Planning and Concepting

     Planning and concepting is an important aspect of creating and finishing a final piece. It helps to develop an idea into something you can work with.

     To be a successful artist you need to first understand how to plan, this goes from planning what techniques to time and to spacing on a page. Everything needs to be efficiently planned otherwise time can be wasted, and time is very important in the gaming industry, as deadlines are a key part to a successful game. Planning is the first stage of developing anything. Even if you do not write anything down, you mentally create a “to-do” list and plan out how to tackle the problem in your mind. Plans will change as you begin working on them as you realise better ways of tackling issues. This is a natural process of planning.

     Planning is incredibly useful when it comes to tackling a brief or problem in a brief, timescales and lists are an efficient way of keeping track of the tasks you have to complete.

     Concepting is where you start putting the plan in motion, you have a general idea of how to conclude a task and you begin by sketching ideas, bouncing back and forth from one idea to the next to get a good section of different images. You find what works with an image and develop it further, sorting out any issues or design flaws or drawing failures. Concepting includes a lot of rough sketches and experimenting with styles and thoughts. Thumbnails are a great and efficient way of portraying a general idea in a small amount of time, these generally accumulate and evolve into a singular idea for a final piece to handle the brief. So from beginning with loads of random inspired thumbnails you can defer a better idea and develop it further.

     Concepting and planning can come in many forms, moodboards, spider diagrams, words, sentences, doodles, diagrams, thumbnails, they are all produced to create quick ideas and begin the means to an end. Before this stage, nothing has really been created or thought about. This is where you can begin the motion to getting a final piece.

     Without proper planning and concepting a project can quickly become mis-directed and lost within the see of imagination and thoughts. It is a lot easier for a human to understand a way of getting to a set goal if the plan is clearly in front of them, it then produces a design that flows well and reaches the end target, which is the main reason for a brief to be set. It is a key part for a gaming organisation to have staff members that are proficient and resourceful when it comes to the planning stage of the development cycle.

    When attacking a brief i will have to keep these two important steps in mind if I want to create a high-quality outcome for the project and the brief.