Long time no....see?

Wow I can't believe how long it's been since I've last posted on here. Well to be fair it's only been a little over month, but it feels like far longer than that, things are getting pretty crazy at the moment. Lots of work, uni has started being open until 9pm, meaning I am there from 8am - 9pm most days of the week for the next 8 weeks. So I apologise in advance if I don't write for a while.

So we have an exposition over in the mailbox where we showed off a video of our game, still though I best not say anything about it, just in case.

The reason things are getting pretty hectic at the moment is that we have a lot of work to do for our game, constantly re-scoping, but it's looking promising now. Also as it's getting close to the end of the course I'm having to start working intensely on my portfolio so that I may start applying for some jobs. Hopefully come the end of the month I will have a portfolio worthy of applying for junior artist jobs.
So I've decided to work on small projects in my spare time, right now I have decided to model a pistol. I started it last night and hope to be done by the end of the weekend, obviously I don't have much time in the evenings but as I'm not getting any work at the restaurant I have more time on the weekends. Anyway this is about 1-1.5 hrs of work [though it could be less as I'm often having conversations online at the same time as I model haha]

The Old Earth

So hello again, long time no... speak?
Well I've been buried with uni work, as always, and this is going to be like this until at least the end of August. It's all good though, keeps me busy and keeps me learning so much. It's rather funny that before starting this course I had only knowledge or 3D studio max, and I liked to think I was quite good with it; but for this course I have had to learn how to use Maya for our game, which was something I was a bit sceptical about because I did not want to learn something new when there was already something I could do and could improve with. That's not to say it was a bad idea, in fact I actually love it now; besides random crashes and battling with it on a daily basis, it's actually such a powerful software with such an intuitive UI, you can tell that this was designed by an artist where Max most probably by a programmer. So as I was saying, what's funny is that now I feel I am pretty efficient with Maya, but when I try to go back into Max it all feels so alien and I feel uneasy with it. Ah pretty ironic that my views have totally turned 180 degrees.

Anyway back to this post... As you saw in my last post I am doing some side projects to boost up my portfolio. That last one still needs a lot of work as I feel it is not particularly inspiring, but nonetheless I've had to get going on this next one, so it is something I will go back to on a later date.
This current project is based on the theme 'The Old Earth'; in fact I was given a choice of 3 to go with, with the other two being 'The Alchemist' and 'The forgotten realm'. So what I decided to model is an old carrack (old sailing ship back from the days of the pirates), with most of my references coming from a particular ship named 'Roter Lowe', a Dutch vessel which was big and mighty in its day. Working this kind of project is great, and references are not only good for helping you with you models, but the research also allows you to understand what you are modelling and learn about it; and at the end of the day the reason I love to travel is because I love to learn new and exciting things, so this is a way for me to do that during those times I cannot travel...fantastic :D

So this is still a work in progress but I figured I would treat you to a couple of images to show you where this is going.
The ship is actual size and is something which could be used as an environment piece in a game as it is quite low poly [under 7000 poly at the moment], but I plan to stick it in a bottle [which I will also show you the image of so you can see how pretty it is]. Which eventually will go onto a desk full of other well detailed models, which will eventually turn out to be a desk in a captain's cabin [which the idea is that it is the cabin inside the ship which is in the bottle which is on the desk within said cabin; aaaah craaaazy, it's like inception....but with ships]

Viewport screenshot of the Roter Lowe

Render of the view of from the previous image

The Roter Lowe inside its bottle

They Landed

It's been a while but here comes a proper post again, aah finally!

I have been on an Easter break now for two weeks and despite what that usually means, time to relax and enjoy lots of food and chocolate before going back to uni, I've actually been working quite a lot [still eating lots of food though of course]. I went home for a weekend and have been working at my job and the rest of the time I have been working on a portfolio project which I have been set by my tutor.

So in this project I've been asked to create an immovable prop based on the theme 'They Landed', which can be interpreted in any way.
It must also meet the following constraints:
- It must contain no more than 2500 polygons/5000 Tris
- Must use no more than a single 2048px texture [or 4 x 1024px textures]
- The scene must be no bigger than 5m x 5m

Some of the ideas which I thought of was something about aliens landing, the moon landings, aircraft landing on a carrier, D-Day landings. So I have decided to do the project based on the D-Day landings. The scene is of a machine gun from inside a German bunker looking out with the sky in view.

I have actually just finished this project, so I here a few screenshots that shows process of my modelling, right through to the finished thing.

Overview of the scene layout

Blocked out scene view

How the machine gun's barrel is modelled

Machine gun added to the scene

Final in software render

Mental Ray render

Diffuse textures used [4 x 1024px textures]

Specular textures used [4 x 1024px textures]

Well it has been a while since I have posted on here. As you can imagine I have been very busy over the last few months with our very exciting final project. Unfortunately I cannot divulge any information for you just yet.
I have been working on some other projects on the side. My tutor has started setting us little projects we can do at home, every two weeks. This is a great idea as it allows me to keep on improving my skills [I plan to go back to 3DS Max, seeing as I work in Maya at uni, so that I will not forget how to use it].

Anyway I will keep you updated on here with how it is coming along [when I get home I will update with where I am on my current project; based on the theme 'They Landed'. I will give description and screenshots in my next post.

I would like to call on anybody who may actually be following my blog. I am doing some research on games to find out what people like and expect from games. I would really appreciate it if you would take just a moment to complete this little survey, please. [Come on, it's only 12 questions long :P ]

Click here to take the survey. Thank you

Agent 17 - The game

Soooo it's been a while, and truthfully that is because I have been on a christmas break and so have not had much to tell. I decided to wait before writting up my first post, instead of straight away since being back, and the reason for that is two-fold;
1) We have just started a new project last Monday, so it has literally only been 3 days at the time of writting this; and unfortunately I am not going to be able to tell you anything about it as this time I will be keeping it a secret.
and 2) I have been waiting for the spy game, which I have been telling you about over the past couple of months, to be published.

So here it is, the good news is that Agent 17 is now officially published and available on the App Store to download for free for the iPad:

Agent 17: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/agent-17/id494250834?mt=8

This is very exciting news for me as this is my first published game, technically I am in the industry now... and hopefully come next September I will be able to say the same but with more pride and an actual paid job on my hands.

I hope that some of you, at least, are owners of an iPad or know somebody with one and are able to download and play Agent 17. If anybody does play it I would love to hear what you have to say about it, so don't hesitate to message me or leave a comment telling me what you thought of it.

My first potentially published game - part II

So I thought I would carry on in another post as the other one was getting a little bit long.

As I was saying the final week was particularly stressful as, after having been responsible for the two characters in the game which took a lot of work, I was then given responsibility of creating the main boss room as I seemed to have a better vision of how it would work (I was originally tasked with creating the lift shaft, which would have been nice and tillable... making it a little easier). The difficulty with the main boss room is that there are a lot of bespoke tiles. I had to work hard at trying to find a way of making as many tillable assets as possible without losing the flow of the level. This took a lot of back and forth; modelling, rendering, putting into spritesheets and testing in game before realising it doesn't work and having to do it again. Eventually I got there and the whole room (though larger than the screen size in both vertical and horizontal) still managed to fit onto a single sprite sheet, leaving plenty of room for extra objects which the player would be able to run behind, giving the illusion of depth within the level.
By the Tuesday, the day before the final submission deadline, I had the whole level planned out and mostly rendered that night (at 3am). But there was still something missing, it all looked very nice but the top platform just did not quite look finished, and so the whole Wednesday was spent making that look right. For this I re-used Simon's corridor that he had done previously in the level. Unfortunately he had modelled it very simply and added a whole host of detail within photoshop, meaning that it was not a case of importing the models and rendering it, making it nice and easy, but instead I had to take the final images from the spritesheet and adjust them in photoshop to get them to look and feel right within the boss room. This required a LOT of tweaking to make it work as I needed them to be tiling all the way across, but in the spritesheet thee corridor just ran once, therefore meaning they did not need to tile fully. This was a very long and frustrating process, but in the end I got there.

This is the last render that I took, but unfortunately it does not include any of the work from the final day as that was all done in Photoshop and put directly into a spritesheet.

Please bare in mind that this has no post-processing applied to it and is purely a render view image.

We are trying to find a way of getting the whole game into a video, which is made difficult as game is for the iPad. We may have a video to show you when we get back to uni in January. Otherwise I will try to get an in-game screenshot for you all to see, as this image does not do justice to the actual final outcome. There are a few things I would have liked to have added in there, or have done differently if I had more time, or if it was not made for a 2D platform game, but I will keep those to myself for now. ha ha!


EDIT: Quickly pieced together what I had, though clearly isn't the finished article as there are some files which I do not hhave with me, and therefore cannot update the level completely. But roughly...

Click on the image to enlarge

My first potentially published game

Yes I agree with you too, it has been a long while since I've wrote anything here but it's for a good reason. We had a guest come in for a day; a certain Matt McDaid, lead artist on Brink. This day was brilliant as Matt is in a position where I would like to find myself someday, he gave us invaluable feedback on our current work, gave a casual presentation/talked us through his portfolio which was exceptionally good and included some of the work he had done for the Star Wars game that had the plug pulled out after 2 or 3 years of production. As it turns out Iain was Matt's mentor back when they worked together at Free Radical, which is really great as I now find myself looking up at Iain as my mentor.
Anyway during that time and for another couple weeks after that we were in full production and so was working whenever I had the slightest amount of free time, therefore not really capable to update you guys (plus Matt asked us not to say anything for a little while, so had to wait. And considering Gamer Camp have put up photos on facebook, I'm guessing it's fine now).

So we have now finished the game and it really is beautiful, everybody on the team has done a remarkable job. I do have to say that the last week was particularly stressful, at least for me. I had been responsible for the modelling, texturing, rigging and animations of the main character (the spy), and then had to take over the enemy ass they looked very different. Luckily enough Simon had already modelled and textured and quickly rigged him for a walk cycle, so I did not have to start from scratch, which was nice. Though I did need to take the model into mudbox to add a bit more form to the model (back of the head was a bit flat, and added a more significant jawline) and also add more detail, such as muscle definition on the arms which would be baked into a normal map, so as to get the clone to match the art style of the spy. Afterwards I needed to tweak colours on the diffuse map, and some of the weights on the rig before I could start animating. As I had previously spent a good couple of weeks animating the spy the animation process for the clone went a lot quicker and smoother, which was nice.
Finally we had two characters in-game which looked like they belong in the same world:

(to be continued in the next post...)

Re-scoped

Well first of all I'd like to appologise, if anybody has been following my blog, for the sudden lack of posts and also how long I am waiting between each one.
As I mentioned in my last post we have been in the production phase for our new spy game game for the past couple of weeks, and with having milestone deadlines set each week (and they've not been the same day of the week each time either) it means that it has been rather stressful with trying to get everything done by each certain deadline. In fact I've been submitting animations for the main character each deadline, and yet it was only yesterday that I actually had all of the animations finished, rendered and spritesheeted to the standard at which they are going to be in-game.
Granted we had to have some animations in for testing purposes, and also for review purposes, but I felt like I had been wasting a lot of time putting things into spritesheets not only for testing purposes but also to keep the programmers happy;

1) they, and when I say they I mean Ollie mostly, needed some visual representation to see exactly how the player was moving, and as he is responsible for the main character coding-wise, as I am with the animations, there is only so much you can take of looking at red boxes with dots and numbers on them.

and 2) they kept telling me that they needed to know exactly how long and where each animation would be place on each spritesheet. In a sense I can understand that as it's always good to try to keep as organised as possible, but on the other hand a lot of the animations had still not been done; And the thing about sprite animation is that you can get them looking as smooth and nice as you want when modelling them in 3D, but essentially they will always look different once made into 2D sprites. This makes it very difficult to estimate exactly how many frames each animation should be, which co-insidently has an impact on the position of the following animations as they have to be moved across.

So anyway just to break up this text a bit I will show you a quick 'action' screenshot of the spy. Bare in mind that since this screenshot was taken he has been tweaked and is also rendered from a totally different direction;
AND obviously he is just holding a placeholder gun, HA!




Our Spy caught sneaking with a fake-gun, whoops!

Anyway like I said this is not the final look as the diffuse map has changed a little (his hair was made to look better, he has been given some, rather bushy, eyebrows and actually has a proper silenced pistol).

So yesterday was yet another deadline, the equivalent of Beta you could say, and so our game is looking a hell of a lot nice than at any other time. All of the spy animations are in, and some of the environment too. I also must add that the environments are looking sweeeeet as hell. Simon and Isaac really are going to town with it, as is Richard with his in the ninja team. Seeing them really makes me wish I was doing some environment stuff, more modelling, because now I am responsible for all the animations (the enemies included). This means that I'm basically not doing anymore modelling and not creating anything new, and essentially not doing anything in the area in which I want to be going in.
Doing the animations is good for a couple of things, though. First it allows me to learn something new and really improve myself in that area (well ok I'd done a little bit of animation before but I wasn't really very good);
and also when I get to see how the final animations look it is a great feeling to bring that character to life.
I would say that I'm hoping to have this done with a bit of time to spare to jump into the environment stuff for a couple of days, but somehow I really doubt that this will happen. We have practically 10 days to get everything done (possibly even less) and I still need to do all of the animations for the different enemies AND work at the restaurant weekends. Yikes :s

Just to quickly ellaborate on the title of this thread, basically the game has been re-scoped a number of times over the past couple of weeks and so is now very far from the original brief, which was a big push toget done in the time frame we have been given, and even bigger push to have got it to look good too. The new scope is basically to have a small but highly polished industry standard game to go on the app store which GamerCamp would be proud to be assossiated to, and we would be proud to present in our portfolio.

Please bare in mind that the are all old animations and the textures have been re-done, the animations tweaked and other various changes to it. But seeing as I haven't posted in a long time I thought I'd treat you to a GIF =P

A change in my methods

Ok so as you may have noticed I'm not posting quite as much as I used to. Truth is that I am very busy with my uni work and that everyday is pretty much the same thing as the previous. We have our list of tasks that we need to complete by each milestone (each milestone is pretty much the end of each week).

To put it quite vaguely we are all pretty much a little behind our tasks. This last week I was supposed to have the spy modelled, textured and rigged but all of these tasks took a lot longer than we had anticipated (we'd given e 2days to do all of that and it pretty much took the whole week, especially the weights painting which took a while and was a right pain in the ass).
So anyway that's pretty much done now, so hopefully we should be able to start animating him today.. Though we do still need to add some acessories, and I have no doubt that some of the weights may have to be re-painted. It's bound to happen.
But other than that everything is looking pretty sweet and we should end up with a nice game, although I have no doubts that we will probably have to drop some features.

Monday 14/10 - 3D at last, 3D at last... thank GOD almighty 3D at last

aaaah yes it's a play on words of MLK's speech, I've not doubt you worked that out yourself. Well as the title suggests today we've started modelling in 3D....in Maya, and I have to admit I'm starting to get the hang of it and I do quite like it, even if it did crash on me about 5 or 6 times today. Just have to keep on my toes and save all the time.
First thing today was to deligate tasks to each artist as to what we would be modelling for this week, and I am basically responsible for modelling the main spy character (which does include texturing and rigging for animation... daaaamn I hate rigging, but we all have to do it. And I suppose it's another skill where I could do with improving). This is pretty cool though as the spy is the main character and the one constant that will always be on the screen, meaning that it's kind of a big deal that I do it right; And as other people will be animating him too, it means that my mesh needs to be nice and tidy so that it's easy for the others to animate with it. This is good though, as it's throwing me right in there where I have to up my skills and work to a high level in order for things to go smoothly... oh and yes I've got other tasks such as creating doors and such.

Today did not start very well and I essentially wasted the first half of my day. I kept having problems with Maya, such as reference images moving whenever I panned a camera (which was a big ball-ache, but I managed to fix it by creating additional cameras with the images attached to them, which I then froze so they could not move). Finally I could start modelling my character, and I figured I'll use the box modelling technique as it's supposedly quicker and it's a method I've used before but don't find myself too comfortable with. It started off very well and I pretty much had the whole torse blocked out when..... BAM! maya crash. Ah it's ok you can just go back to a previously saved file and just redo the last bit, I hear you say; ah yes, well I'm an idiot because I have auto-save feature turned on but I never did an initial save, which means that I am left with nothing. NOOOOOOO!!!
Ok back to square one, this time I'm going to use another technique. I am going to start with 1 face and just extrude from there. This method can be a bit more complicate if you don't know what you are doing, but it's a lot more accurate and, in my case, a tad quicker.

So by the end of the day I had the torso blocked out, an arm with no hand and a leg stump. Beautiful! (oh I only have 1 of each because I am only modelling half of it and then will mirror the geometry when I am done). I've tested the mirror geometry and smoothed it, and I am rather happy with it. Tomorrow we will have a head, hands and feet and hopefully he will be all rigged up and ready to be animated with a beautiful texture to go with it... aaaaah getting somewhere now!

Thursday 10/11 - Preliminary results from module 1 with a touch of concepting

Right well like I mentioned in my previous post, today is the day that I get my preliminary results. I'm not going to beat around the bush here and just tell you that I received 67, 3 marks off a distinction. I have admit that when I first heard I was a little disapointed at being so close but not quit, I thought I may have done enough to reach my goal of the 70 mark, but it wasn't meant to be. Now don't feel too bad for me, I don't... in hindsight (yes, as we all know it's a wonderful thing) I think it's not so bad. OK it's not quite what I was aiming for but it's not far off at all, so it's not like I would need a miracle to turn it around and achieve an average of 70+ by the end of the year, just means I need to pull my finger out and start working even harder.
As I was told in my feedback, I can still step it up a gear or two and I know that. OK so I am making an effort and working a lot harder than I did on my Ba, but that's not exactly saying much. I think I have been staying within my comfort zone and trying to do well within it, rather than branching out and trying to better my skills in other fields.
We will see what this module brings, but already I know I have had o up myself in my drawing abilities. I know I'm not the best, I'm certainly nowhere near as good as the others on the course, but at the same time concept drawing is not where I want to go, but as long as I am improving at something each and every day then come the end of the course I will be somewhat better in almost all areas... and that can only be a good thing.

So anyway today was the last day of concepting but I still have a fair bit to do. Got quite a lot done and, after my feedback session, I got back to drawing but tried to step it up a little and push myself at using techniques that I was not so comfortable with in order to better myself in those areas. Weekend comes and I will be doing yet more drawing throughout. Can't wait for next week to start, 3D at last =D

Wednesday 11/11 - A summary of the last couple weeks

First of all would like to apologise for not posting for the last two weeks but do have a reason, of which I am going to tell you. As you may remember from my last post the space invaders project was done and dusted, the oral exam done and I had an extended weekend where I would write back my next post the following Monday.

Well I did have all the intentions of doing so but was halloween and ended up going out to have a couple drinks with the people I live with, so did not have any time to post. On that day we spent the whole day being briefed about the new game we would be working on over the following 6 weeks. I cannot tell you too much about this game as I realise that a lot gets changed over the course of production, and as this game may be published on the app store I'd rather not give you false information. Yes that's right, we are making a game for the iPad2 and have been split into 2 groups. I will tell you that we are both making platformers and that one team's main character is a ninja and the other team is a spy. So I am working on the spy team, we have 4 programmers and 3 artists in our group, whereas the ninja team have got 5 programmers and 2 artists.

Anyway onto Tuesday and the reason why I haven't posted in over a week. On this day I came into uni feeling slightly fragile but still capable of working. We were learning how to use Maya the afternoon before and were continuing the whole day Tuesday, and consequently the Wednesday too. Half way through the day I received a phone call from my mum informing me that my aunt had passed away; as I had no idea that she was even ill, this obviously came as a huge shock to me. I decided to stay in uni working, and also came in the following day, but it has to be said that it was all done with my mind a long way away from that room.

Thursday right after uni I took the train home, and then Friday I went to France with my mum to pay my respects at her funeral and spend a couple extra days with my uncle and cousins. This really did help to see that they could still have a good laugh with us, though I guess they had suspected that she was on her way out and had mentally prepared themselves, that's not to say it wasn't hard and very sad for them but I imagine they were in a way glad that she is not in pain anymore.

Anyway I came back on Monday night, and straight back to uni on Tuesday. Basically this whole week is being dedicated to concept drawing. This is where we put pen to paper and decide on the shapes of everything, from characters to ladders and environments. This is kinda fun as this is where you get to interpret the brief in any way you like, and you can come up with some very good concepts. So today has been spent the whole day concepting different ideas.

The interesting thing about today is that Emma (who was on my team) and Isaas the ninja were both switched around the groups today (remember don't get attached to your work as you may have to give it up some time) so a lot of the time today was spent bringing Isaac up to speed with our visual style.
Guess this kinda works out for us though, Emma did some amazing drawings for our spy and all the animations that will be needed; and now we have Isaac we will be getting some amazing environment drawings. I do have a suspicious feeling they will do this again through production, Richard the ninja will be swapped with either Simon or me. Oh well we will see.

Tomorrow I find out my preliminary results from my first project, so will keep you informed on those. Prob won't have much else to say as will be more concepting.

Tuesday 25/10 - Deadline day

Today was the deadline, and I wasn't actually as stressed or worries as I probably should have been. To be fair I'd pretty much finished all my art work the day before, all that was left for me to do was to just polish everything. I had even started working on all of the sounds for the game too, the reason being that I didn't think that the guys would have any spare time to do anything like this because they would probably be coding right up until 16:00.

It turns out that I was actually right, they did actually keep coding right up until the final minute. To be fair they managed to almost get everything done, they had done all the code but when it came to putting it all together there had been a bug and, as they'd left it to the very last minute, there was no time to do any bug fixing. So we had to revert back to the older version, which is still a nice playable game with sounds, but did not have all the fixes which had been worked on at the end. For example, Varun has coded the death animations for the enemy ships and it was looking real sweet and tied in well with the sound which I'd created for it but that had to go, as it was this bit that was buggy.

Basically my day today was spent being nervous for guys hoping they would get it all done in time, and just wandering around trying to figure out what else I can do to help, as most of what was left to do was coding. So I finished off all of the sounds, so now there are some nice sounds for everything, and they actually sound really good. Even though I had done all of the artwork required this does not mean that I had totally finished with it, I was still needed in a couple of areas: for example I had done separate sprite sheets (all the frames required for an animation on one image) required but it turns out that they needed them put together. So the enemy ship death sequences needed to be merged with the movement animations. This didn't really take all that long, but is still one of those things that would have been nice to know from the beginning... I know now though, even if they never really got to be used as we had to revert back and not include the death animations.

So 4pm come everything has been submitted and then we had to go get 'debriefed', so to speak. We basically gave feedback on the module, what we liked/didn't like and where it could be improved. We then did an exercise where we answered some questions about our game and how it was working on it (what we're happy with/ not happy with, where we would like to have done better etc...), we wrote the answers on a piece of flip chart paper and then went around the room to see what everybody else had wrote, and giving our opinion on what they could have done also. Was interesting to see most people suffered the same/similar problems (planning and communication being the big ones).
After that we spent maybe 30mins playing each other's games, and I went home to revise for my oral exam in the morning (I'm the second one in, so bright and early and not much time to revise... unlike those taking the exam Thursday afternoon, for example) so I figure those who weren't in until Thursday went out for drinks. Not all bad though, after I was done with my exam (around 10.45 or so) I was done and free until Monday... aah nice 2 days off until I have to go to work, LOVELY!

So you will not be hearing from me now until Monday. I will try to get a video or something of the game and how it looks/plays and I will post the link as soon as I have one. For now I will just give you a screenshot collection, you might not be able to see how the game plays, but at least you can see the artwork which, after all, is what I'm responsible for.

Have a nice week end y'all!

Top row: Main menu screen; Instructions screen; High-Scores screen (the shutter comes down from the top to the bottom); Game 'loading' screen.
Bottom row (all gameplay screenshots): First enemies to appear; Pause screen (move the ship and fire at the option of choice); wave 2, made up of asteroids which give you points if you shoot them but hurt you if you hit them; End of the wave, the purple enemies represent the last enemy of each wave and moves from left to right (original space invaders style) but disapears after a while, so hurry if you want all those points

Monday 24/10 - So close, but still so far

Tomorrow at 16:00 is the deadline for the first module meaning that I have less than 24hrs left until submission. When put like that it sure sounds scary as hell!

Still, I'm not actually worried; at least not for myself. I have pretty much done all the art work that is needed (if there is anything left it will be very small and probably not so noticeable) and as such have decided to start looking for sounds effects and background music; it is for Steven and Varun that I am a little worried. Don't get me wrong they have done a wonderful job and we actually have a working game and it looks really good; but there are a few creases that still need ironing out within the code, as well as adding sound to the game.
Ah yes sound, often left to the end and added to games as more of an 'after-thought' but it is a lot more important than most people think. It's not until you actually start playing your game with sounds that were not so thoughfully chosen that you realise how important it is. Especially with a game such as this where there is a lot of 'firing' going on, meaning a lot of repetitive sounds which can get very irritating to the player if not chosen carefully. Also Background music has to match to the theme of the game, and not to forget those little sound effects such as 'clicks' when swtiching between options; something which goes unnoticed when done well, but is picked up straight away and becomes irritating if done badly.
I am trying to convince the guys that getting the sound to work in the game correctly is a lot more important than adding extra screens such as the 'instructions screen' (particularly for assessment, as this game will be not officially published), as that is something they have already shown they can do, and are more likely to lose marks for not implementing sounds than an extra screen with instructions.
Not all is lost, though, and I do remain hopeful that they will figure it all out in time and that we will have something that is a lot of fun to play; and this is why I will be spending all night looking for numerous sounds and using audio editors to try to get different sounds so that when it comes to adding them tomorrow we will have a good choice to pick from.

There are still a few bugs to be fixed and minor problems which would be difficult and probably quite long winded if I tried to explain them, but believe me when I say that I highly doubt that our game will be completely bug-free come 16:00 tomorrow.

Oh and I think I forgot to mention, we will be showcasing our game to everybody right after the deadline tomorrow.... so no pressure! Ah well, at least I know the art is pretty much done, although I am not very happy with the current look of the menu buttons and so may look at changing them (maybe I will polish it a little more if I get the time tonight... though it may mean not getting much sleep).


+++ Just to keep the main blog page looking interesting, I will show you a little screenshot+++

Thursday 20/10 - Review day #2

So here is it, the second review day (also known as the Alpha stage). All of our work had to be submitted onto perforce yesterday by 18:00 but was still in this morning nice and early to work on gathering all the correct files and put them in a folder to show Iain during my 1on1 so that I don't start searching amongst my 1gb+ worth of files that I've created so far (yes I know that's crazy big, but I tend to save a lot of different versions of files, and I am also working in 3D don't forget).

Ok so today's "group" meeting wasn't done per group as it was last week. Everybody was herded into the room which doesn't have any PC's, to make sure nobody can't work on their game while they await their turn. So as it was same order as last week Brown team was up first, but Varun wasn't here yet so we decided to let somebody else go first as we did not want him to miss out. He turned up shortly after so we were second up. The whole experience was very good and enjoyable as the last time we'd all been talking about our games was when we were talking about our concepts (although we have all been looking at each other's work throughout the days) but this was the first time we got to see how each other's game actually works. It was good for another reason, being that we could get feedback not only from the tutors but also from our fellow students, which most of it was very good. This went on for almost 2 hours, and then I had 10mins before my 1on1 review with Iain (Oliver wasn't there this time as he was sitting in with the programmers this week). It has to be said that it's probably a good job that there aren't as many artists as there are programmers because my review last for 40minutes. I'm not really sure how exactly as I showed him my work and, unlike last week's review, he was very impressed with my work and the direction in which it has gone from what I had done last week. I guess most of the meeting was spent talking about what I could add that would look really cool in the game if I had the time to create it (and as I only had a couple more things to do, I most probably would have the time).
The main things discussed were:
1) Having a wireframe model of the 3D ship spinning in the corner of the main menu, to give the impression that you are on this ship. I really liked this idea and took to the idea immediately, and actually ended up being one of the things I worked on immediately (even though I still had a couple of the 'important' things to do).
2) Was to have some 'wear and tear' detail on the console, to give it that damaged and used look that would give it some extra depth. Another thing was to make the menu selection handle look a bit better. I very much liked these ideas, and was something I had thought about already, but as it meant having to re-render all the menu screens it would be a lot of work; and for this reason I merely said that I would do it if I still had a significant amount of time.
A few more ideas were circulated but those were the 2 main ones that were talked about.

So instantly I got to working on some of the things that had been talking about. I pushed back the making of the enemy ship death animations and got to work on the detailing of the HUD (this is an area in which I really want to impress as it is the first thing that anybody playing the game will see).
So for hours I worked away at adding scratches and dints into the metal. Then I added a little speaker and improved on the texturing of the handle. After I was done with all this I showed Steven and Varun and I think they seemed to like it. I rendered and re-did all the images that will use this HUD in the game; and just when I thought I could move on they mention: "oh we need a credits screen" to which my response was of acknowledgement and frustration as it meant having to add extra animation sequences for the button, making additional buttons AND a credits screens, which means too much extra work for something as lame as a credits screen (I say lame because this game will not be published. Nonetheless you still want your name on it); but with my quick thinking I managed to come up with a brilliant plan; I would just have the credits engraved into the console, that way I would only need to re-render 1 animation spritesheet... brilliant; And it looks pretty sweet too, here check it out:

New Menu with worn look and credits at the bottom

Click on here to see the screenshot in it's full and proper size

A few other things were worked on today, but this post is already getting rather long so I will just let you know next week how the game ends up. The ultimate deadline is on Tuesday 16:00, so not long to go now and lots of work to be done still. (Will be mainly balancing the gameplay and trying to find some good sounds from now until then, along with the odd bit of art-work)

Wednesday 19/10 - The Alpha deadline

I am getting pretty bad at writing up my posts on the day when it comes to Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I do have a good reason, at least I think so. "Today" was the 18:00 deadline for the Alpha stage, which is basically having a full working game as an .exe (an executable file which can be run from any computer) with all the graphics done to a high level. So basically I got there nice and early once again and worked non-stop all the way through the day creating nice pretty pictures for our game. To be fair I didn't have all that much that I HAD to do, but as I am a bit of a perfectionist and do want to work to the highest of my abilities (something I rarely did on my bachelor) I ended up going back to previous works and changing them, adding more detail and making it more realistic/pleasing to the eyes.
Steven and Varun were also working very hard on the technical side of the game, except that unfortunately they encountered a bug which took them the best part of the day to figure out the solution to. Though I am happy to say that, along with the help of the talented Alex Darby (programmers' tutor and who also used to be a programmer at Codemasters) they managed to eventually figure out the solution to the problem, although I'm not sure exactly how permanent that solution was.

One of the main things which I spent a long time working on, and seemed to progress ever so slowly as time was slipping by closer as ever to this deadline, was adding some details to the HUD (yes AGAIN, you can never do too much polishing) but this time I added some erosion and wear to the console, and I have to admit that I am very happy with the outcome.
The rest of the work which I did today was to just polish everything up to a good standard while creating more assets which Steven and Varun would ask me for.

Like I mentioned before, at the moment most of my posts will be very similar and will not have all that much interesting to say.

I would post some pictures of the progress that I made in this day, which to be fair is quite a fair bit, but as I have the power of hindsight having only posted this the following Sunday I will post the pictures in the next couple of posts (as I know that I worked on these things again).
But just to keep the main blog page interesting, I will post something for you anyway:

Aaaaaah yes, after careful consideration I have thought of a really nice something to share with you. The animations for both the Winning and Game Over screens (game won't be published so I'm not bothered about sharing this). These are both created in 3DS Max and then edited in Photoshop:

Game Over animation

Game winning animation

Tuesday 18/10 - Time slipping away unnoticed

Another day 'at the office' and so far it's a good start to the week, it's two days where I've arrived for 9am instead of 9.30am, am sure I'll be making that earlier as I get closer to crunch time (not sure why I use this phrase as it stinks of Americanism, but for once I don't actually mind).
Today was basically yesterday but today, and working on different assets. It really is quite incredible how much time I will spend working on one small thing trying to make it look exactly as I want it to, and often that look is not even good enough and I have to keep tweaking and tweaking until I finally do get it to look right. It is so easy to spend half hour, an hour even, merely just playing with different colours on a background or some asset (such as the colour of the player ship or the glow around some text) before thinking "yeah that's not too bad at all, I like that. Ah but wait, what if....NO I've already spent thirty minutes tweaking the colour between the green and the blue spectrum's trying to find the right shade of greeney-blue glow. Must move on!"; and before you know it you're looking at the clock and realise it's already lunch time, you're half way through your working day and you've spent all your time doing something you thought would take you an hour at the most. That's the thing with us artists we're all perfectionists and we always want to tweak tweak tweak followed by polishing, and I say this because I know I'm not the only one as I was talking about this Simon who has basically been doing the same thing.

All in all, though, it has to be said I find that my work seems a lot more polished and presentable (well what there is of it, of course) which turns out is a good thing because we had some surprise visitors in today, two women from Sony came in to look at what we were working on, and they weren't afraid to give their opinion either. I heard them give ideas to others, whether the extent of the advice they gave me was "I hope you're going to keep that green grid in there" to which I replied "oh of course, it's part of the look I'm going for" which she then said "oh good, I was afraid you were going to rub it out". I showed them some more of my work, of course, but there was not too many ideas being thrown my way, which could mean either; "that's very good and you clearly know what you are doing, and so don't need any advice on which direction to take", or "yeah that's not bad but not so interesting so have nothing much to offer you", to which of course I prefer to think it was the former rather than the latter.

As today I just worked on creating new assets and improving old ones I will just list and briefly explain what I did today:

1) HUD (Heads Up Display) - I had actually started modelling this in 3DS Max yesterday while at uni and also spent some time at home working on it also. But today I spent some more time getting the right textures to make it look more realistic and adding other features. It has gone from a pretty boring looking 'radar-type' screen to a quite interesting an nice to look at feature.

How the HUD looks after today

How the HUD looked this time yesterday

The bored bit (the part that is known as the HUD) was actually modelled in 3D and is bigger than what you see, which will be seen when in the main menu (there is a twisty knob thing and a switch that are animated).

2) Game Over - I created a game over screen which is animated. It looks pretty awesome actually as I used the old player ship I designed before (the funky looking 3D one) and just obliterated it onscreen. It looks pretty awesome. Maybe on another day when I have the time I will turn it into a GIF and show you it on here.

3) Enemy ship #3 - I have started working on the third enemy ship, it is a pretty mean little guy. It has been modelled and rendered, so it just needs to be re sized and have the right effects added on. It will be a different colour, as you can see from the screenshots above so far I have green neon for the player ship, and blue and red neon's for enemies. This one will be a kind of pink/purple neon, but like I mentioned earlier, it can take ages to tweak and get the right colour so I have decided to leave that for tomorrow.

The rest of the time was spend tweaking other various assets that weren't quite looking right in the game. Tomorrow I plan to add a double shield to the player's ship, as the player loses a life when he/she is hit by the enemy they will subsequently lose a shield, with the last life representing the ship itself and thus activating the whole ship getting blown to smithereens in the 'Game Over' screen.

Bonne nuit les petits!

Monday 17/10 - Musical Mac's

I am so proud of myself today. There that's it.

OK fair enough I'll tell you why. Last night I decided to sleep with my head at the other end of the bed (I was fed up of having the light from outside the window on my face) and somehow I found it a lot easier to get out of bed, now I'm not sure if it's purely psychological or maybe I went to bed earlier but either way I was in uni half hour earlier than I usually am, ace! First things first I decided that we are now getting to the point where we have to work more closely with the programmers and so I grabbed my Mac and moved it to somebody else's spot so I could talk with Steven and Varun without having to shout across the room. This did prompt a bit of banter about literally taking YOUR Mac with you, and that the people whose place I had taken would freak out when they walked in and couldn't sit in their 'usual' spot. aaah anarchy! I have to admit though, this was a fine idea which pretty much everybody took up, and I found that it was a lot more productive. I could just turn my head and ask the programmers to add something I had made and see if 1) it works, and 2) whether work aesthetically, meaning whether it all fits together without clashing colours.
So over the weekend I actually managed to work on my player ships, enemy ships and a main menu screen; and considering I had to work around a part-time job that generally wears you out, isn't bad at all. So today I refined some of those models, made a second enemy ship and re-made the background. As much as I really liked that image, the colours just clashed too much with the player and enemy ships and it was lacking a sense of depth and motion. I still went for the same thing but worked on the design and desaturated it (took some of the vividness out of the colours) as such:

By the time I had refined all the player and enemy ships and projectiles, made the new background (and got it to work, because Torque is a pain in the ass with scrolling backgrounds) as well as the main menu screen (needed new font, and to be made into sprites for the programmers to import it). Now I could finally start on the HUD (Heads Up Display) this is everything which the player sees on the screen that is not part of the action (such as scores, lives left etc...) and as I am a bit of a 3D nut I wanted to make a kind of cockpit area in 3D to have as the HUD. The idea is that the ships onscreen are a representation of the ship you are controlling, to show this I also added some dark green lines to represent a screen/radar-like view.

I would love to stay and tell you more, but I really must dash. See you tomorrow

Thursday 13/10 - Try again

Right first of all I want to apologise to the lateness of this post (if anybody has even noticed that is, otherwise never mind). I will still refer to this day as 'today' as this just makes it much easier to write, and by the end of the post you might realise why I haven't done it until now.

So like I mentioned in my previous post today was the day where we were having meetings with various people. The first was a team meeting and 'brown' group (had to be careful not to use the 'T' word there) was the first one called in. Basically there was the 3 usual suspects: Oliver (the course leader), Iain (the artist's tutor) and Alex (the programmers' tutor). We were asked to run through the prototype of our game and then they would ask us various questions about the game, mainly where we were planning to go from there. I feel this went pretty well, they seemed to be quite impressed/happy with what we'd done.
So next came the 1 on 1 with your representative tutor, and again I was the first one in (seeing as my family name starts with a B); First of all let me tell you that it wasn't quite 1 on 1 as Oliver was also there listening in and dropping in some ideas every so often, so I have to admit I did feel a tad nervous at first as I generally feel a little more comfortable talking about my work with Iain than I do Oliver (maybe it's because it's easier explaining things that aren't down on paper yet to other artists). Nonetheless to it was still very productive and both Iain and Oliver made some very good suggestions about how I could improve on my design. To put that meeting in a nutshell (because it did turn out to be quite long) they said that they liked where I was going with my work but that it needed to be more simplistic, my design was too busy and had too much detail which, when scaled down to the size it will actually be, would be very difficult to see any of it. At first when they were saying maybe I should just work on taking the outline of the ship and maybe even take off the guns and engines and work from there, I have to admit that my heart sank a little as I was very happy with what I had done and that I was generally on target with my time approximations. So to hear that I would need to make my player ships and enemy ships again after having spent several hours on them was not what I wanted to hear, but I guess this is exactly what they meant during the first week when we were told on a number of occasions not to get attached to our work as, first of all, it doesn't belong to you it belongs to your client, and most of it will get thrown away.

I had one more meeting with Rebbecca that day which was just basically asking what we thought of the course, if it was what we expected and whether we wanted anything else from it.

The rest of that day was spent re-designing player ships, I went through several different concepts of simplistic design with different colour glows and then asked other artists and Iain which they liked and then worked on combining the best bits of each one. This did take a little while but I did manage to get the player ship done by the end of the day and I also got started on an enemy ship too (still working in 3D so that I can get different angles on the ships for when they turn).

The end of the day was fast approaching and I still had a lot to do to be where I wanted to be, so I knew that work would have to be done over the weekend, but I have a part-time job working in a restaurant and I had to be in on Friday, Saturday and Sunday; so basically I would have to get as much done as possible tonight; But it's never this straight forward as I got a call from work practically begging me to come in and I managed to bargain getting Sunday off so I could get some work done: skillz!!

So there you see, I was working all weekend, and in my spare time was trying to catch up on some uni work.
Hope this post didn't bore you all too much. Will try to include a screenshot on Monday of where I'm at, but for now here are some of the concepts for my new player ship which I toyed with (bare in mind that in-game they will be 2-3 times smaller than this)

Wednesday 12/10 - A productive day indeed

Today I woke up 8.10 (a whole hour after I usually get up), so that's what you get for staying up working until stupid o'clock. Well anyway I guess it kind of paid off because I was still there on time and I had a model almost finished, just needed texturing. This time though I used a couple tricks to save myself some time doing unnecessary work that won't be noticed. Ah yes I know what you are thinking, I AM learning indeed. Well even though I had already come up with a couple of design ideas for enemy ships, I decided to come up with some fresher and better ideas (actually the first idea was designed while watching the football last night); and I have to admit that I am starting to get the hang of this concepting from thumbnails, oh yes.
After spending an hour or 2 in the morning touching up the model and creating the textures with a funky red glow, I had an invader enemy as well as my player ship to be proud of; and I am not only proud because I had made another nice model, but mainly because I have managed to create an enemy that looks very different to the player while at the same time keeping within the same art style (they actually fit together in a game). I will let you judge yourself. This is the first enemy which I had started creating late last night:



First Invader Ship, concept [left] + model [right]

Also may I say that all these models are designed to be seen on a black background, so even though this does still look pretty awesome, the glow is more prominent and therefore the model just looks better on a black background (just to prove it I will show you the difference on this one model, rather than for all of them... if you agree that is)



You see, I told you.

So as you can see, it does look quite different. But anyway, I then went on to designing a second enemy ship because not only was I enjoying it, but I had noticed another similar shape which I like the look of. So using the same process I set out to create this enemy; But this time I during the texturing process I made a small mistake of putting the texture material of the bottom part of the ship on the top part, but it came out with a really nice and unexpected result. So I used that and improved on it to really bring it to life and give it a different look to the previous enemy, while keeping within the same style.



2nd Invader ship, concept [left] + model [right]

As you may, or may not, have noticed the first ship has only 1 gun while the second ship has 2. Oh yes, that's right the first ship will be the easier enemy while the second will be harder with dual fire (at least that's the plan so long as the guys working on this project with me can script it), otherwise will probably just be turned to look like 1 big laser gun where the laser builds up in the middle between the 2 struts. We'll see what next week brings.

After this I still had a fair amount of time until 6pm (deadline for submitting our prototypes), so I decided to get working on a nice pretty background. I wasn't too sure how to approach this so I went online to get some inspiration and came accross a very nice tutorial in which I took some of the techniques to come up with this wonderful background. What this picture shows is the size of the playable screen (represented by the white box) in comparison to the actual image. The reason I made it so large is so that is we wanted to we could have the background scrolling a little to make it look like you are flying through space.

I actually also modelled a pretty cool looking projectile that is animated, but this may have to be edited as it looks awesome in big but not so good in its actual size (will be tiny as it's just supposed to be a laser coming out the player's ship):



Animated player laser which probably won't be used

That was today, all in all a very productive day, got a lot done but still a long long way to go and many things to create, but I guess the good thing is that most of the 'harder' bits are done. This has also been a day in which I am starting to feel much better about myself and my abilities. I really did not know I could do these things, but I guess when I 'have to' I really can push my abilities beyond what I believe I can achieve. I guess this is the silver lining to always doubting your own ability.
Tomorrow I will have 3 reviews, the first is a team review about the game (I guess), second is a meeting which I am not sure what will be discussed (we seem to think that it will just be to see what we think of the course) and the third is a 1 on 1 meeting with Iain (the art co-ordinator for the course), where I guess we will discuss my progress.

Oh and I forgot to mention that the guys coding the game are doing a great job. We have some gameplay; the player ship can move left and right, while the enemies come down the screen and 'zoning' in on the player's location. Good job!