P2: Be able to generate concept ideas for computer games.

Generate concept ideas for computer games.

What is a brief?

• Client Brief - A client brief is essentially a 'To Do' list given by an employer, it would have and a initial objective and things they want to be implemented into the piece of work. For example they may ask for you to create a character, the character must be male, scary looking and wear something to cover his face. Sometimes a client may ask for several pieces of concept art so they have a choice of several different styles.

• Own Brief -  An own brief is a creators personal objective, it could be a pre set task or an idea that they continue to alter and work on. 

• Market Research - Market Research is looking into what gamer's want from upcoming games or looking at their attitudes towards current games, this is important to a development cycle as it can help show what other developers did right and wrong.

Ideas Generation

To create a good product the first thing any creator needs is an idea of what they're going to create, there are several ways to generate ideas, some of these are:

• Brainstorming - A creator could jot down several ideas and elaborate on them until finally choosing the best one.

• Mood Boards - A creator could gather images and materials and essentially make a collage of items that could spark new ideas.

• Thumbnail Sketching - These are quick drawings of ideas the creator has, they're usually not extremely detailed. These ideas could either then be completely scrapped or altered and used.

• Concept Art - Concept Art can be created from thumbnail sketching or from a brief. Pieces of concept art will be later changed slightly to fit the original idea, concept art does not always make it into the final product although it's part of the development process.

Legal and Ethical Considerations 

This is an extremely important part of creating a game as it could potentially ruin the progress a developer has made. If a game is too controversial, the game could receive an adult only rating, which would cause the developer to lose a significant amount of sales. The games could even be banned completely.

Some of the most important ones are: 

• Copyright - Copyright is a law that was created that grants the creator of a piece of work exclusive rights for its use or distribution, in other words if someone else uses a copyrighted piece of work without the original creators consent, it's theft and they could be sued for a lot of money.

• Libel - Libel is slander within video games, it could be ridiculing a rival company directly or attempting to attack their business. Some companies will implement very light slander into their games but nothing too offensive.

• Females in video games - Through out video game history when a women has been placed into a video game they tended to be slightly sexualised which is straight away too much, some people accuse the Tomb Raider series of giving the protagonist Lara Croft larger breasts to get more sales, due to this the developers actually altered the character over the years. Women being sexualised is a lot rarer today rather than a decade ago. 

• Ethnicity and Diversity - Religion and race isn't a problem in video games, many games that include character creation offer the player to choose the race of a character but nothing offensive has occurred. 

Although religion is touched upon in certain games such as Assassins Creed, not many games choose to implement religion in to games, this is probably because if a developer was to do so they would be walking a very fine line as it could potentially be an extremely controversial subject.

• Intellectual Property - This is a risky subject as it could go either way for a creator. If a creator was to design some concept art for a character and it was to 'Fall into the wrong hands' and had been stolen and used elsewhere, the creator could still sue. To do this they must have proper evidence of when they created it. For example they could hire lawyers to help them with the case or when the idea is first thought of and designed, the creator could actually make a copy, and mail it to themselves, this would put the date, address and a stamp to make it official proof of the idea of being theirs.