Week 7 of Big Game Project

A late post for last weeks work, but better late than never 🙂

So we are rounding up for GGC, getting our last assets done and some small fix and changes.

I have primaraly been working on particle effects this week to help indicate the gain of speed. I have also done some menu stuff like buttons and background for different menu states.

the particle effects i created this week was a ”wind blowing past at high speed” effect, an exhaust effects for when the player gains big bursts of speed, a dust effect for the ground that shows more the faster you go and a ”break the soundbarrier” effect for big bursts of speed for example when the players uses a checkpoint boost.

i will go more indepth on how i did the exhaust and dust, two pretty simple effects but very effectfull.

Exhaust Pipe Effect

The exhaust effect was made very simple. i made three cylinders in 3DS max and removed all but the outer faces. I made the middle and last cylinders diameter smaller but the lenght longer that will later make a nice flame effect.

 

 

Because of the Particle/Addative shader im using i dont have to worry about the inside of the cylinders, the diffuse will still show through.

I then did a simple flame for the diffuse that tiles, i only use one color and im letting the shader do the rest to create color variations. The Particle/Addative shader removes all the black in the image and make it transparant, so by making the color a bit dark i can create a transparent flame that is still very vibrant.

Now by adding a script that rotates the diffuse very fast it creates the illusion of flames. The programmers then make it fade in and scale when they player picks up a boost or runs into a checkpoint.

The Dust Effect

For the dust effect i use a standard particle system.

I started out with a diffuse texture that first was meant to only be a test but it turned out so well it ended up being the final.

By then manipulating the emitter i can create a cone shape that emitts on the ground. The shader i used for this is Particle/addative (Soft), by using the soft version the particles will keep their color throughout the duration of its lifetime the same, different from the exhaust where i used Particle/Addative that lightens up the object/particle behind it.

And becuse of the the Particle/Addative shader i can easly fade in and out the particles, the programmers can then later fade them depending on the speed you are going, so if you go slow they will be less visable.

The particles also have a random rotation value of 0-360 and also grow in their lifetime from 0.2-1.2 and fades out in the end of their lifetime

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The Menus

We wanted the buttons to feel that they belonged in the world and since we use such stylized textures we also made the buttons stylized. 

By using the lasso tool to make a simple shape and then the lasso tool again to add the the fallen off paint with a very suttle dropshadow to give it more depth. 

The left button is when it is selected and the right is when it’s unselected. I took out the color, made it slightly transparent and removed the highlight to make it very clear which of the buttons are selected.

I chose the same colors as in the logo so you can easy make a connection to the game via the logo, the cutout red is also in the same style as the logo.

 

The backdrops are made in the same way with a slight transparency to not make it so harsh on the eyes. the asymetri in the shapes helps convey the childish and stylized tone we set for the game. 

 

Next Week

Next week i will start with the trailer and do some more oddjobs that needs to be done before we go into beta and GGC

 

 

 

 

Fifth Week of Big Game Project

This week has been very hectic, we worked  hard  to get a somewhat solid level for the alpha test for people to play.

I have been working primarily on the effects and particles this week for feedback purposes and readability.

I have never worked in depth with the Unity Particle Systems so i had to experiment allot and look what others had done to get the desired effects. I bought some particle effects i thought was cool and dissected them to see how they where made and used that knowledge to make my own.

These are effects i created this week.

Far left is the small boost that when picked up will give you a small amount of speed.

To the right of the small boost is the Checkpoint Boost, here you will get a significantly amount of speed, and you will also be able to spawn from this location at any point in the game.

To the right of the Checkpoint Boost is the Spark, there are still some work to be done on the spark. The Spark will be used to reward explorers with allot of score points.

The two circle effects are for the pumping. When you pump correctly and are gaining speed the blue circles will appear around the wheel of the avatar and when you pump incorrectly and lose speed the red one will appear.

The last one to the far right is for when you pick up a Small Boost. The particles will for a small amount of time stick to the avatar and then stick to the game world and fall off you.

I will go more in depth on how i created the small boost effect.

I started out with a standard Unity Sphere and applied the standard unity shader Particle/Additive(soft), as a diffuse i used blue color with about 50% blackness. The shader will then remove the black and keep the original color and make it transparent depending on the amount of blackness in the color. I can now put a particle system inside the sphere and they will still show through.

The Particle System is a bit more complex.

It is using the main particle emitter and two sub-emitters.

The first emitter creates the lightning bolts, the material for the bolts are the same as the sphere to give it a suddle transparancy to make it more smooth and not so harsh. The gradiant at the start of the lightning bolt is also to make it so it looks like it fades in then just pop in from the emitter. It also has a suddle glow that is barley visable.

There is too many different options to go through them all but the picture above shows what i used to create this Particle System.

The two sub-emitters on the other hand is pretty simple, the particles are created on the birth of the lightning bolts. The first is just a standard unity particle effect the it creates this ball in the center of the sphere that is the core of the boost, the other particle effect is a more hectic effect but barely visible to help convey the lightning.

 

Next week i will be working on some more effects and to make some new tileable ramp assets.

 

Fourth Week of Big Game Project

The fourth week of big game project has ended and we have gotten a lot of things done.

I personally have been taken a deeper look into the unity particle system and also made some assets for the level designers to use.

I will be talking about the Ramp Building Kit in this post.

Since we need smooth surfaces for the player to ride upon the logical solution was to let the level designers make the ramps and pipes the way they wanted it to feel and play like, after that they would send them to me and i would optimize them and texture. But we realized that doing this on every different kind of ramp and pipe in the game would take too long so instead i made this Ramp Building Kit for the level designers to use for ramps and decoration.

Doing it this way the level designers could replace their white box ramps with a custom built ramp in the exact angle they want it to be and it saves me a lot of time to not make every ramp in the game. 

Here are some examples i have made just to demonstrate how the ramps could look.

I will still have to do some custom ramps for the level designers but this building kit will replace at least 90% of the ramps in the game as of yet. 

Third Week of Big Game Project

So me and Anders are in charge to make ALL the assets in the game. We are aiming for about 100-120 props in the GGC version so we have alot of assets to make.

I have been working on craters, stones, signs and more but the thing i want to talk about in this post is the Spark and how it was created.

The Spark will be used as a point of intrest for the players and will yeild alot of score when picked up.

I already kinda knew how i wanted it to look so i drew som quick sketches to further explore the design i had in my head. I knew i wanted a ball/core that was glowing and emitting particles and x amount of rings circle it in different axis, but i had to come up with the design of the rings.  

 

I talked to the team and we chose the ring design in the left corner.

 

I then made the 3d model in MAX and exported it to unity, for the ball i will be using a standard unity sphere game object.

 

We wanted a clean look for the rings like they are new, it will create a good contrast between the apocalyptic world and the spark giving a good focus point. So just a flat color that are coherant with the other alien objects in the game will do fine. 

I then copied the ring three times and applied a script to it that one of our programmers made. The script makes the rings rotate in different axis and randomly changes the direction  in random intervals. 

Since we are going to place the Sparks in points of intrest to the player and themselves are points of intrest we need to make sure that the players knows where they are. So i made effect that will be visable from pretty much every position on the level to make sure that players wants to go there and that there is something there to get. 

 

To the left is the spark and to the right is the effect (neither of them are done yet). The effect was made with a texture that is continually is offsetting the texture to make it move, since they are planes they will always have to be pointed towards the camera which is the next step. 

The Spark is pretty much done in itself, i just have to add additional particle effects and lighting. The rings rotations also have to be calibrated.

First week of Big game project

So the first week of Big Game Project, project that will eventually be on the GGC floor has started

The concept itself was not done during this week but has been iterated upon for several weeks beforehand so we knew exactly what to do once the course started, thus giving us more time in the production phase.

The concept is a fast paced adventure game where your avatar is a robot that is broken, for the player to move you have to use boost nodes placed on the level to move forward and explore. Read more about the concept here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B29qyva6DiC8Z21LdmlQMHlHcG8/edit?usp=sharing

I’m the designated Lead Artist, so I’m the person every model, animation, texture and level will go through as a final step in the pipeline to make sure everything is coherent and matched the initial concept we started with.

This week I have been working on some general assets that will go into all the levels in the game, different kinds of stones and light sources.

 

The Stones

I took a lot of inspiration from the rocks in Dota 2, very simple with strong highlights on the edges.

I made a high-poly model in Z-brush and then exported them to 3DS max, but before I did that I had to cut the poly count on them or max would crash so I used a plugin called Decimation Master, they started out at about 4 million tris and I was able to cut them down to about 250k each without losing detail. I also made the rocks so that they can be rotated in every direction to create variation in the rock pattern since I have only planned to make more if the time allows it, so by doing this I give the level designers some options to how they want to place the rocks and give them more option on how to use them.

But 250k is still way too much for a game so I had to further optimize the models. By using ProOptimizer modifier I could go down from 250k to about 120 tris and still have the general silhouette of the objects. I then Unwrap the UV’s for both stones and bake a normal map from the high-poly models.

I was going to bake an ambient occlusion map as well but for some reason my max refused so I had to come up with another way to do it. So I used a program called CrazyBump to do it, I also got made a specular map in CrazyBump form the normal map.

I then took everything into Photoshop to adjusted colors and to add the specular to the diffuse, by doing it this way we can save some space and not have to code a custom shader for Unity but it makes it harder to change the specular later on if wanted.

 

Light sources

The process is pretty much the same but I did not use Z-brush for these. The two have very distinct designs and are supposed to be used on different places. The first one is a light post that the robots have attached their own technology on with materials they could find around, in this case a rope. This will be used in the city area where there are natural light posts accruing placed by the humans.

The other design however is just scrap the robots have found and made their own posts. This will be used for the areas outside the city.

Corrugated Plates

Once again the process of the plates is much similar to the stones except for the Z-brush part. This will be used for many different things as decoration and as part of the level design where you can go upon them.

 

Next week I will be doing more assets for the game, next on the agenda pipes that you can go inside.

/Mikael Karlsson

Shadow Path and GameX

This is the last week of the course, Advanced Game Design and we had our final presentation of our board game.

Not many changes were made from the previous week to this one. While half of the group where at GameX the other half did as best they could to balance the game. They play tested it with people that had never played it before and they thought it was fun and exciting to play.

Short about GameX:

I and my group were requested by the school to show our game at GameX, the biggest game expo in Scandinavia. Not only that, we managed to have our game in two booths, we had one at the schools booth and also at the indie developer booth. It was an awesome experience and everyone was hyped throughout the whole expo. Our game got some great publicity through journalists, bloggers and youtubers. And we are very happy that we got the chance to do it and we would love to do it again.

Back to the game.

As I mentioned earlier there was not many changes to the game this week. We did however add feel that something had to be done to the monster. We had not balanced the monster while we saw over the heroes and their wands so something had to be done. We had earlier come to the conclusion that the giving the monster superior movement did not work at all, the monster became way to powerful ending a game in almost 12 rounds or less. So we had to come up with something ells.

We added pathways that only the monster could take at four locations on the map binding paths better for the monster. This way we did not alter the board for the players while still giving the monster a small advantage on catching up running players.

With this change we called the game finished and that it was finished for presentation.

The presentations went good and there was not a lot of feedback from the players, they seemed to have a good time playing it. Some people that had played the game before we redid the action system was surprised how well the game played and how exiting the game was to play.

One problem that we had before was that when the monster was about to choose its movement the other players could get a hint of where the monster where just by looking at his/hers eyes, so we printed out a small version of the board that the monster could use to make his/her movement more strategic without anyone knowing where he/she looked.

Marcus or Adam has yet to play our final version of the game. And we want to know what they think of it. Adam was skeptic about our concept in the beginning but after playing an older version he liked it a lot. We want to know what they think now when it’s done.

That concludes our five week project of making a board game. We had a lot of fun making it and learned a lot when it comes to systems and balancing. A postmortem will be written on this game and I will upload it here later.

And lastly, we finally gave the game a name. Shadow Path

Re-thinking

A week late but here it is, GameX took alot of time 😛

Last week we made some major changes to the game, we reworked the action system and we also further iterated on the game board.

In the start of the week we had a meeting with Marcus discussing what we could change and make better. He came up with some ideas that would give the monster player a more defined goal. He suggested that we should give the players lives, so when the player dies two times they are out of the game. He also suggested a modular board which would make a good addition to the game but with the time we have left, we felt that making a well-balanced board instead of trying to balance all the possibilities with the modular one would be a better choice for a good experience.

In the last game test the game did not performed as we hoped. The game sessions took way too long, lasting almost up to an hour; the reason for this was that we experimented with the round limit and the lives. We also tried different ways to reuse the wands in some way; we tried to reshuffle them as they depleted but since the talisman is also reshuffled in the deck when the monster kills the player that have it, the game resets and the monster have the upper hand because of the lives and the round limit.

So the goal for this week was to make the game faster but still has the same tension throughout the whole session. And we solved this by doing a few different things, first off we did a big change to the actions system that might not sound like much but makes the gameplay where different, in the original we had three different actions, Search, movement and wand use. Having these three actions you were only allowed one each turn, you where though allowed to use a wand if you moved so you could consider wand use a free action and the search as giving up your turn. Now you are allowed to use any two actions however you want and you are allowed to search immediately when you land on a search tile. However, you may not use two of the same actions.

Another thing we did was to further iterate the game board. We have now has about 230 tiles instead of the previous 130. By doing this we could use two dies for movement for each player to even out the randomness a bit but still have it so that you can get bad/good die rolls.

We also changed some of the cards so that they were more coherent in the way that almost everything can go through walls except disintegrate. We also increased the range of which these cards can be casted so they can more easily be used. And not just discarded all the time for their highly situational situations.

In the end the game plays much faster than the previous versions and we got a nice curve where it is slow in the beginning and ramps up towards the end.

The menacing ladybug

Todays session was about establishing a system till our play test on Thursday.

Our basic idea is that 4 players are to find treasure in a dungeon with a monster in it, the fifth player. The monster is only visable every fourth round and when he/she kills a player, rest of the time the players are unaware of it’s movement.

We feelt that the movement system in this sort of game would be the most important, thus starting with it. Also we knew the gameboard was going to be a big part of the game and how its balanced, so starting with the gameboard and movement was a quite obvious choice.

The gameboard is going to need alot more iteration aswell as the movement, but i think we got a good grasp on how this game is going to play.

Both the players and the monster moves equal amount of squares as a D6 die shows. The players does not have to move the full amount but have to move a minimum of 1 square.

Game 1 – First Iteration

This is our first iteration on the gameboard, The gray squares indicates tiles you move on. The white squares are rooms where you are to search for treasures. The white lines are shortcut pathways that players can take to quicker get to places.

To not make the movement of the monster to obvious we numbered the squares so that the monster player could write down his movement instead of having a avatar representing it at all times.

We decided that 20 turns would be enough to test one round of the game. It took about 30 minutes to play.

This board was way to small, the restriction in movement except for the outer ring it was way to limited and very predictable, for both the monster and the players. The monster had a huge advantage becuse of this and killed a player almost every turn. So we only needed one play to know that this board was not going to work.

 Game 2 – New board

We made a new board that was not symetrical. We also more than doubled the amount of tiles. We used the same rules as the first time we played.

 

We did not make any secret paths this time, we thought if they where needed we could add them later.

We was just trying the board with the most simplest mechanics which was movement.

This iteration was WAY better then the first one, the movements became much more unpredictable and random which was great. It happend alot that players ran into the monster thus killing them and it was great fun. When we died we respawned without penalties just to try the movement as much as possible.

The deaths was distributed between the round very even, round 2, 6, 12, and 19 so almost every sixth round there was a death.

Game 3 – you may not move through players.

So in the third game we added a little twist we thought could work very well in the system, and this was that players where not to move through eachother. Meaning that if a player blocks a pathway other players cant move past him and gets stuck.

we used the same board that we made for game 2 with no iteration. 

This added a whole new dynamic to the game, now you could block players to go paths that the monster could potential be on.

We tried to play as it would if they game had all its components, staying in rooms and search for treasure to simulate a more accurate representation of the game. 

We ecountered alot of cases where a player would block another to force him down another path and in some of the cases getting killed by the monster.

Deaths in this round: round 8, 10, 11, 20. Not so spread out this time but still counted up to four kills as the previous game.

Game 4 – More of the same

We tried to play the game again with the same set of rules as before, in this round we ended up with 7 kills on the players and much more concetrated, even there was two kills in the same round.

We dont know yet how the game exactly will play out when we add the treasure and searching system, we also think that some sort of action cards is going to be needed for the players to be more versitile. But this is stuff that we are going to test at a later stage, now we are focusing to get the movement just right.

 

Brainstorming about Understanding board games project

Today my group and i brainstormed about the upcoming group project where we are to create a boardgame from scratch.

First of we threw out random aesthetic words just to get started, we ended up with words like feeling accomplished, lonlyness, fear, despiration, paranioa.

After that we took some of the woords and try to give them some contex in the form of gameplay and how the game would play.

We thought of you being desserted on a island with other players and you where to survive on that island by yourself or with the help of others and there would be a winning condition that only one player could fullfill so backstabbing was eminent.

We also came up with the idea that you where stuck in a dungeon, in the dungeon there would be a monster that would apear only ever 4 rounds or so to create the tension and fear. The objective for the players would be to survive with the help of others or by yourself.

We really liked the idea of having alliances with eachother but there would only be one winner. So that in the start the players would cooperate and later in the game betray eachother to win. We think that this will create some fun gameplay.

We will talk more about this concept of having to eventually backstab your friends in other types of gameplay, but for now that concept feels good.

Test

Test test test