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!