Back to drawing

In my original idea my main char was some ex military type figure, i knew this sort of character is used in nearly all games these days and its fairly common but i thought i could work with it.

I had written a 3-4 page backstory from the perspective of the main character leading up to the events before the actual game takes place as the idea would be you would find a diary or some sort which would be used to replay the events in the game back in the past. After much thinking i couldnt decide on how exactly to show this so i scrapped the whole idea and changed the main character which now makes the back story totally irrelevant but i can still submit it in the document i suppose.

Apart from this ive done yet more overhead concept designs for the map layout again i dont think im particularly happy with any of them and im still not sure how much ill be able to even create using Unreal 3 which is why im trying to develop my drawing skills more so i can show what i was aiming for in concept art at least.

An example of one of my overhead images, least they look much better online now i have a scanner.

Loading screen? anddd a logo for the team you work for

Was messing around with filters and some effects and came up with a simple screen i may use for a loading screen before your in the world, may make a variety of these depending on which mission your about to begin but it didnt take me long and i think it fits the game quite well:

Yeah widescreen, going to need some cropping there i think but we shall see when im that far in.

Something that had been bugging me for a while was a name for the group thats set up who aims to reconnect all the communcation devices, i had a big gap in my story as i didnt have a name logo or anything so i had a brain storm and came up with the word Mercury, didnt seem right on its own so it became Mercury Corporation

With a name and an idea i cracked open photoshop and made a logo for this, it could be on your armor, at your base etc, just something to associate with them. What came to mind with the term Mercury was either the planet the greek god Hermes (refered to as Mercury by the Romans) or the element, so i tried to incorporate all 3 things, a planet some wings and a liquid metal and actually came up with something fairly quickly, after a few hours editing and tidying it up we reached this:

I liked the idea of using the Earth as a background image as this is ideally what the corporation want back to normal as the Earth in its current state would be nothing like this.

Map screen

Every game like this needs a map screen, somewhere to show info about your next mission or where your headed next, already roughly knew what i wanted for this so i went ahead and made:

Not sure if ill keep the title of the game there yet, nor do i know how this will be used in the game, zoomed in and being able to move around or scaled down to view it all at once, not entirely sure but as for the actual look of it im very happy and its exactly what i was aiming for.

Some early concepts in PS

Well i toyed with the idea of making Tephra wrote in volcanic rock or carved into a volcano itself in lava, but it didnt really come out too well due to my poor photoshop skills as we can see!

So i went back to the drawing board and decided to find some stock photos of skys and built up towns and blend them all together to give a more realistic view and i came out with this:

Looking much better in my opinion, this is definetly staying however i may add some line of text to it or put something else in the sky im not sure yet but this is a potential beta of the title screen!