Week 8, Gotland Game Conference & Swedish Game Awards

The last week of BGP wasn’t as stressful as I thought it would be. I had already finished all of the props and textures needed for the levels, main character and so on. The one thing I had left was the spaceship for the intro!

The Intro

Like I mentioned in a previous post, we were planning on having an in-game cutscene at the beginning of the game. It would show the ship cruising over Earth, dropping one of the boxes it’s carrying, and unknowingly continuing on its journey. The screen would then fade to the main menu, where the character is lying on the ground next to his box, thus expalining how he got there in the first place.

But when were we going to make it? It was the last week! I asked my coworkers and they said we had cut it for time, and that no one really knew how to create an in-game cutscene in the first place. Everyone seemed to know we cut it except for me, so I was a little annoyed to find that all my modeling and UV mapping that super cool spaceship had been for nothing.
But, instead of just sitting around, I began thinking of alternatives. I remembered the intro sequences in Guild Wars 2, and how they’re mostly just 2D pictures moving on top of each other:

Since I had all the models ready (the ship just needed a texture first), what if I created something similar out of rendered images of my 3D models? Since I had nothing else to do at this point, I decided to sit down and learn Adobe After Effects from scratch, hoping to learn enough to create something decent-looking. I started up a Digital Tutors (thank you school!) video course, put the video on one screen and the After Effects window on the other, and just spent a whole day watching that.

I also created a simple texture for the ship. It’s very basic and boring, but I didn’t want to spend too much time on it. (Also, I messed up and forgot the magnet on the crane, but it didn’t show up on the video anyway):

Within two days I had learned enough to create the video below. At first I was looking into a method of placing all the images in 3D space and moving a camera through them, but I couldn’t quite grasp it, so I just layered images on top of each other and moved them at different speeds, going entirely on feel. People really liked the end result, so we ended up using it in the game and at GGC:

The hardest part to animate was when the ship shifted and the box slid down the open door. It took a lot of iteration to make the movement look natural, while wrestling with keyframes and other things. I’m very happy with the end result though!

Other things

Aside from the intro movie, I did some small fixes and iterations. For example, I improved the “checkpoint bar” that shows how “boosted up” you are at the checkpoint. To the left you can see the old beta version, and to the right is my new version:

The old version was shown to the right of the player, starts from the bottom and goes up. My version is centered near the bottom of the screen, starts from the middle and scales to the sides. When it’s 100% filled, it starts glowing, increasing the feedback to the player. Using the checkpoint feels way cooler now!

I also cleaned up some terrain textures and made them tile better (a task I had been putting off for weeks…) and that was about it for Week 8.

Gotland Game Conference 2014

Gotland Game Conference was a huge success for us! We displayed our game on three computers with TV monitors connected, and we got lots of great feedback from visitors and jurors alike. We saw a lot of players coming back for more, which feels great!
I had the pleasure of having a self-esteem-boosting conversation with Jason Scott, one of the jury members, who had some great feedback but also invaluable advice on how to proceed with the game after GGC. People also kept complimenting us on the game’s visuals, which made me really proud!

The conference ended with a nail-biting awards ceremony, in which we won the award for Best 2nd Year Project!!!

Swedish Game Awards 2014

We also submitted the game to this year’s Swedish Game Awards, and now we’ve been nominated for no less than four awards – Best Execution in Art, Audio, Design and Best Technical Execution! This was really way more than we expected. I was hoping for a nomination in Art, but this is incredible. I will be working all summer, but hopefully I will be able to get a couple of days off to attend the expo at Tekniska Museet and/or the awards ceremony at Nalen. We were there last year and won the Gamers’ Choice award with our first year project Fly or Die, so it feels awesome to be invited back!

That’s it for my last blog post. I might keep using this blog though, and keep you updated on the further development of Defunct, but that will have to wait until after summer! Until then, peace out 🙂

Big Game Project – Week 7 (We’re getting close!)

This week I’ve been finishing the props I started on last week. Now we have a lot of “post-apocalypse”-like junk to decorate the levels with. The environments are looking so much better now that they have some history to them! I would have loved to be able to spend more time on them, but time is not something we have a whole lot of right now, so the textures are very basic, although they still fit nicely within our visual style.
The car models went through an iteration after some feedback from one of our level designers They’re now much more banged up and squashed, resulting in a much nicer silhouette.

Now the player (hopefully) will have a clue of what kind of world this is!

Another cool thing is that I finished our two skyboxes! Now, this REALLY improved the overall look of the game in my opinion. It looks a lot more polished now. The big city in the distance will act as a waypoint for the player, letting them know they’re going in the right direction. You can clearly see the transport ship parked next to the main tower – the same transport ship the player falls out of at the start of the game. We’re going to add a small cutscene of that event at the beginning of the game, and when the player starts, they will instantly see the waypoint. We hope this will establish very clearly what the waypoint is and why the character has to go there.
A big inspiration for this is (as you might have guessed) the game Journey, where the mountain you’re traveling towards is visible in the sky at all times:

Another feature of the skybox is that it has a sort of gradient of brightness, being most intense in the direction the player is supposed to go, and being the darkest in the opposite direction. With this we’re trying to discourage accidental backtracking by making the sky look as dull as possible when going the wrong direction.

In conclusion, we’re really getting close to the deadline now! Gotland Game Conference is in just a little over a week, and we still have some things to do. Next week will be spent on texturing some gameplay-specific props in one of the maps (which will be a pretty daunting task), texturing the transport ship model, as well as creating a cloud texture for the skybox.

Big Game Project – Week 6

I’ve been down with a cold and haven’t been able to do much this week. 😦
But, what I have done is some plants that will hopefully give the environments the character we’re after.

 

I made some new generic ground plants that are much better than the old ones. These ones use half the polys (about 100), and what’s even better is that they actually use alpha! The reason the old one was so expensive is that I didn’t know how how to make a plane visible from both sides, so i just made two planes for each leaf that I welded together, resulting in twice the polys. Now we have our own shader in the game that draws both sides of the plane.
For the colors, I want the plants to stand out but still feel connected to the ground, so I gave them a gradient that goes from the ground’s color to a lighter, more yellow green.

I also made some bushes as you can see. The reason you see those big transparent areas in the picture is because of an alpha bug in the Xoliul Shader for 3ds Max, which allows me to preview my objects like in a game engine, with normal maps and whatnot.

This is supposed to be ivy leaves and branches, or “overgrowth”. They’re simple planes that we’re going to put on things to make them look overgrown, like houses, rocks and everything else. Hopefully it’ll work well.
I also made some tall grass. This will be used with the “paint grass” tool in unity. For the texture I used the same kind of gradient as the plants. I think it’s important for the grass planes to not look out of place, especially when you’re doing a cartoony style. A nice example is the game Mini Ninjas:

 

Lastly, I made a couple of car models that will be textured next week:

My goal for next week is to make up for this week by working more. We still need to finish the spaceship, the city in the skybox, all these props as well as other things!

Big Game Project – Week 5

The logo has been (more or less) completed! There’s still some polish to be done – the bolt in the D needs some more definition, and there’s supposed to be some blue lightning bolts surrounding the text. Also that “chipped paint” effect needs to be better. But so far it’s looking pretty good!
I decided to use the robot’s color scheme because consistency is good! The reason I picked them for the robot is that red is a classic “racing color”, and the teal color is the exact complement to it.

The design is very inspired by Ratchet & Clank’s logo:

 

The character texture is pretty much finished as well! It came out really good in my opinion, a lot better than I expected!

I started by rendering an AO pass of the character. For those of you wondering, AO stands for ambient occlusion, which is a term used to describe the diffuse shadows that occur from the ambient light in the environment. I used 3ds Max to illuminate the model with a diffuse light from all angles, and baked the resulting shadows into a texture. This is then used in the diffuse texture to give it a way more realistic look.

Because the arms and hands need to move a lot, I had to bake all the parts separately. This is to prevent the different parts from casting strong shadows on each other that will be visible when the character bends his arm.
I set the blue parts of the exhausts, the “boostometer” and the eyes as separate objects when I exported the character to put it in Unity. This is so that we can apply a self-illuminating shader to those parts, which means they’ll glow blue in-game.

For the “chipped paint” look, I took the Pen tool in Photoshop and used that to create some custom shapes. Other than being very versatile and easy to change, this method allowed me to fake ambient occlusion by applying a light inner shadow as a Layer Effect on the custom shape layer. This way, the shadow instantly appeared as I created new shapes. For the brown dirt, I just used a soft standard brush and lightly dabbed some color in here and there.

 

I’ve been working some more on the skybox textures, but they’re nowhere near done yet. As you can see, we have two levels – one during sunset and one during night. I’m not happy with the sunset one at all. The reddish terrain makes it look like the game is set in a green oasis in the middle of Hell! It will definitely need some iteration.

 

I started on some more generic props. We do have a lot of props in the game, but the world is really lacking in “story” right now. The point is that it’s a post-apocalyptic world, so I’m making some junk to help convey that (That big blob is a junk pile). I’m also going to make some old rusty cars.
The world is also supposed to be really overgrown (like in The Last of Us) so I’ll be making some props for that as well. We need more “wild” plants, like ivy and tall grass, that we can put all over the place, and on top of other props.

Next week will be dedicated to improving the world.

Big Game Project – Week 4

Week 4 has ended. The game now has an official name – DEFUNCT. Pretty cool.

 

This week I finished the cave prop set, which I’m really happy with! Since these props will only be used in a specific area in the game, I really put thought into my color choices and how they all work together. I used a tetradic color scheme for the wood, metal, crystal and moss. (I made a mossy variant of the ground texture too)
Here’s a concept image I made to plan out the colors:

 

 

I also started working on a sky-sphere for the game. We want to have a dynamic sky with moving clouds and everything, so we’re using spheres instead of a skybox. We’ll have 1 or 2 transparent spheres with clouds inside the “real” sky-sphere that will rotate at different speeds, which hopefully will make for a really cool effect!
What’s left to do on the sky-sphere is to add the big waypoint for the player. The narrative of the game is based on you (the robot) falling out of the big spaceship you’re being transported in, and having to race your way back to it. The spaceship will be visible in the sky at all times, guiding the player towards not only their narrative goal, but also the end of the level.

I’ve also started designing the ship itself, which is pretty challenging! It needs to fit our art style, as well as make at least some sense in its design. It needs to look cool too, considering the player is going to see it a lot! It’s no accident that the back part looks like a wrench – in the original concept the robot was racing towards a big building with a wrench sign on it, to get fixed. We decided to bring that into this design as well. In a way, it still represents being “rescued”.

Here’s a quick concept sketch I made for the main menu. It shows the main character lying on the ground next to the box he fell down in, and the ship speeding off into the distance. I’m still not entirely satisfied with the composition, but this is just a rough sketch.

And lastly, here are some quick logo concepts. I really like the idea that the D is the head of a wrench. I guess what we need for the logo is something that’s cartoony, but not silly. It should reflect the seriousness of the character’s motivations, while still adhering to the art style. It’s going to be a fun challenge!

Next week, we’re going to nail the main character’s appearance (there are still some differing opinions about how “damaged” he should look”, and then produce the actual texture. I think we’re going to use a high-poly model to generate ambient occlusion and normal maps for the character, even though we’re not using normal maps for other things in the game. But we’ll see if there’s time for that. On Friday we need to have our alpha done, so we’ll be working hard this coming week!

Big Game Project – Week 3

Another week has passed! This week I’ve been doing even more 3D props and textures. I made a set of plants to help decorate the levels. We want the world to look very lush and tropical, so these things will be scattered all over the levels. A billboard made by the humans. We’re thinking of having some funny faux adverts on these, like the ones in Fallout 3 or Wall-E, to give a hint of how the human lifestyle was like. As you can see, I taper the shapes to achieve a cartoony silhouette. Of course, this can add quite a bit to the polycount, but it’s essential for the look we want to create. It also poses a challenge when UV mapping – because the edges are never parallel, I can’t make perfectly square UV’s for the objects. Well I can, but then the texture will stretch. Here’s something that isn’t just for decoration! The yellow thing is a booster that activates when the player is near it. In-game, it’s going to have a bunch of cool particle effects going down the middle, and the yellow “gloria” is going to be spinning around. The green thing is a pick-up booster that the player can use at any time. It too will have some particle effects around it, making it clearly visible from a distance. We’re adding an undeground cave area to at least one of the levels, and these are the first props of a set that I’m making for that. We’re also going to have mining carts, rails and wooden supports to create some cool mines. These are the only props so far that have an emissive/glow map. They’re going to act as the lightsources in the caves. It’s going to look pretty awesome. 😀

Lastly, I’ve made some terrain textures. I made 3 grades of grass – dark, medium and light – to provide some variation. My idea is that we use that variation to accentuate height, by using the light grass on top of hills, and the darker grass in valleys. That way we’ll get a more dynamic look. In addition, I made leaf-covered variants of each grass texture, to use in forests and under trees. I really want to start on the character texture soon, it’s going to be very fun. I might do that next week, if the stars are right and we can’t come up with anything else that’s more important right now.

Big Game Project – Week 2

I can’t believe Week 2 is over! It really feels like time is rushing by. Although I’ve been working a lot this week, I kinda feel like I haven’t accomplished as much as I wanted. Anyway…

I blocked in some basic colors on the player model, to get a feel for how the character is going to look when it’s done. I’m not going to produce the final texture just yet though, that’s scheduled for like Week 5.
The model has also been rigged, skinned and sent off to my groupmate Simon Öqvist to be animated. Again, because the arms are made of metal, the rig needed to be perfectly aligned at the joints for it to look good. Sadly, I think I made a mistake with the elbow – its pivot is just a liiiittle off. It’s not that noticeable though, and it’s too late to fix at this point anyway.

This is the rig inside the model. Spooky!

The rest of the week (3 days) was spent creating these props. These should definitely have been done faster, but I sort of had to design the things as I was modeling, so it took a lot of time. The smart thing would have been to nail the concepts before production even started, but I’m not smart so there we go.
Some explanatory backstory for the props: The game takes place in a future Earth, where humans have gone extinct and the planet has been inherited by alien robots. These robots are really childish and have no idea what all the stuff the humans left behind is for, so they’ve sort of taken their own technology and merged it together with random human stuff.
In the picture above, they’ve found an old human house and added a bunch of their own technology to it.

Here’s an outhouse with a bunch of tech added to it. Looks pretty funny! 😀

Our lead artist, Mikael, has come up with a production pipeline for our textures that is saving us a lot of time. We use real photos, which we run through some filters in Photoshop (and do some cleaning up afterwards). The results look nothing like photos, and really fit our cartoony art style.

In conclusion, my plan for next week is:
1) Finish these props
2) Make more props

Big Game Project – Week 1

Since Tumblr isn’t allowed anymore, here’s my new school blog! This time it’s gonna be about more exciting stuff than board games – our 10 week long Big Game Project course started last week, and I’m going to make weekly updates on what I’m doing, which is mostly going to be 3D modeling and texturing. 🙂

Our game is a past-paced arcade adventure, where you play as a (former) racing robot traversing different levels in a sci-fi landscape. As the player, you can’t move forward on your own, and have to rely on different boosters placed about the levels.

Most of the first week was spent making the character model, which is now finished! I was hoping to have the model done by the middle of the week, but after some discussion we decided to do some last-minute redesigns.
The thing we redesigned was the lower body, which we felt looked a lot like a dress. We didn’t want the robot to look gendered, so we changed it up a bit. You can still sort of see it, but it’s much less apparent.

The final polycount landed at 3482, which is pretty low! We’re unsure of how many polys we’re going to be able to have for everything, so we’re just aiming low and hoping for the best.

One of our features is a booster that you can pick up and use at any time. The meter on the robot’s back is supposed to show how much booster energy you have left.

The robot’s (hopefully) animation-friendly arm! Since it’s a mechanical arm, the pivots of the joints need to be perfectly aligned.
For the shoulder, I first set its pivot to the center of the ball. I then copied the X position of the vertices around the hole and set the upper arm’s position to that value. Now the ball won’t pop out or clip through the hole when animating! Pretty neat.

For week 2, I’m going to add some “damage” to the mesh, like crooked exhaust pipes, dents and whatnot (to help explain why you can’t move forward). I’m also going to rig the character using CAT, and hopefully get the skinning done as well. If I have time, I might start on some props too.