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!

Tuesday 11/10 - aaaah finally, some modelling

So as the title suggests, I'm sure you can guess that today I finally got to start modelling some of the assets to be used within the game. As the most important, and obviously most people's starting point, the player ship is where I get started (that and because on Thursday I already planned what I would do, and by which date; if you read last Thursday's post, and remember).

So not too much to tell really as the modelling took around 2 or 3 hours, along with the texturing which took another couple hours (solely because it was a 3D model and for some reason I worked closely on too much detail, even though it will eventually be rendered quite small and most of the detail won't be seen.... aaah the bane of the artists, always wanting to make things perfect. It is an art in itself to know when to stop making things better).
Different looks were tried for the ship, but in general it was clear that I wanted it to be 'neon-esque', like that of tron but a little softer. In the end this is what I settled on:

Player ship

The beauty of doing this in 3D is that once modelled you can get different views and angles with very minimal work. I have also got 4 other angles of the ship that could possibly be used, 2 versions of it leaning left and right for when the player is moving the ship:

Player ship at different angles

Don't forget that in-game this ship will be a lot smaller than this, so even though it looks pretty nice unfortunately most of it won't be seen. Still it's nice to know you've done a good piece of work, even if others can't tell. This really did make me feel a lot better about my abilities and answered a couple of questions I'd been asking myself, such as "how am I here? what have I got to offer that is good?", well even though Richard also went the route of 3D after I mentioned the idea, and he is very good too and has come up with some great designs, the style really are quite different.

When I got home I watched the football, France qualified for Euro 2012 by coming top of the group by drawing 1-1 with Bosnia, but it certainly wasn't easy to watch. After this I decided to start on designing and creating an enemy ship, just so that I would have something for the programmers to shoot instead of just red squares. I was up until 1.30 am working on this, and then decided I should get some sleep and finish off in the morning, so screenshot to come in tomorrow's post!

Monday 10/10 - Production Begins

OK so it's Monday, the official start of production for our Space Invaders sequel game, and this is where the fun begins; although I have to admit that the brainstorming and coming up with ideas was fun. For us artists this is the part where we finally get down to business and start doing what we do best, for the programmers on the other hand this is where their problems start. Thank goodness that when I had to make a choice between art and programming I chose the 'pretty pictures' side.

So today was mainly spent on coming up with ideas for our designs. Creating thumbnails for each asset that needs to be created (from player ships, enemy ships and backgrounds all the way down to things such as the projectiles, both player and enemy, and even designing explosions and satellites which will be moving in the background).

So that was the first part of the day, at least that is what it was dedicated to. The second part (usually after lunch) was spent picking some of our favourite thumbnails and turning them into concepts. Here are some of the concept ideas I came up with, which I would then create a polished version to be used as a playable asset in the game:

Player Ship

For this I decided that I wanted the player ship to be something familiar to the player, so instead of trying to come up with something solely from using thumbnails I decided that I would use the basic shape of a jet fighter, but modify it using parts of thumbnails to make it look more like a 'fighter space jet', which as you can see basically consists of giving it big engines and big-ass guns too. 'HA, TAKE THAT EVIL SPACE INVADER!'


Enemy Ships

For the enemy ships I had a lot more freedom as I would not have to stick to known rules and designs. Here I could really stretch my imagination and come up with some very interesting designs. I designed a couple of ships for this as we are planning to have 3 different types of enemies. These were all created by 'kit-bashing' different thumbnails together to come up with new and interesting ideas. These are a couple of ideas


A few other things were designed, but these are probably the most interesting and I'm sure you get the idea of how this process works now.
It's nice to get this phase out of the way, and hopefully tomorrow I can start modelling (oh yeah I decided that I would create them in 3D and then render them from different views to be used as 2D sprites [a sprite is a 2D image that is always facing the camera/player] )

Thursday 6/10 - Refining the scope (better late than never)

OK so I realise that I am posting this 3 days late, which kind of defies the point of writing this blog as it's supposed to contain the things I learnt and would most likely forget after a couple of days, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.

So on Thursday morning was dedicated to each group having a meeting with the powers that be (our 'tutors' to put it in another way). These meetings were there so that we could explain and outline our scope to them, and which in turn they would give us their feedback, tell us whether it is a realistic scope that could be achieved within the time constraints and give us their advice about the best way we should approach it.
To put Brown Team's (the team which I represent, working alongside Varun and Steven) meeting in a nutshell, the ideas which we came up were very good; but (and there is always a but, BUT ours was quite a big one) even though we had spent the previous day bring down our ideas to a more realistic and achievable project it was still too ambitious. They also seemed to think that this was largely down to me, probably partly because I'm an artist and we don't always realise how much we're asking of the programmers and maybe also partly because I've already come across as ambitious, opinionated and full of ideas. Either way we listened and took their advice and implemented it and have now come up with something a lot more achievable (even if we had to drop some of our favourite ideas, but this is something we are taught to do from the beginning).

The rest of the day was dedicated to coming up with a precise work flow of what we want to have done and by which date. At first we were taught about perforce (a centralised control system which is used to share all our data with the others in our groups. You have to check out a file (like you would in a library) then you can make changes to it, and then you submit it back in so that the others have access to the updated version; it really is quite ingenious. We were then given an excel spreadsheet where we fill in the objectives we need to complete by a certain deadline (in this instance it is by the time we realise the prototype) and by which day each individual thing must be done by. As the artists are kind of working in a team we had to get together to decide on the deadlines for the process of creating concept ideas, which is something that should have maybe taken 10minutes but took closer to an hour because we kept confusing each other and making it more difficult than it should have been (that and we misinterpreted what Iain had said we will do.
Oh well, we got there in the end after a lot of faffing about and post-it note sticking/re-arranging.

So Monday (tomorrow in this case) is the official start of production. Even though we decided to make some mood boards over the weekend to get them out of the way. Monday we will spend the whole day concepting ideas; first some time creating thumbnails for each type of asset (player ship, enemy ships, props & environments, and VFX such as missiles and shields), then we will spend a few hours picking the thumbnails we like the look of the most and bringing them to life by turning them into an actual design which, as of Tuesday, we will be able to turn into actual assets to be used in the games.

Just a quick note, even though it will be a 2D scrolling game I have decided that I will create my assets in 3D using 3DS Max; so exciting times ahead...

Wednesday 05/10 - Back to the drawing board

As the title suggests today was back to the drawing board, but in more sense than just one. The first part of the day was basically very much like the first lecture last week, we were all in room 4, no computers except for the one plugged into the large flat screen TV on the wall flicking through many PowerPoint slides. As you may have guessed we were listening to a presentation (which was also being filmed); today we were mainly learning about project management. This is all very boring stuff and nobody particularly likes teaching it, let alone learning about it. But nonetheless it is still something that is very important to know about, as essentially whenever you are working for somebody (or even working on your own, to some extent) you need to know how to manage your project so that you can correspond with the rest of the team to make sure that everything gets done within the time frame. I won't go into all of what I learnt this morning, because I don't want to bore you and turn you away. But in brief we learnt about 2 types of methodology, the waterfall and agile; in short the waterfall model is a linear model with a start and end, whereas the agile (as the name suggests) allows for more freedom in creativity as it is a looped system that has you constantly re-checking your work, the risks and problems and going back to changing the brief.

There I'm done with that, you can look again.
So the second meaning behind the title of this post references to the drawing board that we used last week to stick our post-it notes to (you know, the ones for our brainstorming ideas). So yeah, we went back to that drawing board and re-visited our ideas and changed some to make the game more solid and do-able within the time frame. So that was certainly fun to go back to it and see how we made our game ideas a lot more robust. Tomorrow we will be telling the rest of the team what our idea is.

Another brilliant thing that has come out of today is that the art team will be working all together on every project rather than a project each. Which does mean that I will be able to claim having worked on five games as part of an art team come the end of the month, rather than just the one.

Production starts next week, though it seems that we may start a little earlier. Will keep you updated with the progress, but I doubt that the posts from now on will be as long as these first 9 or 10.

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oh and by the way, I did work on making some better graphics for Fartman and his enemy. Check them out...


FartMan



RocketBadger

Tuesday 04/10 - More of the same, but different

As the title of this post suggests, today was more of the same. So as we get ourselves settled in and ask the tutor what we were doing today he simply responded with "more of the same I'm afraid, just keep learning Torque". I can't speak for the others here, but personally I was totally fine with this. I had learnt a fair amount during the course of yesterday, but I didn't feel I had learnt quite enough. Today, on the other hand, was a very productive day. I wasn't all that interested in doing the tutorials that come with the engine as I don't feel that they explain everything very well, and as they are written tutorials that go too much into details about unnecessary things it does tend to take a lot more time to complete than it ought to.

With this in mind I set out to search the world wide web for some more intuitive and relevant tutorials, needless to say I came across a very good video tutorial that showed you how to make a simple side scrolling shooter game; which considering we are to use this engine to make our Space Invaders games, it cannot get much more relevant than this.
So most of my day was spent going through these videos starting off with simple things such as adding background and objects (although I did do quite a lot of scripting today, and pretty much straight into it from the first minute of the video). Thankfully as I had done a bit of scripting during my bachelor while making my Crab Attack game, this wasn't too difficult to wrap my head around. Though that's not to say that I understood it all without having to think about it. Hell no, there was times when I was just staring at it trying to make sense of what I had just written; and most of the time I did figure out eventually.

Come 3 o'clock or so and I had been through the whole tutorial and had a nice fun interactive ship that flies through the sky shooting at enemy ships as they fire back at me while passing in the opposite direction (don't worry I have images so you can see what the hell I am talking about):

Let battle commence



ahaaa take that, scumbag!

 yes, I still haven't quite got the hang of placing pictures exactly where I want yet, so they tend to take up unnecessary space. Never mind, aye!?

After I had this working version I decided I wanted some kind of scoring system, and maybe if I had time afterwards I would give the player a set number of lives. Little did I know that mixing between tutorials can be quite confusing as the scripts are not always written in the same way. As I tried to explain my issue to my tutor as he saw that I was just sat there staring at the screen blankly, he reminded me that we are artists and will never need to know how to do this, and that this is what the programmers are here for; to which I happily responded in agreement and instead set out to creating new objects/images to replace the ones being used on there (as these were downloaded from the tutorial website). So I quickly drew a low resolution flying 'super-person' to replace the player ship, and some laser to shoot out of his eyes to replace the rockets. Once I had done all that and replaced the ship and press 'play' to test the level, I suddenly realised that the particle effect I had used to create the thruster effect for the ship was still attached but now looked like it was coming out of my guy's ass... so he's flying through fart power, BRILLIANT!! So afterwards I quickly drew a 'dead guy' image to have every time the player got hit by the enemies and decided to show everyone my brilliant farting superhero that shoots lasers out of his eyes, and then decided that I had ended on quite an up and to end the day there. (I will possibly be working on a better quality to add in tomorrow, as well as making some crazy enemies too).

Here check him out in action...



Fartman 1 on 1, wuh-oh!

Fartman down!

and for those who are interested in how the engine itself looks (though I'm sure non of you even care, and those who do have probably already googled the engine by now) Here's a screenshot:

Torque engine

Monday 03/10 - bugs, lolcats and nerf guns

Week 2 begins, and the sliding doors that separate the artists from the programmers are opened and the programmers are finally revealed to us normal folk (well, at least we like to think so). It really is quite funny to see the differences between artists and programmers, as we all work in game production you would imagine that we're all quite similar; but from what I saw today you would be very wrong. As I walked into the room I was taken aback by the fact that the room had just doubled in size, and on my left were sat 10 programmers all with various objects/toys/anti-stress balls littering their desks. After a brief moment taking in this sight I go for the computer that seems to have become mine; oddly enough we seem to have come to some unspoken agreement about who sits where.

Today we weren't set tasks to complete, as such, at least not like last week. Today was all about learning how to use the Torque 2D engine. This was very different to anything we did last week as this was not so much art oriented, but rather more towards building the core gameplay. As this was a fairly new software for everybody involved we were told to just make our way through the 'official documentation' (or in other words, the tutorials that come with the software). So that was pretty much what we did all day; although it took most of the day I think I could have been done earlier but we (and by we I mean over half the whole group of artists and programmers) had some issues with the software. It just did not seem to want to work, or when it finally did somebody else would have a problem and then a little later on you would find you have another problem yourself. Still, we worked our way around some of them and fixed others (well mainly the programmers/tutors did).

Let me give you another couple of examples of the differences between us (the artists) and them (the programmers); the first is that even though we are all going through the same tutorials you notice that the method of going through them is very different. We tended to play around with the graphics and see how we could implement what we had just learnt to make some 'cool' visual effects; the programmers on the other hand tended to just use whatever graphic and concentrate on making the mechanics more efficient. We played with the art side of the tutorials and quickly passed/skimmed through the scripting parts, whereas they tended to do the opposite (some of them even trying to pick the code apart to see why the software was bugging. One thing that did make me laugh was when one programmers thought he'd spotted the reason why the software had been giving us grief all day and tried to show us, but when he ran it and it worked fine he got frustrated shouting: "nooo you're not supposed to work, why are you working?", whereas when WE were having problems and then suddenly it was working again for no reason we would just be glad that it was working again).
So anyway, my second example was something that was only noticed halfway through the day and pointed out to me by Richard (one of the artists sitting next to me); as we sat there each concentrating on getting through these tutorials, with the odd out-loud 'eureka' moment, the programmers had not stopped talking about...actually I don't know I wasn't listening, but they did not stop. At one point they were firing Nerf guns at each other, or were sharing 'lolcats' around (you know the ones, they are the "funny" pictures of cats with "funny" captions). I don't actually have any issues with this, if anything I find it amusing to see the differences between two groups of people who work so closely together. I guess this kind of behaviour is something that has been embedded in the programmers to help them deal with the stress and frustrations that come with programming. Then again it could just be a coincidence, either way I think this year is going to be a whole new experience for me, but most probably an enjoyable one.

Bring on next week, the start of production for our space invaders game. I expect plenty of crazy, stressful, happy, frustrating and eureka moments; in other words, there's going to be more mood swings than on the set of Loose Women.