What Happened, Kangaroo?

Here's an (almost) finished WIP of my first "What Happened Here" painting from Game Design. It's Varanasi, India subjected to hardcore pollution, ten years after everyone has abandoned the city.

I like the contrast of bright colors on the dead city, because I feel like this place will always feel alive - it has so much character and history even if it's just a bunch of empty buildings. I'm gonna desaturate it for the next iteration, but I do like this warm color scheme a lot. In the next painting of the same place, it'll be 100 years after the disaster, and people have started coming back and re-populating, bringing the city back to life.

For DFA we refined some of the abstract characters we had sketched out before:

Now we're on to rendering them out in gray-scale. I love all this character drawing, it makes me so happy ;v;  I want to go back and draw a bunch of the other characters from my abstract shape sheets some time, I saw so many fun characters in them c8

Mood Ripomatic + WIP

   Have I mentioned how much I love my Game Design II class?

Our first assignment back from spring break was to make a Mood Ripomatic video that would capture the emotions and gameplay experience that we want to generate in our platformers. Since my game revolves around a renegade assassin running from the empire and being chased through the forest as she escapes to the port city to flee the country, I wanted to start where the game starts - having momentarily lost her pursuers, she finds herself navigating through a tranquil, beautiful forest - before the chase begins.

The main thing I wanted to convey was a sense of intense forward motion as you're being pursued, the building forces of danger and determination driving you to go faster in order to escape.

Outside of class I've also been working a little on an illustration of my character. I wasn't planning on posting it until I was done, but since I might end up using it in some way for the platformer, I thought I would show some process.

Works in progress:

 I'm still planning to paint a forest background and re-paint over her, and fix the wonkiness of her anatomy.

I'll also have some screenshots of my low-poly character model next time 8)  We're baking normals and texturing/painting/adding materials, so I'll show some of that.

Platformer + Final Character Sculpt

Final high-poly character sculpt before I start doing the topography in 3D Coat and decimating it for the low-poly model that I'll use in my Platformer:

I think I'm gonna change her name to either Ayla Sortwind (Ayla pronounced Ay-luh) or Ayra SinClaire (Ayra pronounced eye-ruh) because the previous name was just supposed to be temporary.

Also, we pitched our Platformer concepts and levels in Game Design. Mine revolves around my character, so it takes place in a medieval fantasy world. The story is that you play as the character above (Ayla/Arya), an undercover Assassin who received missions from the King's high general. She was ordered to assassinate a good friend of hers for a crime he committed, but upon refusing to carry out the order, is threatened with death. She kills the high general in order to escape, and makes way for the nearest port to sail for another country where she'll be safe from the King's jurisdiction. That's where the game picks up; the player makes their way through this platformer forest (the branches being the platforms) to the port city, where the boss fight will occur with the King and his forces prepared to capture you. As the player navigates the forest they are confronted with various puzzles, but have to solve them with speed and efficiency, because if you take too long some enemies will catch up to you and you'll have to kill them in order to survive. Overall I want the feel to be really fast-paced, fun, and fluid.

The main mechanics are jumping, pushing/pulling objects to reach higher platforms, swinging, speed pick-ups, falling objects (environment obstacles), repelling, bouncing on giant mushrooms, and shooting with her crossbow.

Here's a simple draft of my tutorial level (the first level), the yellow path being just one of many the player can choose to take:

Right now we're blocking in our levels in UDK and getting the mechanics to work 8)

Final Contraption + Multiplayer Map

I finished some stuff last week that I never posted. Here's my final Rube Goldberg contraption:

And this is my final death-match multiplayer map for Game Design based on the back alley, but with modifications. We were just focusing on level design, so we didn't set-dress/texture anything. The geometric shapes are all stand-ins for objects populating the level such as buildings, cars, dumpsters, and mechanical things. Level design is so much fun ;v;

Parking Garage:

DM-BackAlley

 The last week and a half has felt like crunch-time even though we're nowhere near break. We've had constant, huge ongoing project deadlines due almost every day between 3D, Game Design, and Programming, nevermind our other classes. I haven't had the time to really take screenshots and videos of all my stuff yet. Here's my modified Multiplayer Map, still a work in progress.

Multiplayer Level

The next part of our Multiplayer Level project in Game Design was to find an interesting location in Sarasota that we would model for a 7-person multiplayer map. I chose this grungy, long back-alley along Main Street that I thought was really cool because it has the backs of all these nice restaurants, but they're all beat up and trashy on this side. There's boarded-up windows, graffiti, inlets with pipes and vents, the back of an open-faced parking garage, and you can peer into the back kitchens of all the buildings. The main pathways of the level will be the alley, but players will fight and navigate through all the buildings as well, which will be connected.

 

 

Here are some quick sketches of the place:

I just finished modeling the gray-box (blocking in everything in geometric shapes) for this map, so I'll post that next time, as well as the "mouse-trap" contraption level I'm doing for Programming.

Second Semester Begins

This semester kicked off so fast, it's hard to believe we've already been back for two weeks. From the first day of classes we dove in head first.

In 3D for Games we immediately began deciding on some concepts for our characters based on the loose idea "What you wanted to be when you grew up." We'll be working on modeling our characters in ZBrush and Maya, rigging, and animating them for the rest of the semester. I had two main ideas - a medieval fantasy explorer/warrior, and a female 1700's Rococo Assassin - that I sketched out variations for and compiled research and images, and then decided on one and created the character design/turn-around/bio for our presentation. I don't have the sketches for my second concept scanned though, so I'm going to make a new post on the entire character assignment once I do that 8)  Next class we have to have our basic anatomy sculpt done for our character in ZBrush already, I'm so excited.

In Game Design II we each chose a Multiplayer map that we had a powerful experience on and had to analyze it in-depth, including drawing a detailed map from playing throughs, and do a presentation on all our information to the class. I chose the map cp_Badlands from Team Fortress 2, since it's probably my favorite map in the game, especially to play Scout on. Here are some of the images from my presentation:

I explained the map, classes, and gameplay strategies throughout the presentation, hence all the images and minimal text. Cooksey loved it, I was SO happy ;v;  I'm so psyched that I have him as a teacher again, he's one of my most favorite teachers ever. Our next assignment now is to study a real-world environment off-campus that we're going to base multiplayer levels on for 7-person maps. I love all the assignments in this class (B

Programming ended up not really being programming as much as Scripting. We've been learning how to do Scripting in UDK with Kismet, and it's been tough to pick up on. The more I learn the easier it's getting, but each "pop quiz" we get in class, a timed script-making challenge, has been really frustrating, and only one or two people seem to be getting things to actually work when the time's up at the end of the challenge. Kismet and the whole process just seems unnecessarily convoluted and unintuitive, but hopefully that feeling will go away after using it for awhile. Here are the first couple simple things we Scripted in Kismet:

Our first challenge was to make a level based off of the spike-trap room in Indiana Jones (http://youtu.be/G7BCRXkcW-w) with a start room, a proximity door that leads to a trap room and closes behind the player to trap them, the trap room with a spiked ceiling that drops down (killing the player if the spikes touch them), an escape door with a switch to open it, and dramatic lighting and sounds. I made a quick video of how my map turned out:

Next time I'll try recording the video in Fraps so it has sound and better quality.
But YEAH everything I'm doing is so fun, I love this semester so far 8)  I'll make another post soon on my character designs!

Daemonibus Pictures

I finished and turned in my boardgame, Daemonibus, as well as the 15-second game commercial for it. They collected the games to grade over Winter break, so I'll take better photos of it once I get it back. For now, here's stuff from the finished game that I haven't shown yet.

15-Second Game Commercial



 Front and Back Covers

 Side panels (top and bottom lids)

Game-guide  and Game board

Cards  (If you can't read them, click to view, then right-click -> View Image  to open image full-size)

      















Photos!

The pouches are for the Red and Blue pieces to be stored in, and the clear bag with the little roundish wooden pieces are tokens for pieces that land on the black Chance squares.


And for your entertainment, a compilation of extra clips for the commercial that were cut, set to epic music: