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