Props

I will just summerize this week developmen and paste more about it later.

This week I have been modeling props. The props will be used to make the world more alive and block of areas where the player can not go to. The props I made are some ”broken loot stash” (I will pose picture and tell a bit more about them later. I am not on my laptop at the moment).

There was also a play testing on friday, were we merged scene together. We had some feedback that will be usefull for us, even if much of the feedback was stuff we already knew about it is still good to get those kind of feedback from players.

More info of the week will come later. See you until then!

Enemy 1

This week has been a little slow with the enemy creation. I made the base mesh for our first enemy.

The shapes of the enemy is very basic and this will work as a place holder for the Alpha.

Code and animations

I also made our player character Kei to move in the engine with animations. I used animations from a website called Mixamo which is a website Adobe owns. Here you can rig and skin your mesh and use animations for free and you keep your rights to your project (you can read about Mixamo more here ). This is just for place hold, to have a quick look how will look and we can write the code for Kei and just change the animation later when we are done with our own.

Check link for the animation: Player movement

Here I used a very simple code from Unity’s documentation, with a small change I made Kei run and stop with working animations.

Animation list in Unity.

This was kinda fun since I never done ”coding” before. And with basic code from unity’s documentation I got it work, pretty neat!

Enemy 2

Last but not least I created some sketch for the enemy nr 2.

I had hard time to figure out how we wanted this enemy designed. I had some requests from our Producer. A range weapon ”plasma weapon”, a melee weapon, bigger and heavier than enemy nr 1 but should have some recognition from enemy nr 1.
One of the attack should be ”electric fists” where it try to smash Kei in between the hands.

Here are some sketched / doodles I made when trying to come up with an idea of the enemy.

And here is the final sketch and demonstration how it will work with the combat / attack.

 

Big Game Project

Big game project

BGP is our second big project in our program. The course is a 10 weeks course but with around 7 weeks development. Our team has 7 members, 2 programmers, 4 artists and 1 designer/producer. The game is named Kei and is a 3D action game with a 45 degree top down view.

This is Kei. Kei is a gamer and she loves all kind of games. But suddently she is not welcome in the GameTown anymore, neither are Kei’s friends. This ofcourse makes Kei upset because she thinks games should be for everyone. Kei now begins the quest to take back GameTown and open up the games for all the gamers!

Kei picture was made by Nayomi Arvell.

Week 1

The first week the whole team has been designing and mostley talked about how things are going to work. Art guide / style has been set and concept art are in progress. My task has been coming up with ideas of the enemy 1. It is a ”dummy” robot with melee attack. It got a medium rang of aggro, when the robot has been aggroed it starts to move forward the player. In right rang the robot will attack with its area of effects damage. It srarts to spin with its arms out sraight and cut the player with its sharp hands.

Down bellow you can find some sketches I did to come up with the idea of our robot.

Those first was sketched before we decided which abilities the robot should have.

After the desision of the abilities it become easier to design the robot since I had more information how its behavoir and abilities should be.

Then I got feedback that it weapons need to look more ”dangerous” looks like it will hurt you and i came up with this and the designer was happy with the idea.

 

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR6. WRAPPING THINGS UP

Last week blog post for this course has finally arrived!

This week have been about to strap things up for the final version of our game. I have done some small changes to the game that I will write a bit about.

In the last week blog post I wrote about how I made the buttons and finishing up the background for the main menu. This week I did some small changes as adding who has done our music in our game, which is Samuel Ehnberg from Team 15. Team 15 was the team who came up with the concept to the game we are making (Fancy Mansion) but we have renamed it to Trespawsser. I also remade the text of all the names in Credits. I think it looks more solid with a normal font (font name is Vani Bold) with on the names then the other font we use (this font is named Steampunk font by *hannarb Regular). By changing the font I simple mark which text I want to change and choose a different one In Photoshop.

I have also done two more buttons that will be needed in the game. The two buttons are Submit and Restart. The Submit button will be used when the player types in her nickname for the Score board. The Restart button we will use to restart the game.
I kept the same design on the buttons with some lamps just like the other buttons I made last week.

I was asked to make a cross on the boomerang marker (the boomerang marker is the mouse pointer in the game). This cross over the boomerang will show the player that she can’t use the boomerang at the moment. But today our lead programmer had a crazy idea, that we should scrap the boomerang and make a droid that the player can command instead. We want to change it to the droid because we have seen that the players who test our game dose not simple use the boomerang as much as we want them to. We do think that the players can use this droid in different ways such as clearing the way into a room that the player have not been into yet or have the droid patrolling at a specific area for maybe see where Otto are. The droid is just like the boomerang sort of, it can’t attack nor hurt Otto. It is just to be able to see a bit further in the dark. We have not made this droid yet but it will be in our final version.

We hope this crazy idea will go as we have plan it should go and that the players will have fun with this different kind of “weapon”
Thanks for reading!

/Kim

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR5. MAIN MENU CONTINUE

I started this week work where I left it the other week. So this mean I continue on the main menu and the background. I want it to be as clean as possible for our beta deadline which is this Friday this week.

The background from last week was pretty much done except the colors and some shading. I am working with Photoshop and there for I am using a lot of layers. I will try to explain what a layer in Photoshop are since I have got some feedback from some readers that ask me to explain which program I am using and explain more what it do. So a layer in Photoshop represent a piece of paper sort of, you can manipulate it and I use it for keep some colors and items separated. This helps a lot if you need to remake the color or maybe an object. Then you go to the layer (remember to name the layer to something that represent that drawing on the layer) and change what you want to change.

So I colored the background and added some rough shades and light to it. I am pretty satisfied how it turned out, I am looking for a cartoon-ish style and not too realistic. I did though add some texture on the brick wall, road and the house which I do say looks pretty neat.

I also spent my time on all the buttons and windows for the menu. Here I needed to keep to the style we have in the HUD (Head-Up Display) in game, example of a HUD is the inventory in our game.
I managed to do pretty well with the final result but I did struggle. I accidently saved over my whole file with all the buttons and I had to remake them all again.

First I created the frame of the button and colored in separate layers. After that I started to make some lamps which I wanted to light up the buttons when the player holds the mouse over the buttons.
After I attached the lamps to the frame button I made all the text. Each button has two types of text one with a lower opacity of glow and other one with a higher opacity of glow. The lower one will be used when the mouse is not on the button and the other one when the mouse are over the button.

The two windows screen Credits and Score Board I created was the same process except I did not have two different text nor two types of lamps. I only made the text with the brighter glow and the lamps when they are switched on. 

Thanks for reading and see you next week.

/Kim

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR4. MAIN MENU

This week I am working with the main menu for the game, so pretty much I have only been sketching and drawing the whole week this far. Most of the time I have been drawing some different backgrounds, which have take more hours then I thought it should. This is because I am not the fastest artist but I am perfectionist and want everything should be as good as it can be. Also I think the main menu is important because it is the first thing the player will see on her screen. It is important for the player to get the right narrative feeling and I think the main menu also can give a certain expectation of what kind of quality the game have. The narrative feeling I am trying to give the player are that the environment (the mansion you are breaking into) are a bit spooky. Also that the mansion is huge and a touch of a steampunk theme.

The buttons in the menu going to match the HUD from in-game game-play, some sort of metal frame with cogwheel and maybe a pressure gauge. (check down bellow for some sketch drawing of the buttons)

The nr 1 are pretty basic but are surrounded by tesla coil electricity. This feature we maybe will use when the player holding the mouse over the button.

Nr 2 have some metal, cogwheels and pipe that smoke coming out from. This design I did because to get some feeling of steampunk.

Nr 3 design is not that far away from nr 2 but I added a pressure gauge to it and different metal pieces.

This nr 4 consists of a long tube which also exists in-game.

The background I made some sketches, the very first one was kinda small but it gave me an idea of how the final background should end up.

When I sketch I always use color red this is because later I can put down the opacity of that layer and add another layer on it and draw over it with black color. I do not trace it, I just draw over it and make it better.Sometimes I use different layers for different objects or details so I can simple see if the drawing works with it or not. After this when I am happy I merge the layers (not the sketch layer) and start painting with colors.

So for my background I got sketches and a kind of a clean lines drawing. But it is not colored yet.

This is the first sketch of background, to give a picture of how I imagine it to look for my coworkers.

This is how it looks like now.

Leave a comment with some critic or what you think and if there is anything you wondering.

See you next week!

/Kim

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR3. LOOT ITEMS

The weeks flies by and time for another weekly blog post.
This week I have been drawn items for the player to be able to loot. These items have values and some of em have power ups that the player can use for her advantage. Also there are items that works as a trap but they have a high value because of the high risk to be detected by the antagonist.
A example of a item that I have worked on is this gramophone. 

This gramophone will be able to pick up by the player but when the player pick it up it will start to play music and the antagonist (Otto von Fancy) will hear where the player are positioned and start to run right against the player.
The player will also be slowed by picking up this item since it is heavy. So the risk to get caught are high when holding this item but will be rewarded when the item are brought to the drop zone.
I will make a animation for this gramophone later, I will add some music notes and make the head of the gramophone move a bit. By this the item will look a little more  like cartoonish, which our group are aiming for this game. I wont make animation for all of those items but maybe one or two more depends on how many items I will be able to make total.
Now this picture is too big and I will have to re size it so it will probably looks a little more pixled but I’m pretty satisfied how it turned out. This maybe was not the most funniest item I have drawn but it was instructive.
I also had made two other items but I did some how mess it up badly and saved this gramophone file over the other items. So by this I have learned to read those pop up windows carefully and think before I do press enter.  Anyway those I did draw was inventions that are created by the antagonist, he is a scientist and it is his inventions that the protagonist stealing. I am also trying to draw those items a bit steampunk style, so a lot of reference picture I have searched for I have remade and changed em up a little to get thise steampunk feeling to em.

Hope you liked the blog post, I did rush it in the last minute this time because I have forgot it was Thursday so might be some spelling error. Anyway see you next week and thanks for reading! 🙂

/Kim

GAME DEVELOPMENT WEEKLY BLOG POST NR2. Sprite sheet

This week I have done some some new stuff, this stuff is called sprite sheet. A sprite is a single graphic image that is incorporated into a larger scene so that it appears to be part of the scene. When you put many sprites into a single image you get a sprite sheet. Sprite sheets are used to speed up the process of displaying images to the screen. Sprite sheet animation is sprites that rendering in a quick succession to give the illusion of moving. For example sprite sheet is used to make the character to move in most of the games or a lamp to flash.
Since we havn’t done any movement sprite sheet yet I show how a typical sprite sheet looks like. This is a example of a movement sprite sheet from Megaman 7. We have not implanted this in our game.

So to my work this week. I had some problem by doing this sprite sheets since I have never done it before. My task was to create a lamp, and give it some light and also some highlights to help the player to see when he or she can pick up the lamp and when you can’t. So by indicating this I picked the color red for showing that you are too far away from the lamp for being picked up and blue color for showing that you are now able to pick up the lamp.

After importing this sprite sheet into the game I could see that it had some flaws. the red and blue highlights need some rendering because you can see a sharp line where it ends which is pretty ugly in the game. This will be fixed before beta but will do fine for the alpha which is this friday.

Another sprite sheet I made was an tool item which will give the player points for picking up. This one was easier because of the space the item have in the sprite. It was easier to avoid the edge of the sprite I think.

Tool sprite sheet

Here I had the same highlight color as the lamp, blue for showing that you are able to pick up the tool item and red for showing the player that the item is too far away from the player.

I have learned a lot of sprite sheet this week that I will take with me. For example how to plan the sprite size and adapting the item to the sprite size.

Thanks for reading!

//Kim

Game development weekly blog post nr1.

Time for start my weekly blog post about our game we are making.
We like the story with the whole game and also the visual of it. But as artist it was kinda hard to redesign the characters so what we did was changing the game visually. By doing this it was easier for us all to stand behind the game and say ”this is our game” since we came up with the design of the characters and environment and not just copy the team behind the concept.

I did some sketches what I thought could be our new main character (the player).

The nr 1 was inspired from the team who did this concept so I was seeking some sort of inspiration at first. Nr 2 is a ninja that the team had talked about before about implant a ninja instead of the burglar so I did some alternative head styles to him/her. I tried to keep the characters as much as unisex as possible since we did not plan to make the character in a specific sex.

But we didn’t feel like this was good enough so we got back to brainstorming again and we felt that Otto von Fancy who is the antagonist in this game were looking very British and we all liked that. So what we did we took the game back to early 19th-century and added a solid steampunk theme to it. Here we have a bunch of options to go with,both with the characters but also the objects.

We made new sketches and this time we went away from human character and did sketch some animals. We thought this was a very cool idea and this could be also easier to keep the character to unisex.
Unfortunately I some how lost my sketches but they didn’t get picked for the main character. Instead we went with Evelina Foxberg character design, the raccoon.

Art made by Evelina Foxberg

The raccoon I really like since they have a famous reputation for being light-fingered in the animal kingdom together with the fox. The bag around the raccoon waist represent the inventory. The eyepatch is for the narrative feeling of steampunk and nothing you can use for like see in the dark like a night vision goggles.

Anyway, after todays playtest with our teacher we are rethinking about the raccoon as a character. This is because of our teacher did mention that both raccoon and turtle (our Otto von Fancy is a turtle) are in the game Sly Cooper. This is pretty funny I think since no one in our team did know about this game and didn’t refer to this game at all and we manage to pick both animal to our game. This shouldn’t be a big problem if it wasn’t for the raccoon and turtle in Sly Cooper are main characters in the game, as in ours.

Practice Values

First time for me working with values.
Did this in 10 mins approximately.