Theo Clarke's MA Diary (NO LONGER UPDATED): Stone Circles & Druids

The 2nd Semester of my MA Games Design course is now well under-way, and while I have been keeping myself busy so far with learning to use the UE4 sequencer, dabbling with character modelling, and learning to use UE4 blueprints, its now time to get to work on my main body of work for the semester!

My next project will, of course, be another 3D environment. Over the last week or so, I have conducted extensive idea generation, gathered research materials and visual references and drawn up some sketches for my next environment.

Sticking with my historical themed environments, I wanted to do something involving stone circles and prehistoric megaliths from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. This is an area of history that I've never looked into before and I've never looked this far back in time - I soon realised that concrete facts are very hard to come by and a lot of the history of this period is based upon theories.

I began to look into the uses of stone circles with the aim of making a scene involving Celtic Druids, and discovered that stone circles and megaliths actually predate the arrival of Druids to the British Isles by several hundred years. Luckily there is evidence that Druids used them for rituals, even if they did not build them themselves. This also allows me to take a bit of artistic license, so I may add some sort of mythical/fantasy angle.

I have eventually decided to create a scene set in a forest in Iron Age Britain (approx. 800 BC to 43 BC), with the player taking on the role of a Celtic Druid who must gather a branch from 3 different symbolic trees from Celtic mythology - Oak, Ash and Hawthorn - and light a fire with them in the middle of a stone circle. This is an interpretation of a Celtic festival/ritual called Beltaine, which involved the lighting of fires on the Eve of May Day to mark the start of Summer and offer symbolic protection to cattle and crops. I'm also going to include interactable stones that offer historical information to make it an interactive learning experience.

This will be my first scene involving gameplay, and I hope to employ all of my skills including using UE4's sequencer and Blueprints, 3D modelling, texturing, environment art, audio and music composition. My plan is to spread this project over semesters 2 and 3 so I can really make it as good as it can be.

I have created a Pinterest board of reference images which can be seen by clicking here.

Here's some pictures of my rough sketches:

And a couple of books that I withdrew from the library.

I've also made a quick level block-out in Maya to help myself visualise the level scale and layout. The level will be a cross shape, with the stone circles located in the centre and a tree in each of the smaller offshoots. The longest offshoot is where the player starts.