It Just Keeps Getting Better

Let me clarify: "it" (the game) keeps getting better because our team is putting an obnoxious amount of hours into making it better. Between the four of us, we've put in over 500 hours.

This past week has been so exciting. I know I say this every week, but this week was especially awesome because we got to see the characters come to life, thanks to Chris -- our wonderful animator. Then when we got those into the networked game and were all playing together, watching our animated characters running around...

It was just amazing. 

Personally, I've been working on several iterations of UI, the environmental assets I posted before, and the new environment Chris and I are working on together. 

As I predicted, the UI did give me some trouble. I find that UI is just one of those things that you need to make a lot of different versions on so you can pick the best later. There are endless possibilities for UI, so if you only do one version, you're not doing yourself a favour. You have to consider everything from the design, to the placement on the screen and the scale on the screen. You don't want to UI to block the wrong areas, or too much of the player's view.

I used Adobe Illustrator to make most of the UI elements. Illustrator is a vector-based art program, as opposed to Photoshop which mimics painting. It's not easy to explain what exactly vector graphics are. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics (I expect teachers everywhere just sighed in disappointment.)

The main advantage to using vector graphics: they can scale up or down without stretching and losing colour information. If you try to scale a regular image up, it just doesn't work; it gets all fuzzy and blurry and loses resolution. But you can scale vector graphics up or down as you please without losing resolution. 

I also just find it easier to make simple shapes and buttons.

Because I used Illustrator, the UI fell into a more cartoony style. That ended up not being a problem, because we were going for that whimsical, simple style for the game as a whole.

For UI in general, I really try to stick by that old saying "Less is more." The less UI there is, the less of the player's screen you have to take up. I also appreciate UI's that don't need an explanation -- either through text or tutorial. I mean, I want the UI to be intuitive and understandable without having to explain anything to the player. 

For example: in many fantasy games health and mana are represented by red and blue bars/meters/counters. It's just become chiseled into gamers' brains that red=health and blue=mana, so any UI that incorporates them is automatically easy to understand (I'm sure there are exceptions of course).

For Chris's prototype, he made the health and mana bars green and purple. I thought this was an interesting change of pace, especially since our element system went along with it -- green being earth (often associated with life) and purple being arcane. So I played around with it, but the health and mana meters just became that much unrecognizable. I ended up going back to the standard of red and blue.

This is one example UI. Taking inspiration from actual sports games for the top left UI, it includes what half the game is in, how much time in the half is left, and the scores of both teams. For a more fantasy feel, I tacked on a gargoyle dragon. 

Then the bottom right UI -- taking inspiration from Team Fortress 2 -- would cover health and mana points with a picture of your character. The health and mana meters are contained within little potion pots.

This UI would be an all-in-one. The two red and blue orbs are the player's health and mana. The numbers on the orange and blue flags are the scores of each team. 

The problem with this one, though, is that it is confusing. When I showed it to Alex he said he didn't understand why the health was on the Ice's flag and the mana was on Fire's flag. 

So I took just the score aspect of that UI and put it on top on the screen with the time left in the half under it. This is less confusing. If we were to use this one, it would be coupled with the bottom right UI of the first picture (the one with the potion pots). 

Moving on: Chris sculpted an extremely basic version of Team Fire's home field so I could get to working on it. It ended up taking forever to get done what I wanted to (which were cliffs to go in the level). But we now how have the base of where we want to go for the end of the semester.

Also, I've been holding out on you. I've been holding back the biggest news of all: we passed Stage 2 on Tuesday! This is a big deal! We weren't even planning on passing, we just wanted to get feedback so we could challenge and pass next week. But we ended up passing which is a huge relief and also very exciting for all of us. This gives us a lot of time for polishing and getting documentation done for our Senior presentation next month. 

I'm not sure I explained any of that so I will try to sum it up quick.

Documentation: All game majors are required to write documents about each specific aspect of the game. Programmers write Technical Risk Documents, which outline all risks on their side of what may be problems in the future. 

Designers, to help the programmers, write a Systems Analysis Document, which outlines all things that the programmers eventually have to program into the game. Designers also write the general Design Document, which explains every single thing about the game. 

Us artists have to deal with Art Bibles, which is a full explanation of the specific style we're going for. We have to break down every element of the game and provide verbal explanations and pictures so that any new artists that come on the team would be able to understand and replicate my art immediately after reading the document.

Senior Presentation: The senior presentation is taking place before Thanksgiving break this year. It's when each team that qualifies (has at least passed Stage 3) gets to present their game to a committee made up of game faculty. We get fifteen minutes -- some of which is talking about the game, and most of which should be a demo of the game. Then afterwards the professors get together and decide which teams/games are going forward to next semester.

Whoo. We've got -- what? -- three weeks to go until then? Where did the time go?

Also, this upcoming Tuesday is our draft version of the Senior Presentation, in front of another section of Senior Capstone. The goal is to get feedback so we can do better at the actual Senior Presentation. It's not graded but still, it's very nerve-wracking. 

Thanks for reading! Wish us luck in the upcoming weeks. There's a lot to do.

Generic Weekly Update

This week's blog is my break from all of the sculpting in ZBrush I've been doing. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, just imagine I'm making a clay sculpture, except on the computer.

Last week was dedicated to the character (as you know if you read my last post). By Thursday I ran into a wall when Chris was looking at my topology of my mesh (arrangement of polygons that make up any 3D model). We decided to see a teacher about it to make sure it was okay for animation. The topology of a mesh needs to be a certain way for it to animation without too much deformation in the wrong places. With wrong topology, meshes often "pinch" in certain places and it just looks bad.

One of our professors, Joann Patel, was a big help and found a couple things that could be fixed to cut down on the polycount and also help animation. Unfortunately, by then it was already Friday and I had absolutely no time to fix it because I had to make my way to Maine to visit my family and go to the annual Fryeburg Fair (a family ritual I've taken a part of since I was born).

So as bad as I felt about it, Chris had to be left with fixing the topology of the character model. But after thinking about it, the animator should probably do the retopology for the animated mesh anyway. He did a great job of cleaning it up. He also threw a simple texture on to see what it looked like with colour.

 After a three-hour-long drive back from Maine, we all went to the game lab on campus to work together and have our late sprint review. I worked on the character some more...

Handsome fella.

Sculpted a new Rockwall...

This is actually only three rocks duplicated over and over.

And between last Thursday and today I've been working on environmental assets to put in our level. 

I heard you like rocks and volcano mounds.

I've also been gathering resources to figure out what I'm going to do for UI (user interface/health and mana bars, scoreboard, etc.). As it turns out, sports "UI" and UI for fantasy games like Diablo or World of Warcraft are incredibly different. Who knew? Any suggestions on how to pull of a UI that combines the two? 

So this week I'm in charge of getting the environmental assets done as well as several iterations of UI. 

By the way, I say "this week" and not "this sprint" because we're challenging Stage 2 next week. It seems like just last week that we passed Stage 1 (oh wait). We're confident about it, but we also have to because the week after that, we have something else going on so we can't challenge. 

But today was a real confidence booster because we got a lot done. Alex has been working his butt off on networking and integrating the Hydra controls into the networked game. Bryan and Chris have been coming up with new design ideas that are definitely awesome and have shown iteration.

Most importantly, I think, has been the field design. From QA they discovered that players who received the ball would chuck it to the other side of the field and it would be a race to get it. To fix that, they've come up with a couple of new field designs. And with that, more spells were added to go with those field designs.

Bryan has also been getting some audio done which makes casting Rockwall all the more satisfying when it bursts out of the ground with a "THUNK" and crumbles with a... crumbly noise. 

It's coming along great and I can't wait to see where we'll be a week from now, two weeks from now, and so on.

This is the first game I've ever worked on that I've been attached to. Hopefully our audience of gamers will feel the same way after this semester. 

Big News x 2

It's only Tuesday and so far it's been a pretty exciting week. First of all, we had a seminar last night featuring Jean-François Dugas (Lead Game Designer) and Mary DeMarle (Lead Narrative Designer) of Eidos Montreal. They worked on one of last year's big titles, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 

Despite dragging my feet to the auditorium (sorry professors) to what I thought would be another Look-How-Awesome-I-Am presentations by someone I could never even touch in terms of talent, it ended up being extremely interesting.

I haven't been to an enormous amount of talks like this, but what I have been to have been less learning experiences and more... intimidating presentations on the amount of talent the people can hold in their bodies. Blech.

But "J.F." (as they called him) and Mary were very normal, down-to-earth people -- people that I could see myself working beside (if I were ever lucky enough to). They realized not only their successes, but their flaws and regrets in making the new Deus Ex. And they made it very clear that it is not through magic of their own that the game came to be, but from the talent and hard work of their entire team.

The Powerpoint presentation itself was very short. It started with a personal timeline of each of the designers starting from 1997 -- showing what games they worked on for how long. It ended with a Deus Ex: Human Revolution cinematic trailer, which I had actually never seen before.

It was so cool.

Right off the bat, J.F. reiterated a point that's been personally bugging me since last semester. He talked about an unannounced game he worked on for a few years that was apparently "awesome" as he put it. What happened to it? It got cut.

After years of production... production just... stops.

This happened with a game cut earlier this year nicknamed Project Copernicus that was being developed by 38 Studios. Before it was nixed, I was more excited for it than I was for Twisted Metal 2012 (this is a big deal). 

It's just a shame, you know? It's a damn shame. And it's not that rare for this to happen. I mean, these are not even close to the only two times a game has been cut while in production.

J.F. also lightheartedly talked about a game he worked on that was, as he put it, the worst game ever. Which only reinforces what our professors have been telling us senior year, I think. Our senior team game is the last creative thing we get to do, at least for a long, looong time. Rather, this is the last project we work on in which we have any choice. Sometimes, even if we won't like it at all, we'll have to work on a stupid, bad project. Them's the ropes.

I also learned a lot about the conceptual process and meshing as a team. For the first few months the Deus Ex team sat in a room and used sticky notes for their design ideas -- not even touching a computer. Interesting. And a complete contrast to what we're doing at Champlain. 

Mary talked about the story of Deus Ex, and how everything tells a story: game design, mechanics, art, etc. So everyone is telling the story: the designers, the artists, etc. In other words, not just the narrative designers and not just the cutscenes. This is something that matters a lot to me. Sometimes teams are so divided. Sometimes it's like they have nothing to do with each other, except all of their work is being Frankenstein mashed together into the same game. What are the chances of something like that being cohesive and good?

The lead designers at Eidos Montreal seem to understand this concept. It's not just one person's game. It's everyone's and everyone has their input. Everyone works together, and so every element of the game will work together. 

My game team in Production II last semester was pretty much the opposite of this. All the designers and I (I was the only artist on my team) worked as separately as possible in most cases. Part of the problem was that we didn't have a solid narrative design until three months in, and part of it was just not coming together as a team. In the end our game was not nearly as good as we wanted.

This year I have infinitely more hope for my team. Mageball is important to all of us, so we've all been working together constantly to get the outcome that we want from all elements. We also all happen to be friends and will be spending more time working together on everything.

I know I've talked a lot already, but there's more big news. Today Shadowpuppet Studios passed Stage One in production! Wooo! Thank you, thank you.

My team managed to whip up a new spell system, goal system, and 4-player prototype, which pushed us through. 

This new goal is a ring on a stand. It has a defense system that deactivates

if shot by the opposing team's attack, and regenerates over time. There is no goalie.

  
The new spell system, instead of being separated by a class of element (fire, ice, earth, air, etc.), is just free-to-pick. So, instead of picking the element Earth to get rock wall, rock armour, and slow time, a player would just pick individually, rock wall and whatever other spells they want. 

We also changed the spells to cater toward cooperative play. Some spells aid your team, and some hinder the other team. They also no longer "kill" a player, but make them fumble or slow down when their health is too low.

So the new unsorted/unclassified spells are that way to hint at a sports class system. Since some spells are offensive and some defensive, players may choose to play offense and pick all offensive spells, defense with defensive, or a mix.

You can also slam dunk if you run through the goal with the help of a teammate!

So while Chris, Alex and Bryan were working on all of that, I've been working on character modeling. Right now I'm sculpting in ZBrush.

 

I just want to make this clear: this is my first character model. So I'm... chuggin' along.

Thanks for reading Long Post: Extended Edition. Until next time! 

EDIT:

Long Post: Extended Edition Extra Content

I just wanted to update on what I've done on the character since I posted this evening.

This picture also shows the base character model from Maya (right) that I brought into ZBrush to start the sculpt. On the left is the "finished" sculpt (in quotes because I'll probably touch it up tomorrow).