lestrange-games

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2 Sprints

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 17

I’ve very proud of how this game has turned out, I wish we had been able to have our complete vision of the original game idea, as it is very different now and I did love the original idea. However, I’m happy with how it looks in its current state, as it has progressed so much from how it worked in the first semester.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 16

For this week I work on creating new parts to improve upon the website, since the current version of the website was a fairly empty template with only about 2 pages. I added a few different pages, including an about us, a milestone/blog page amongst others.

I began adding a simple about page, explaining the game a little, then I added a page for the walk-through that one of the programmers was recording and left the page blank while that was being recorded. Then I worked on a characters page to give a little bit of information about the characters in the game and the milestones.

This about page is first page I worked on and took surprisingly long time to do, as I wanted it to sound and look good since it is our first page with text on.

I began working on a trailer as I thought we could use some more on the website. I began slicing parts of the walk-through of the game in Premier Pro and put together a fairly rough trailer, but I’m proud of it considering I didn’t have any experience with video editing at all. I also had to consider the file size as there was a restriction of 100MB and I had to redo it several times to get it small enough to upload it to the website.

This is a short page, with small pieces of info on each other characters the player will encounter throughout the game.

The teams page was worked on by everyone, they put on their own information and pictures.

The milestones on our GDD looked very appropriate for some blog posts that would give some information on how the game developed over time.

The walk-through which was a bit of a pain to put into the website as the file was too big to upload and I had a few problems with incorporating the YouTube link into it a first, but eventually managed to get it working.

I’m very happy with how the website looks like currently, as I didn’t think it would end up looking as good as it does, but works really well.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 15

For this week I worked on the parts that I created within the game and made slides showcasing the parts within the presentation, then I also had to work on a script for what I would say when pitching the presentation as the entire group had to figure out how long they’re pieces would be and find out if we would go over the allotted amount of time or if we wouldn’t have enough and would need to improve upon our script to reach the amount of time needed.

I also worked on the collectables for the game as we currently only had floating boxes surrounded by glowing particle effects for placeholders. We had discussed a while back about perhaps bringing back the memory card design that we’d originally had as a specially collectable for the quests. Instead of them being for the quest it would just be a standard collectable that if you gathered enough of them would unlock some more of the plot behind what happened in the game’s universe while Zorx was in cryostasis.

Here you can see that I modelled a basic shape for the collectables as I didn’t want it to be too complex, since they wouldn’t be that large in the game. I tried exporting it in a few different sizes so that I could get the scale of the collectables right compared to Zorx, I didn’t want them to big or small. I preferred the smaller version, however some of the group preferred the larger version here, so this time I comprised between the two sizes and made a version that was in the middle, before UV unwrapping the piece.

Here you can see the finished texture, I worked on a few versions, mostly just adding more components until I was happy with how it looked. The first version only had the singular blue line down the middle and some of the tiny lights at the top. However, I thought that design was way too empty so I added the largest circle design, but it still felt too empty so I added more lines and circles to fill in some of the space and give it a more futuristic/space design.

I’m glad I continued working on this instead of just leaving it as it originally was, because it was such a empty and boring design. Although I do worry that this design is maybe a little bit too crowded and that it doesn’t matter much because it’s a small item within our big game level. I checked with the group before finalising the design and they liked how it looked so I saved it and started making emission maps for the design.

This was a new learning experience for me, as I had never worked on emission maps before and didn’t quite know how to make them, but it was easily picked up once Lewis the environmental artist explained how to do them to me. 

I redo the parts that I wanted to glow in white and the rest I made black, it was pretty simple to do this, however I did mess up and accidentally make one of the circles completely white instead of doing the pattern so I had to go back in a redo it because the emission map was to bright otherwise, and covered up the details of the piece so I wanted to spend a little extra time on it and fix it.

I placed the texture back into blender and messed about with some new settings that I hadn’t encountered before and I usually textured the models within blender instead of UV unwrapping them. I got the texture onto the model to make sure that it fit and looked correct before exporting it and giving it to the group to place within the game.

And here’s how it looks in the game, before I noticed the mistake I had made with the emission map.

Here’s the collectable with all the maps fixed, and it looks so much better in my opinion so I’m glad that I fixed the maps so that the look is improved.

I also spent time fixing tweaking things within the game, as a few problems appeared and I had to fix them in order for them to work properly, this was mostly in the animation of the rock golem. Quite a few issues reappeared within the golem and I concentrated on getting them fixed so that there wasn’t a delay to the game. I also was asked to create a simple death animation to implement death into the game a lot smoother as the exploding idea that would have been code based, wasn’t possible.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 14

The week I did the animations for the golem, I started from scratch as something happened to the armature and I had to make a completely new one in order to try and fix the problem that I was having.

However, this wasn’t the only time that I had problems with animating the golem, as not only did this happen a few times to the point where any animations I had done had been completely erased or replaced with the incorrectly animations and shrunk the body down to close to the original size again before it started playing the wrong animation.

A lot of this week was spent trying fix the problems that kept arising with the animating of the golem, since it was a very important piece and I wanted it to work properly so it wouldn’t affect the look of the game. After a couple of attempts and having to completely start over with animations I finally managed to fix them all so that they worked and didn’t disappear or be overwritten by other animations that were in the file because of a previous comparison in height with the main character. This was to make sure that head would be a good size for him to pick up, as it was really large compared to him, but if I shrunk the head down to the size that it needed to be for the player to pick up, then it would be way to small and unnoticeable on the body so we compromised and I made the separate head model a smaller size for the player to pick up but it stayed the same on the actually golem model.

Below you can see yet another problem I came across while I was animating the golem, for some reason the left thigh was acting really weird and I was’t sure on how to fix it, so I spent a good couple of hours just testing things out and trying to fix the problem. 

I eventually stumbled onto the solution by doing the opposite to what someone else has suggested to another person on a forum, as they mention turning off the deform feature on the armature, however the bone that was acting strange on mine seemed to be the only one with the deform feature turned off, so I turned it back on and it fixed it.

Although while in the process of finding and testing out solutions I managed to fix all of the weight painting issues that I had as I had zoomed into the model part very close and made sure they wasn’t any weight paint from certain bones in any of the wrong places, this solution just made the thigh piece disappear into the torso, which can be seen below.

While doing the actually animating on this piece, I spent quite a while figuring out how would be the best way for the attacks to swing, trying to get reference from watching myself do the planned attacks with my hands. This helped a bit in working to make the animations, most of which took a while to make for the first attempt, but I got faster at making the attack when I had to the o the same attack on the opposite hand.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 13

This week I focused on beginning to animate and the texturing on the golem.

When I was texturing him, I decided on using the texture paint tool within Blender, instead of UV unwrapping him and using Photoshop to texture him before importing it back.The reason I did this was mainly because I wanted to test out texture painting within blender to compare it to unwrapping models and exporting to texture things.

I found out that with the texture painting in blender, it’s a lot harder to be precise like you can be in Photoshop, however it is very nice to be able to see how the texture looks on the model as you go, as it makes it a lot easier to make any adjustments to the texture as you go instead of going through the trouble of importing the texture onto the model, only to have it look awful and have to completely redo it in order to get it to work nicely on the model especially if a specific detail is spread across several faces.

Here I worked on texturing the face of the golem before working on the rest of the body. I worked on a few different variants for faces, and asked my group for some feedback on which they preferred the most, they decided on the first design that I created which is the one that is on the golem in the above picture, they liked the simple design compared to any that had more elements.

I even tried out changing the colour of the eyes and making them red to represent that the character is a bad guy and wants to hurt the player.

And here is the texture on the rest of the body, I tried to go for a dirtied rock texture, so like similar to if the rock had been buried and was dug up again and I think I managed to achieve the look that I was going for, which I really like and think will look good in game.

After I had finished texturing the golem, I started to beginning to properly rig the golem so I could start to animate. This process started by changing the golems limbs from multiple models to a single model then finally attatching it to the armature and beginning the first animation, which was one of the slamming animations.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 12

For this week, I spent the time adding the vines that can break to the golem, these were the most annoying and complex part to make while I was modelling the golem and in the end we decided against the vine burning and breaking off as it was too complicated to do and we didn’t have much time left.

The limitation on time at this point also made us debate if the mini rock creatures would be possible to create at this point as they would require more animations then the golem I had yet to move on to them for him. We also had decided on a different way of being able to defeat the boss, instead of using the original plans of throwing flaming rock golems and volcanic fire balls, we made a puzzle out of defeating the boss, in which you are required to hit several switches in order to deactivate the boss and obtain the Caveman’s pet rock.

I had to move the cave man into the T pose position in order to not only the armature, but also so the vines would wrap around the arms an not create a weird gaps, however later one while working on him I decided it would be better for him to have gaps so that some of the weight painting could be fixed easily as the original weight paint went a little bit dodgy around the transitions of the limbs.

I worked on scaling him to the environment, as this week Lewis was finally finished with the environment so that I could use it to reference what size the golem needed to be. I also scaled the armature again so I could rig him properly, since now that I had the environment from Lewis, I was now able to animate it where he would be positioned within the game, so the animations would look odd when when everything was implemented into the game.

You can also see the massive difference in size between his original size and how big he is after I resized him within the environment.

Here he is scaled correctly in the environment, minus the Lava and effects that will be added in unity to polish the overall look of the boss arena.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 11

For this week I continued to work on the boss, modelling the rest of his body, and adjusting everything so that I could begin to create an armature to move the pieces in order to create a set of animations. However I didn’t start on those this week as I spent quite a while modelling the golem and going over it again with the sculpting tool in order to give a uniform look to it.

I added in the legs and the feet to the model this week, taking the same approach to creating them as I did the arms and head, where I started with a sphere and added added edge loops and stretched it out until I was happy before sculpting the rocky texture onto the legs and the rest of the model. I put a few different coloured placeholder textures on, then I worked on adding the second side of the model, mirroring the pieces and sculpting them again so they were slightly different from the first side.

I also took the time to cut both the space and prehistoric sky boxes into sections so that they could be implemented into the game. This was a fairly simple job as  just had to figure out the sized squares I needed and cut them into the exact pieces so that they would fit correctly into unity.

Here are some screenshots of the finished sky boxes implemented into the game and I really love how they’ve turned out, they work really well with the aesthetic of the game, the only thing I would do extra to make it look better would be to improve upon the planets and give them more of a 3D effect, as they look kind of flat from certain angles.

I think the space sky box is a lot better then the prehistoric one but I did spend a lot more time on the space one and I’m very happy with it, as it’s one of my favourite pieces that I have worked on within the game.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 10

For this week while we were in our weekly scrum, there were suggestions of creating a boss character that Zorx would have to fight in order to get the Cave man’s pet rock and finish the game.

Once we had discussed what we wanted the boss to look like roughly, I started concepting the designs for him. We wanted a rock golem for the boss, so I took inspiration from rock monsters that I had seen in other games. I especially took inspiration from the legend of zelda: breath of the wild with the stone talus creatures. In my designs I added a face to the head of the golem to show that the head is the Caveman’s pet rock.

While we were brainstorming we also brought up the possibility of the boss character have little rock minions about the level. These would not only be cool to have about, but would also help to teach the player the mechanics of how to fight, although these little minions would be very different fight compared to the boss.

However we wanted to include the minions within the  boss fight, as projectiles that the boss could throw at the player, they would either smash upon impact or land on the ground and try to chase the player around the boss arena until you dealt with them by throwning them back at the boss to inflict damage onto him. The minions would be on fire so that throwing them back would burn away at the vines holding his limbs together.

For the minions when I was designing them, I tried to keep the design simple compared to the boss cause the details on the little minions wouldn’t be super visible since they would be flaming most of the time you would encounter them. I took inspiration again from legend of zelda: breath of the wild as I really like the designs of the rock creatures and wanted something similar, but much more low-poly since that’s the aesthetic of our game.

Here you can see I started with modelling the boss, it all started as a simple cube shape which I added a ton of edge loops to in order to create more vertices to make a rough, uneven texture that I thought would work well as a rocky texture. Once I had made enough edge loops and vertices and I pushed and pulled the vertices out a different angles and depths to make the rocky texture better.

I finished the body part here so I moved onto modelling the arms, these started as circles, which I then added edge loops to and gradually stretched out until I was happy with the length of them, then I copied what I did with the body and pulled and pushed the vertices out to make the rocky texture on the arms. Although that is not the only thing I did to make the rocky texture of the body, I used the sculpting tool within Blender to try and improve upon the texture, this helped me makes a lot more uneven rocky texture.

Here I modelled the head, fingers and waist similarly to how I made the other parts, I started with simple shapes, stretched them out and adding in edge loops in order to get more vertices that I could sculpt into rocky textures in order to make the golem look uniform.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 9

This week I worked on finishing the saddle for the T-Rex, as you can see here the design has changed again, this is because my team didn’t want there to be a roof or large posts on the saddle as they would affect the vision of the player as they rode around the puzzle.

I ended up having to shorten the poles a lot more as I progressed with making this, in order for the model not to interfere with the mechanics of the puzzle in the area. I also started to model some draped fabric sides and simple low-poly skulls to add decoration to the saddle as it looked a little too plain in it’s edited form. As you can see I did a couple variants of the human skull for the saddle, a more boxy design and a smoother design, both of which I like but I didn’t think worked all that well on the finished product.

At first I tried to do this with only the human skulls but it didn’t work all that well, so I added dinosaur skulls to the posts and made a pattern. However this design also didn’t quite look as nice as I wanted it to so I swapped out the rest of the human skulls for more dinosaur skulls, which I feel was a good idea as in my opinion it looks better and fits so much better in with the aesthetic of the game.

Although I did ask my team for more input between the two designs, instead of deciding which model was to be exported and implemented into the game on my own. They also agree that the design with only dinosaur skulls on, looked a whole lot better then the one with human skulls.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 8

This week I began to work on the sky-box as well as modelling the saddle for the dinosaur, the saddle was my main priority for the week so I spent more time on modelling that compared to the sky box. However I still worked on the sky-box in the spare time I had where it was easier to work on drawing then modelling.

This model was the original Saddle that I worked on creating, since when testing the game, it ended up that a lot of the times the player would fall off the dinosaur and struggle to get back, so counter sliding of the dinosaurs back so easily I was tasked with created a saddle to help the player stay in a specific space while riding on the dinosaur.

However this version of the saddle, ended up being scrapped as my team didn’t like how it looked, and suggested a different approach towards the design of the saddle from what was originally planned.

After the response to the first version of saddle, I started working on another version using some inspiration from elephant saddles in India. I think using reference pictures helped a lot with the creation of this version of the saddle, it started fairly small and simple before I built upon it adding a cloth canopy at the top of the posts that surround the base. I’m really happy with how this version turned our and I think it’s a lot better then the first attempt, this one fits more into the game’s aesthetic.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 7

For this week I was tasked with modelling a range of different dinosaur bones for the environment of the prehistoric level of the game, they original were specifically designed to be placed around just the area where the T-Rex is situated, however as the game has progressed and developed these bones have been scattered around other parts of the prehistoric level to add more detail.

I had some variations tin designs to give the group, for the skull they decided upon the skull with nostrils instead of the on without as it looked better. However for the ribs they chose one of the arched versions, where it is a full rib cage  with the spine piece, the team thought that version of the rib cages was the best version, however I think the partial ribs that stick up out of the ground are better designs.

As you can see in the screenshot below, I had a few problems with these models as well, but these weren’t to do with the models alone, it was to do with the cell fracture effects that I put on the bones. I had to play about with the settings of the cell fracture effect to get what was needed for the game, however this was a problem that would occasionally happen when the effect was added to the model.

As you can see here in the final version after added the cell fracture effect, I had managed to get the model to behave correctly so the vertices didn’t get out of control, although this problem seemed to be randomly occurring so was hard to fix. You can also see in this picture that the amount of pieces that the skull splits into has been significantly decreased so that the game wouldn’t struggle to render a 100 new objects appearing in the scene, so instead the max amount of pieces was around 10-20 to make it easier to render in game.

Once I had exported the bones, we encountered another problem with them, a the light had accidentally been exported with them and some of the normals of the models had been flipped so that you could see through the faces of the models. These set of problems were fixed fairly easily, so it didn’t affect the pace of work that we had for the game.

Here are the skull models implemented into the T-Rex area of the game, I think they look really good and I like how they turned out, especially as they add a lot of depth and world building to the environment of the game.

And here the models are placed about the game in multiple places about the prehistoric level, these have been added to the game as we progressed and built additional areas about the level, to implement new mechanics and story to the game.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 6

This week I showed my team the walk animation after working on it for a while, they liked it however because the first and last frames didn't match up exactly I was told to redo the entire set of animations and I had a very hard time doing this, since I had struggled so much the first time and couldn’t figure out how to do it like they wanted.

However one of the artists from another team in the class came over and tried to help me out with recreating the animations like my group wanted me to and after a lot of messing about with settings and bones to animate it, we finally got the walk animation to work.

As you can see below I had such a hard time with getting them to work, that I ended up with a lot of different save files all various stages of completion and in broken and fixed states. I’m very glad I decided to persist with the animations and kept working on them until they were fixed, as this dinosaur is a big part of the game and I really wanted him to work and look good as it would vastly improve the look and feel of the game, compared to if I had left some of the broken animations or just got rid of them completely.

Some more pictures of a new problem that appeared while animating the dinosaur, where the bones had ended up moving away from the mesh and pulling them away. It was really nice for this problem to be such an easy fix after the complete breakdown from the previous versions of the model and it’s animations.

Here I began the journey of texturing the dinosaur, which started with picked out a colour scheme I liked from the variants that I made at the concept art stage of the game, then I tried to find similar colours to it in Blender where I was texturing him.

I decided to try and figure out the texture pain function within Blender in order to texture him, instead of going through the process of UV Unwrapping him, I would paint directly onto the model. I thought that this process would be a lot quicker then the usual method of unwrapping the UV Maps and taking the them into Photoshop to paint on and re-import onto the character once finished.

As you can see here my first few attempt at it didn’t quite work out and planned and I really didn’t like the look of the model so I tried a different method of using the faces to colour in the different pieces and I also had to alter the colour palette slightly so that the dinosaur didn’t blend into the environment to much since they were very similar shades of brown.

I also added a tongue after animating it and gave myself a problem, since it wasn’t there originally when it was weight painted, it acted a little funky and I had to readjust the weight paints so that it wouldn’t stretch of in a direction I didn’t want it to go while the rest of it was animating correctly. It was a fairly quick fix, but was a little tricky to access so I had to move some parts, with just created more problems with the weight paints which I also had to fix.

Here is the final textured dinosaur, I changed his brown tone to a more reddish brown, so that he showed up better within the environment and I also added a contrasting lighter part to the underside of him, as well as adding the claw and teeth colours, alongside the tongue and giving the eyes a bit of a rework from the previous versions. 

Since in previous version, as seen about the eye was a solid black colour and really didn’t look all that nice or convincing to the player, so I added a few more faces so I could make the slits of the eyes and give him a reptilian look. I think that this worked really well and I have managed to improve the model so much from the original in the limited amount of time that we’ve had to work on the game so far.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 5

This week I worked on animating the dinosaur so he could be properly re-implemented into the game, now that we had changed some of the level design again, so that the prehistoric and space levels were no longer combined, but instead the player was to travel through the wrecked spaceship and end up in a simulation room. The simulation room would then put the player into the semi open world of the prehistoric level, where there was a lot more to explore and the level was less of a Metroid-vania design then planned with less backtracking since it was designed to have a more linear path.

As you can see in the below pictures, while I was animating I ran into a few problems with the armature and the mesh being a bit messed up once they were attached and enveloped and that meant that I had to go back into that area and rework it until I could move the dinosaur without it stretching weirdly when I tried to rotate and move the bones.

Most of this week was spent trying to fix the bones and less on the animation, however I did manage to get some of the animations done once I had fixed the bones. I started on a walk cycle of animations and got the majority of it completed over the weekend, ready to show my team the next week when our weekly scrum was planned.

Here is the scale of the dinosaur compared to the environment that he will be put in within the game, although this isn’t the final scale of the model so he may change once I work further on him and complete the animations and add a proper texture to him.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 4

For this week I worked on some cosmetic additions to the game, such as grass and ferns. As seen here I wanted to created a range of different grass and ferns so that it wouldn’t all look the same, I wanted to create a little bit of variety when creating these models so that the environment has diverse foliage and would look better.

For the grass I did both long and short types of grass and I also made different thicknesses of grass, so there thinner versions of the long and the short grass as well. As well as clumps of grass that were a mixture of the different types put together.

For the grass at first we wanted to animate it so it would sway like it had wind on it so I tried to make it so the grass would animate. I creating bones to rig the grass and searched the internet to try and find so information on how I would go about animating the grass, although I couldn’t find any resources on how to do that.The group wanted to try to find a way to do it in Unity by programming instead, but that didn’t work out either so the idea of animating the grass and the ferns was scrapped.

Here I tried to model a flower for the scene, but I really didn’t like so I decided to keep it to grass and ferns, plus as the project progressed I didn’t think bright flowers work within the environment.

The original scale of the grass within the rest of the environment, as you can see it was maybe a little bit to small, so  I scaled it up a little it so it  was more visible and scattered a few of the grass and fern clumps about. However it took a long time to create just tiny patches and there was a lot of area to cover so the team got help from another programmer from the class, George and he helped us out with a terrain brush so that we could put patches of grass in the game a lot more effectively and randomly instead of the fairly uniform patches that I had been  manually placing into the environment. By doing that it also saved a lot of time, as when I was placing the patches in, it took a long time to do small parts, but with that tool, it was done a lot faster.

For the ferns I modelled one side to begin with, adding details and vertices and then I mirrored it and joined the pieces together to create the single leaves and then I changed and edited the originals to create different angles so I could make up the bushes.

I made these kind of fern leaf as well, I made these after the others and I much prefer these to the first type of leaf, mainly because these look a lot sleeker and more professional, and they create an nicer aesthetic within the game and adds to environmental story telling as well as filling up the empty space in the vast partially open world of the prehistoric level.

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2 - Week 3

For this week, I really wanted to make up for being unable to work on modelling the previous week, so I picked up a more important piece that needed modelling and decided to work on the cosmetic improvements at a later date as they weren’t major, they would just add more to the game environment instead of  it being kind of empty.

I started modelling the cave for the caveman NPC that our main character is suppose to interact with. I started it out as a cube and worked from there, adding more vertices as I went tp try and create more shape, which I did managed to do. As you can see here, this is what I originally ended up with, however I thought it was too small and not detailed enough despite needing it to be a low-poly model.

After not being completely happy with the original so I worked even more on it, add even more verts in order to add detail. I even tried out the sculpting mode in Blender to try and give more of a rock like texture, since when I was done with before that point, the model looked quite smooth and that wasn’t what I wanted as it wouldn’t fix the game at all. After I was finished modelling I added a material colour to the models so that it wasn’t the plain white that objects start out as.

Here is the cave in the original position in the game, with I placed it into the environment that Lewis sent me and I scaled it to a similar size to the player armature that was in the environment. As you can see here I had to play about with the colour material as well as the sizing, since it blends too much into the rest of the background

Update: We’ve advanced in the game quite a lot since the last time, some new elements have been added alongside the old, but here is the cave implemented properly into the game, as you can see the I managed to fix the colour so it stands out a lot more and it has been resized once again, so that it’s bigger compared to the characters. You can also see the foilage that I’ve been working on in the next sprint, and I really love how all of this works together and looks good. 

[lestrange-games]

Semester 2- Week 2 - 04/02/20

For this week, I did try to get my tasks complete, such as the wire mentioned in the previous weeks sprint and some additional asset to improve upon the environment. I also attempted to start some of the bushes and plants we had planned, but due to illness I couldn’t attend uni to access the software I needed, although I did try to download and sort it out from home so I could work. However I struggled to do this as for the majority of the week I was so weak that I couldn’t leave the bed to do anything. I did however try and stay in touch with my group and joined the online scrum for that week to find out what I could do to catch up when I got back to uni