GDC Week

We've been preparing for this dreaded week for a while now. The Game Developer's Conference in California stole away a bunch of the senior game devs. When we went into the labs to work this Sunday it was completely empty besides us, which was incredibly creepy considering the lab is usually full on the weekends. 

From our team, we're missing Sibyl, Kyle and Erin. Which means I'm the only official artist this week, and Alex is the only programmer.

I scheduled Sibyl to finish the character by this past weekend so I could use this week to just create a bunch of skins. There were some problems with the bake at first, apparently, so Chris had to fix it while Sibyl was gone. In the meantime, I decided to just finish up the new GUI and menus to have that out of the way and prepare for mass texturing for when my artists returned.

New menu screens! Alex made it so these fade out and switch every 60 seconds.

So it finally came to my attention after about seven months that health GUI is usually on the left side of a player's screen. I nearly headdesked I felt so stupid. I don't know how I didn't notice that before.

I switched the health/mana potion bottles to the left side of the screen. Alex, Chris and I stared at the GUI and debated for a while what the "background" of the potion bottle GUI should be. You know how it had that mage at the corner of the screen before? We decided to ditch that. There was really no reason to have it, and it was just taking up space. 

Again, I wanted to keep the GUI looking more simple than shiny, busy, or complex. I feel like this is not even something that's an opinion, because I've looked at tons of FPS screenshots for examples or inspiration, and all games have really basic UI. I mean it's usually white and another colour, and simple icons and numbers. This isn't something that needs to be complicated. It just needs to get the point across.

Although I realize the concern with just going with simple, I guess. We don't want the UI to look boring or nondescript. I don't want it to seem like I just went into Illustrator and made circles as a last-minute throw-away task either. The fact of the matter is, GUI is just usually not that complicated. And it doesn't need to be. 

Anyway, after Chris finished the character I got a few skins done. It went a lot quicker than I thought. Thankfully, I was actually smart about this and did it in such a way that the colours are layered. This way I can export from 3D Coat as a .PSD file with the layers in tact and just play with the colours as I please in Photoshop. It makes it a lot easier to make an ice uniform a fire uniform, and just change colour palettes in general. It also makes it possible to just layer the different patterns over a base design, so I don't have to paint everything all over again. Yay!

Our mage is lookin' cute. :)

Also, thank god for Chris Sydell. He's been such a savior. Since we had a new character, we needed new animations. Doing all of the animations all over again was going to be a huge task. I asked if it was possible for the animations to just transfer to the new character, but I got a No. But then Chris managed it and then suddenly we had all of our animations back in one night. PHEW!

I am totally ready for this week to be over. I don't think you understand how stressful it is to be missing all of my 3D artists this week when we only have two weeks to fully complete the game... Wish us luck PLEASE!

Whitedagger Pass

This week was definitely a busy one for us. Especially us artists. We worked our butts off to get Whitedagger Pass art complete so we could get ready to work on the Drago Mines.

As Sibyl and Kyle were churning out models, I was churning out textures, and the level designers were putting everything together very nicely. It was kind of a messy process, simply because the assets were getting in late. We were all kind of scrambling and pulling late nights just to get it done. As Chris was getting his models and terrain done, he was asking for impromptu textures for different kinds of snow. I also had to jump in and do a few models because everyone else was so busy with everything!

Sibyl did an amazing job with the buildings for Whitedagger. Oooh are they beautiful! These were much better than I even expected. She really went above and beyond to not only make them look good, but they also fit together in different modular ways, and there's also a great variety (so it's not just one building model scaled up or down). 

I knew the textures had to be spot on for the buildings. The colour palette was crucial, because Whitedagger Pass -- being primarily ice and snow -- is a mostly blue/white level. It was vital that the colours of the structural elements around the level -- like wood beams, stairs, and buildings -- were perfect accents to the overwhelming blue and whiteness.

I made a bunch of different colour palettes and applied them to the buildings and presented them to the group. After some voting, it became pretty clear that the buildings had to be brown to contrast the snow and ice. I kept some elements blue for decorative-detail-accent purposes. Making the buildings all brown would just be too monotonous. 

Here are all the building pieces together!

Also here was my brick texture that you see everywhere:

This started as cubes in Maya, which I brought into ZBrush to sculpt. I then exported the high poly models back into Maya and arranged them in a brick pattern. I projected those high poly models onto a plane to create a normal map.

After Whitedagger got its extreme makeover, a group of us headed to the labs to take screenshots and enjoy our pretty level. We ended up taking like 200 screenshots all together, because we needed a really good one to put in our Senior Book.

This year, Champlain is sending out a Senior Book for recruiters interested in our graduates. We did personal ones which pretty much acted as resumes, and then we had to do one for our games. 

I know this is going to benefit me later on, and the faculty is just trying to make it easier/better for recruiters to hire us, but sometimes it feels like this stuff is getting in the way. I know Alex (primarily) is working on this document, and he barely has enough time to do the other work he's supposed to be doing. Stress doubles every time you have something new to work on. 

Anyway, we also released an art spotlight video on YouTube for the new Whitedagger Pass. Here it is: 

Furthermore, I did some work on fire level assets that Kyle started work on. We've still got a TON of stuff to do. It's a good thing we dropped that third map...

Spring "Break"

If there's one thing I've learned in college, it's that breaks are always too short. Even when they're three months long.

Over break, I planned on getting all of our menu assets done so that when I came back, I could fully focus on our texture art. Another thing I've learned about break: there's always a lot of stuff to do that isn't schoolwork. I didn't get ALL of it done, but I was happy with what I did get done.

Start Game Screen

Before, we had little banners that just had the name of the spells and then you would pick your team. It was uuuglyyy. We needed something that was 1.) prettier, and 2.) had more information.

We had to let the players know what the spells' mana costs were. We also thought it would be good if players could see what other players have joined the game, which team they were on, and the spells they have chosen. 

The two spells chosen will have the glow effect pictured here. The team picked will glow (as the fire team is here), and then the "Ready" button will be active so the player can join the game. Not pictured is a little mana pot with the mana cost right next to the spells. 

QA testers apparently enjoyed the new menu art, and were pleasantly surprised when this popped up instead of our old, bad banner buttons.

The other artists were working hard over break trying to get all of the assets for the ice level complete by Sunday so I could get to texturing as soon as I came back from break.

Sibyl's stag statue came out AMAZING!

I hand-painted the stag in 3D Coat.

The stag in-engine with Chris's master shader that allows for translucency.

Looking majestic huh?

Kyle's done a lot of assets, and here's what I've textured so far:

Wall banners to put around the level and show team pride!

Torch for the ice level.

A brazier cleverly themed for the ice mage's stag.

Creating Myran

Myran is the name of the world our fire and ice mages live on. It's been quite an adventure translating our narrative designer, Matt's, stories and lore into artwork.

I posted my progress on the map of Myran I did last week. The map is nearly done, but now comes the tedious work. With the help of Erin, and uniSWF, each name of a place on the map will become a button that (when hovered over) will give a little description of the area.

Current progress. May need some more little details, but it is mostly finished.

You may be surprised to learn that this takes a buttload of time. For every name on the map, I have to bring it into Flash to create two states for every button (one for when it is not being hovered over, and one for when it is being hovered over) and save them out. Then we have to make sure the names are back in the correct spaces on the map so it looks good. The Flash work itself takes a couple hours. Reconfiguring the map through programming might be a little difficult.

Anyways, unfortunately, we ran into some issues with uniSWF. The in-game GUI was glitchy and would disappear if the screen was minimized. For now, we had to take it out of our build until the programmers figure out and fix what's wrong. So I'm actually creating buttons for a system that we're not 100% sure is going to work yet. Cross your fingers!

Other than that, I grabbed some models from Sibyl that she had finished and painted them so they were all set to go into Unity. 

Ooo rocks.

These are a couple of "rock piles" that are going to be reused throughout the ice level. Having these assets will help the level designers and artists work together to break up the space and define it better.

We also got some of the whiteboxed buildings and other elements into the engine. 

These images are from last week.

Believe me, when you're running around in the environment, it feels a lot different than it did when it was just boxes... Especially with the proper lighting. 

With lighting. (Also from last week.)

In other news, Spring Break is coming up! Most of us aren't going to get much of a break though. I plan on finishing the majority of the menu stuff so when I get back, I can focus on textures.

... And now that I think about it, it's not really going to be spring either. Hmmm.

Hats

This week I finally got into jumping around to different kinds of art. I'm wearing a lot of hats this semester, being the designated 2D artist on the team. I have to take care of in-game UI, menus, concepts, and as many textures as I can handle. I also have to work with pretty much everybody else on the team to make sure the art is up to par and efficient for our pipeline.

For Alex, this week, I did some in-game UI changes. Ever since we switched over to keyboard and mouse controls, we've gotten endless complaints from QA Testers that they couldn't tell what spells they had queued. I scrapped the "book" UI that displayed what secondary spells are chosen and replaced it with something a bit sleeker that displays all spells (including primaries) and which are queued to cast. 

I stole this screenshot from Chris. We also have new spell effects!

The primary spells needed "symbols," as did the two new spells we added this week. In addition to our other secondary spells, we now have:

Snare - Creates a glyph on the ground that traps enemy mages and holds them in place.

Buddy Shield - A channeled spell that mages can cast on their teammates that shields the teammate from damage.

UI always takes a lot longer than I anticipate because I forget how long it takes to save everything out. I have to save out the stationary "background" (the circles), and then all of the symbols out separately. And not only that, but I have to save a "big" version out and a "small" version of each spell. AND there is a fire and ice version of everything.

Let this blog serve as a reminder that saving UI elements out takes forever!!!

Also, to make Alex's life easier, I saved it out in such a way that everything has the same amount of space.

This is the UI all together (in Photoshop). (The checkered pattern represents transparency, by the way.)

This is what I save out for the background asset.

And then this is what one of the spell assets looks like. This way, placement of these assets does not have to be programmed in. When a programmer brings this into game and puts it all together, it automatically fits together. Had I cropped the spell assets, Alex would have needed to position the asset himself, wasting time.

I also had to do a "sample" texture this week, for my fellow artists. Inevitably, I'm not going to be the only one doing textures because of time restraints. The other artists wanted to see what we were going for in terms of textures when the time comes for them to do some. Also, it's just important for all of us to know what we're aiming for.

This is the pillar in Maya. Painted in 3D Coat.

This is the pillar in engine. (Also stolen from Chris. :D)

On Sunday, we celebrated getting the first "finished" asset into the game. (I put finished in quotes because touchups will need to be done.) We all got super excited to see more assets make it into game.

I'm going to be working closely with Erin for menu art, and I started on finalizing some things for the lobby menu today. 

We're going with a Tolkein-style map for the map-selection. Players will be able to scroll over all of the areas and a little blurb with info/lore will pop up, too.

... It's just a matter of figuring out how this uniSWF stuff works and how to save out my buttons. Cropping in Flash is already a pain, but I'm even more unsure how to do it when a button's hover/on state is bigger than its off state*.

So Erin and I are going to meet sometime and go over uniSWF together so we are both on the same page about things. Working with programmers is actually a really important thing that game artists have to learn. Especially with Flash, naming conventions** and consistency are essential. If the artist doesn't know, the programmer's gonna get pissed.

Oh and before I forget, I did some concept work and gave the mages a little makeover last week.

I did these just to get some ideas out for some customization we could do. Do you love Christmas sweater mage? Me too. He wears it because his nana knitted it for him.

Anyways, until next week, readers!

*Hover/On and Off States: A "button" is a certain kind of movieclip that you can make in Flash. Its "off state" is what the button looks like when your cursor is not on it. Its "on state" is when your cursor is over it.

** Naming Conventions: A naming convention is how you literally name something or save it out as. Something common for artists, when we're doing artwork, is to name our first save project_001; our second project_002; etc... This way they save in chronological order and it stays organized. For buttons, it is common to save them out as "BTN_play", "BTN_save", "BTN_quit", etc...

Kickin' it into High Gear

We're all very aware that we're rushing headfirst toward our deadline. Why can't time just go slower for the next couple of months? Two months is not a lot of time to get from where we are to where we want to be. But we expected this.

This Sunday was a lot of discussion. I met with the artists and let them know that we are going to have harder deadlines so we can really start to churn out assets. We also talked about methods and technical issues like modularity* and particle effects**. 

I got started on some menu concepts. I feel like menu artists and menu art are probably the least appreciated of game artists (maybe technical artists are). Even I admit that menus aren't really something you really think about until you try making one. Menus are the part of the game that are totally necessary, but aren't the game, so they're extremely overlooked.

Well I'll tell you now, menu/UI creation is hard! 

These are the bare bones concepts I've done.

The Player Customization screen, where players can customize what their ice character and fire character will look like in-game. They can also put in their username and number.

The lobby screen. Multiplayer games usually have lobbies where all players join up before the game starts. Here, the host picks the map (time limit, and number of players). Players can also see each other and talk to each other. And yes, that is a map of Middle Earth.

A lot of this was also just discussion between Alex, Chris and I about the information that needs to be provided and a lot of technical things. It's my job, basically to structure and decorate the information in such a way that makes it intuitive to the player and easy to look at (if not fun to look at).

These are some new in-game UI concepts I did just for the hell of it. I remembered getting some complaints about the current one from someone, although I can't remember who. The only thing I would change about the current one is adding in a timer, an indicator that tells the player what half the game is in, and some polish. But I did these anyway just to see what would happen.

The left one is an asymmetrical idea that reflects the architecture of the two different mage groups. The banners are inspired by environmental elements we're working on. The right one is basically what we have now, only the timer is integrated through banners that hang down. If the left banner is hanging down, it means the game is in the first half. If the right one is down, the game is in the second half. I expected players might get confused by this, but also argued that if someone brand new to football saw football on TV one day they'd have no clue what was happening. (Funfact: I'm 21 and just learned how football works this past Superbowl...)

The team liked the left one more, and also suggested that we don't need an indicator to tell players what half the game is in. I disagree for a couple reasons. 1.) I feel like all games state the obvious for one reason or another. Fighting games tell players what round their in and how many wins each player has. This is not to mention sports games, which always have an indicator of what quarter/period/half the game is in. 2.) Players just joining the game wouldn't know unless they had an indicator, asked, or just waited out the timer to see if the game went into half-time or ended.

The left one also takes up too much space. Here's what I notice when I look at game UI: UI artists make a point to save screen space. Sure, UI looks good, but it's almost always just sleek and to the point. We've looked at Team Fortress 2 before, but let's look again.

Notice how the UI is pretty much just rectangles and information? I looked at a few games, and all of them had simple shapes and numbers (pretty much). I'm all for cool-looking, fancy schmancy 2D art, but this is not the place to do that. UI is for feeding players information at a quick glance. I saved as much space as I could with the UI last semester, but I still feel like it takes up too much space. Not only that, but I have to add more information to it. I think this is where we need to sacrifice nice drawings for, well, rectangles.

This takes a lot of finagling, but you can count on me to figure it out! 

Until next time. 

P.S. We totally passed greenlight and celebrated at Longhorn Steakhouse.

* Modularity - a technique game artists use that allows assets to be reused and "fit" together. Good example of a modular set for a church: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/medieval-church-modular-set-3d-ma/639363

** Particle Effects - game engines can create these animations for many different uses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_effect

Greenlight

Greenlight is essentially our "stage challenge" this semester. Techincally, we are in pre-production right now, and need to pass greenlight to make it into production. We need to get to a point where our teachers trust us enough to move us into production... But honestly, it doesn't really change much. (We're going to do the work anyway.)

We're presenting our greenlight challenge on Wednesday, and our whole team has some stuff to get done before then. On the art side of things, we needed some (at least) concepts of environment artwork. Marc needs to be sure that we can decide on a direction and get assets churned out. We also need to make sure we're constantly talking to the narrative designer, to make sure we're all telling the same story with our art. We had some problems talking about the animal logos in class this last week, so we needed to sort that out.

Kyle concepted some new logos and his girlfriend mocked them up in Illustrator. 

Kyle wanted to bring that modern day sports theme to what we had come up with. I thought it was a great idea. There were some nitpicky things people pointed out that we went over today, but other than that these were great.

However, some of the designers pointed out that having the animal logos in the level and the fire and ice logos in the GUI would be confusing for players. They wouldn't necessarily draw the connection between the two. While I don't think that would be an issue, or even if it would matter that much if players didn't understand right away, I was fine with scrapping the animal logos altogether. So basically we had to pick between the animal logos or the element logos.

I thought this was kind of silly, so I brought it to the art team again. The good thing about Casey's animal logos is that they have both the animal and the fire and ice symbols. Kyle brought up that actual sports teams have multiple logos they use. The Boston Bruins of the NHL have their "B" logo, circle logo, as well as a bear logo. What we could do is break the logos into pieces if we needed. So sometimes we could just use the snowflake, or sometimes we can just use the stag. As long as the fire symbol above the phoenix's head is the same fire symbol in the GUI, it should be fine.

I also mentioned that, while these coloured versions were awesome, I do like the idea of having simplified versions. So maybe silhouettes? We also made some other nitpicky suggestions to Casey and she fixed them right up for us. 

What we have here are three-toned, two-toned and one-toned versions of our logos. These could be used on jerseys as a customizable option, and in the environments on banners, not to mention the GUI. I think these turned out great and it will be fun to see these in the level and on the characters.

As far as environments go, at this stage I just think it's wise to keep putting out as many concepts as possible. That way we can have a collage of our own work to pick and choose from. The more ideas, the better. And the more angles of the levels, the better.

I drew over Rob's whitebox of the ice map for this. I just wanted to get a feel of what we want to go for. I think the first piece of concept work is always the hardest because it's when you have to make the most decisions on the spot. Afterward, you kind of just already have a feel of what you're going for so you feel a bit more free to just do it.

I also go to working on even more goal concepts, because we were dissatisfied with just having one. 

Kyle suggested floating rocks would be really cool and magicky, and I was like, "Totally." We wanted to play with the geometry a bit too, and see what our possibilities are for embellishment or marking the goals. We want the goals to stand out, because they're pretty much the target for the players. We want the target to be easily identifiable and easy to see. Kyle played around in Maya with primitive shapes too, just for more ideas.

Everything is kind of in the "in progress" stages right now. Kyle and Sibyl are working on rock sets so we can start filling the levels in with not-whitebox art. Kyle has also started working on the goals.

I'm jumping around a lot, so I think I'm going to need to get started again on menu concepts since our programmers are ready for art for that.

I can't wait to see our art as it's being placed in the levels. The levels are interesting and fun to play now, but as we start getting art in, the game will really start to come alive.

I'm Back

"But Sam, where did you go?"

I went to flu-land, where most of Champlain's student body went this week! This horrible cold-fever-flu thing is making its way around campus and eventually got to me. It was one day of complete agony followed by four days of just not feeling good.

While I was absent, apparently Marc noticed some disconnect within our team and our vision. This is a huge issue. We all have to have a big picture of where we're going, and we should all know what the end result of our game is going to resemble. Class on Wednesday, apparently, reflected that we were a bit disjointed.

Alex met with Marc on Friday to talk about things, and also with the other leads to nail down exactly what we want in Mageball by the end of the semester. I laid in bed and drank a hundred cups of tea.

Yesterday, I was finally feeling like a person again (instead of just a pile of sickness). So today, I was ready and able to show up for our usual Sunday meeting. We started out by gathering in an empty classroom. Alex led the meeting, going over all the changes we were making and all the decisions the leads made. By the end of it we had a full list of everything Mageball was going to have.

Also by the end of it, we had decided that Sibyl was changing to part-time character modeler and full-time environment artist. Marc had suggested this, because our game cannot be released with no/crappy environments. Technically, we already have a character. It's just not good. So right now, Sibyl has to do environment work until we are in a comfortable place. Luckily, she had no problem with this at all.

I had an artist meeting with them right after to talk about things, and we were all brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. Sibyl, Kyle and I work very well together, and after today I believe our environments are going in a great direction.

Environment artists usually work closely with the narrative designers to develop a world that feels like people actually live there. We want our maps to have personality and feel like different cultures inhabit these places. These places should tell a story through the art we put in. So, we talked a lot this week about the narrative. We didn't want to step on Matt's toes and change the narrative design on him, but there were some things we wanted to stay away from.

The story was that the "ice tribe" worshipped wolves and the "fire mages" worshipped dragons. While there is a lot we could do with that, we thought it to be a bit cliche. We listed out a bunch of animals we could replace those with and settled on a stag for the ice mages, and phoenix for the fire mages.

I also mentioned that I wanted to stray from asian architecture. Our game was already being compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender non-stop, and we don't need to draw anymore connections. I also just wanted to step in the fantasy direction more.

After Matt presented his narrative to us, I kind of started to picture both cultures as elves. The fire elves lust for power and wealth. The ice elves are more self-absorbed and concerned about beauty. For other geeks reading: fire are basically Blood Elves of Warcraft lore, and ice would probably be Lothlorien elves of Lord of the Rings lore.

Going in this direction, I spent a lot of time just looking at references.

I know this is hard to see, sorry!

For the fire map, or "Crystal Caverns," I looked up a bunch of statues of phoenixes, general cave references, and pillar references. We decided, to reflect the fire mages and make the map more interesting, we had to have some ornate stone pillars and archways. There should also be statues in key places around the level. Making a collage of references is just a good way to look at everything at once, which should give us one combined idea of what to do.

Again, this is hard to see. Our other level designer, Rob, has been working on the ice mages home field and posted a picture from Guild Wars 2, suggesting a direction we could go in. 

Temple of Silent Storms, Guild Wars 2

We were all totally on board with this idea. One problem us artists believed ice environments have is that they're always too blue. Making this a nighttime scene and adding fire, along with wooden architectural elements, would balance the scene in an interesting way. We also loved the torn banners in this reference, although we were already going to have those.

So basically I was looking for references on how to do ice and snow structures, snowy scenes with wooden or fire elements, and general references for architecture.

We also have to redo the goals. We decided they should be rock, because rock can go in any envrionment, so it would make sense if in any level. This means we only have to  do one goal asset, which is a good thing. Sibyl made a simple napkin-drawing of an idea she had for a goal and I ran with it.

We stuck with the "ring-on-a-pole" idea. The added banners would mark which goal it is, as well as the runes etched into the ring. The runes would be what powers the "portal" inside of the goal (Kyle's idea).

Working off of the new animal ideas for the mages, I did some logo work. Logos are an important part of sports teams. They could be used on jerseys or banners, or pretty much anywhere on the fields.

I'm really aware that I'm not a graphic designer.

I I like the simplicity of these types of logos. They can be usedf stfusedused anywhere as a sort of "stamp" to markp" mark territory.ry. I want to make one for "Fire" and "Ice" too.