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