Games Development Project 4

Creating a tower in Maya-

So our new project involved us creating a wizard tower in Maya. In our project brief we had discussed about different buildings and architecture. I have a thing for steampunk and a lot of that is from Bioshock, I like how each building tells an interesting story. I had an idea for a tower straight away and as we were sent away we had to do some research on buildings, creating a mood board.  I looked at old buildings and how they was structured, paying close attention to the materials used so when it came to creating my tower I could mimic that with tiny details such as rivets or screws.
Once I found multiple ideas, I created a mood board in Photoshop so I could print it out and look back for reference.

Once I had my reference I began to create different drawings of ideas for my tower design. Going with the steampunk feel I wanted to more or less create objects or houses that were on top of each other. I found out that steampunk generally mount or connect loads of buildings together with either pipes for support or just generally stack them on top.   

. 

As you can see this was pretty much the first design I did, I have a habit of not experimenting and just sticking with one idea. I drew a base where the main entrance would be, with cogs and different structures coming from it for support. I also drew the main part which was above it; this consisted of a number of houses that was stacked together to create one huge house. Amongst these houses there was a tower attached to the houses. This would be the main tower where the person who lived there would reside most of the time. I wanted this to stand out amongst all the other stuff since it was the most important part. There was also a section underneath the main part that was just a simple clock tower; I wanted to add this in because it was the easiest way to give it that steampunk feel.

Overall this week was going good since I had a positive view of where I wanted to go.

 

3D Animation

At this point in the project I really just wanted it to be over. I wasn't really looking forward to the 3D animation after having so much hassle with the stop motion and trying to work with the group. I left Ben and Nikos to finish the ending of the stop motion and to add the sound onto it. I then carried on with my 3D that I had a go at when I was at home. This gave me time to figure out the kind of horror that I wanted to go with. I wanted something that people would think was horror but had that horror aspect. 

I ended up going with a sound clip from batman. It said " some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn", automatically I thought of an idea. I wanted to just create someone just standing there saying this. The camera would pan round from the back onto his face and zoom towards his eye. The camera would then switch to a world spinning and burning. I had to think about many things when creating this and to be honest I didn't think I would have been able to do it in time. 

After spending many hours both at college and home I had figured it all out and done it all. Of course I had to look a number of tutorials up with how to do certain stuff but in the end I was happy with what I produced. The most difficult thing I had to figure out was the camera switching and how I could go from the eye to the world. I first started of with the point camera, I thought this would be easier to pan the camera around from the back to the front and keep it simple. Of course after messing around with it and trying to switch to the world from the eye, I started to give up. Then I realised that I could have just used a normal camera and switched it over. I felt a bit stupid after this but in the end I figured little stuff out and actually enjoyed the 3D animation part.

Stop-Motion.

After spending alot of time thinking about the general idea of the stop motion, we thought that the new one we came up with was a bit better and less time consuming. We wanted to incorporate block men running on lined paper and interacting with it. Of course after we worked it all out we figured out that this too was very time consuming. Since I would be drawing mostly  everything, I wouldn't have time to draw all this out and create my 3D work as well. At this point in the project I was becoming overly stressed out and had to think of another idea. I wanted this project to hurry up and finish and this put a downer on the whole project. 

Finally we settled on a idea that it would be easier if we drew and used clay as well. So our final idea; I drew out the square zombie we had from the previous ideas out and cut him up. We was going to have him fall like tetris and once he was complete he would come alive. We figured that the use of clay would benefit us at this point. So using a toy as a base I made the square like zombie out of clay. I tried as best as I could in the given time to create something decent. Anyway so the rest of the idea involved him switching to the clay and rising up from the paper. He would then come towards the camera as if he was attack the audience. We also had a car, this would come from the side and run the zombie over, crashing into the wall and crushing him.

Me and Ben did most of this, he done the camera and I moved the objects and operated the laptop. With the two of us doing it I think we did a fairly decent job.

Games Development Project 3

Animation-

So the new project Is all about animation. I guess I don't really mind it sometimes, although its very time consuming. We had to create a stop animation and a 3D animation based around horror. Again we had to have groups, I never know how I really feel about the whole group idea. I don't mind working in them, it is just frustrating when we don't act like a group. Anyway thankfully only the stop-motion was a group project and the 3D was something we had to do by our self.

 After finding out the subject of the animation we had to base it off, everyone seem to rush of to use the clay and Lego idea. I had a number of ideas floating around in my head so i was happy to share them with the group. We grabbed a piece of paper and began to brainstorm ideas. I suggested we do a drawing one since it would be different from everyone else's. This seemed like a good idea at the start and everyone agreed. The initial idea would be that we would create a hallway and a girl would be walking down it fighting zombies along the way. This took us a couple of days to actually figure out what we wanted to do.

After thinking about this and realising we had to also do our 3D work, we came to terms that this was too much work and we had to re think the idea over.

The Character Design

So first off I started with a quick rough sketch on paper. Because even my quick sketches have a bit of detail on them this took me a bit to sort out. I tried to think of the time period that the game was based in and kind of took it from there. I gave him big shoulders so it made his frame look bigger than it actually was. Since our characters had basic roles and mine was the tank, I decided to make him look like he was built to last.

 

The drawings above show the progress on how I went about with my drawing. We decided to go with the 2D graphic look so I designed and coloured my drawings in illustrator. Since I had a bit of experience with the program before I was able to navigate my way around it and finish the drawings alot easier so this helped alot on time. I scanned my drawings into Photoshop and just edited them in illustrator. I done a basic outline and just coloured them in after. I had to mess around with the colours quite a bit since I couldn't figure out what I wanted it to be. Once I had the basic colour I began defining the detail with shade and highlight.  

Well after spending a while on developing the drawing and making it a final piece, I also did a final shield and sword for the game. After having a week sorting out everything for the design document and getting stuff together I think we caught up pretty fast. Yes we might have a few pieces missing but I think it counts on how well you present and get across your point. I think I have achieved the kind of look I wanted to give my character and happy with the overall results. I think if we had a little more time and didn't decide to change the game we would have had a better chance to develop it more.

Changing the plan..

After a couple of weeks working on this project I came back after half term to find out that our group had changed the game we was creating. Obviously because I drew out a bunch of concept art it was really frustrating. Going from the few scribbles I drew and to now creating a totally different concept was hard. We had basically a week to do everything again and since one of our group members left we are only left with three people. 

The basic story involves a dragon that is terrorising the worlds of the each three characters. The leaders of each race have chosen certain warriors to take battle in defending and saving the world. From the adventure they are blessed with a powerful crystal that embodies into their weapon, giving them abilities.
 
After I was told what the game was actually about, It was alot easier for us all to go with this idea, as much as I found it frustrating. The game is basically a side scrolling puzzle adventure game. Going off ideas like Trine gave us a basic start and base to build on. We had 3 main races; the human, the dwarf and the elf. I was left with the human since they already chose theirs. I didn't mind this because I was pretty excited about coming up ideas with this game.
After knowing what I had to do I began to look for inspiration and ideas I could incorporate into my own design. Creating a mood board gave me the examples I needed.

Here is my mood board,

I wanted to have a medieval kind of type armour for my human and that was the plan in the begging. Because our storyline in the game is all to with this powerful crystal that gets forged into special weapons, I decided to go with this type of look. The game itself has alot of depth to it and would give the player the experience to team up with two more people and play through the main story together. For a simple side scroller we wanted to add alot of detail, no matter how simple it came across.

Games Development Project 2

Coming Up With The Idea

Group Members: Richard, Russell, Leon and Myself.

The new project was launched today and we found out that we had to work in groups to take a game idea and develop it more. We had a choice to choose the total genre and style of gameplay but since we couldn’t decide on an idea, we ended up going blind and picking out the hat. We ended up with a Sci-fi strategy game for the PC. We chose to stick with what we had gotten and created a brainstorm of different ideas that all ended up revolving around a base strategy game. Taking ideas from games such as Command and Conquer, Halo Wars and StarCraft we pretty much had a base for our game to build on. So starting off  having two different teams and battling out with built turrets and waves of units against each other , this was the overall idea of how the game was going to develop.  

To give you example of what I mean, the game is more along the lines of Sanctum.

After working out what the main objective of the game would be and that there would be two main sides we split into groups. Richard and Russell are handling the “Sci-fi human cyborg” race and Leon and I are handling the “Sci-fi alien creature” race.

We first created mood boards so it gave us an idea to show each other the kind of creatures we wanted to create. This gave us a chance to throw ideas easily and be able to get a quick idea of what we wanted. I used different pictures to show the different colours and different kind of armour an alien could have. Here is a picture of my mood board,