Thesis Idea Revised Again

After thinking over my previous idea, I've decided to redirect the focus of my senior thesis project. Previously, I had been focused on combining Marvelous Designer cloth, XGen hair, and a fully rigged character to create a series of short animations for that character. However, I had a hard time finding something within that scope that I wanted to focus on that would make my project 'different' from the rest.

Now, I want to focus on bringing a character or two to life in an interactive environment. By that, I mean that I want to create a 1st person game in which the NPC characters will interact with the player. Some things I have in mind are that they will react differently depending on the actions the player takes. Or if the player is looking at a certain quest item or location for a while, the NPC character will take notice and say something about that item or location. It would also be neat if the character could tag along with the player without trailing along directly behind like NPCs do in most games. Maybe they could wander about on their own within a certain radius around the player until said player entered a key location. I will still be designing the characters using MD cloth and XGen hair, but instead of going for rendered short animations, I want to bring the characters into Unreal and focus on finding different ways to make them interact with the player and the player's decisions.

Since I am currently also taking Real Time Design, I would like to bring my projects for both classes together to create the final product. Therefore, rather than going with my first plan of creating the characters from my favorite childhood books (A Single Shard and Kira-kira), I will be creating characters based off of characters in one of Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Goose Girl. There will be some deviations from the original story, but I will detail those in a later post.

As for the aesthetic, I want the characters to be designed in a simple, yet elegant manner. I have begun collecting images of styles that I like on a Pinterest board (https://www.pinterest.com/sydney8073/3d-design-thesis/). For the environment, I would like the player to start in a forest, then make their way to a castle. The color palette for the forest will consist of cool, dark colors like blue and green. The castle will also have a darker, run-down look to it, based off of some of the changes I plan to make to the original narrative.