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.