after reading the information. I would appreciate it very much.


First question: 

First of all, I have observed that the texture materials of many materials in the game "Ether" designed by you during your master's career are created by yourself. In my design, some furniture also needs to add textures. May I ask if you will refer to the materials in the real world when making textures? In project design, how do you usually work with art, modeling, and programming teams to ensure that the texture of the material is consistent with the overall style?



Second question: 

How do you usually balance artistic expression with technical limitations when designing material textures? Now that AI technology is becoming more and more widely used in game development, and AI painting tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are also being used for texture production, how do you think we can better combine AI technology with traditional handcrafting?

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