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Reflection

The four month project consisted of a lot of dedication and an equal amount of sacrifice from both the project and from personal life. Over the previous months working on this project there has been a large amount of ups and downs along with some informative experiences. 

Never Set was a massively over scoped idea, which I feel like I knew even from the beginning, but I didn’t want to back down from the challenge. However coming out of this project and reflecting back on the process, it was stubborn of me to believe that with the skill level that my team and I had, we could produce a game that we originally visualized. There are a lot of things I wish I could have changed from the beginning, cutting out a lot of the original ideas, giving more time to write a script that reflected the ideas and themes we wanted to convey with the player, even during the concept stages I wish I had come out of it with more concepts to show for the game.

These are all things that I am wanting to bring forward with me for future projects. I don’t see this game as a failure, with the result that we came out with, I am very proud of the progress and process that us as a team had to go through together and although we didn’t reach the desired result, we learnt a whole lot from the process of creating this game, and in my eyes that’s more of a success. I’ve learnt that it’s more important that we can learn from what we’re doing, especially as students. This is what we are here to do and the best way to learn from mistakes and failures and even successes, is to make them and learn from them as best as we can. As a final assignment from Yoobee, this one is very dear to me as it has helped me grow not just as an Artist, but as a person as well.

There are things that I regret about this project. The commitment level to this project was in flux for all of us throughout the months we worked on it, and we each have our own personal reasons as to why. I was facing a lot of difficulties in my personal life, and with the final months of the project, began working part time alongside full time studying which resulted in a lot of fatigue and difficulty with adjusting to a healthy schedule to support my busy lifestyle. These are all things that I believe are just more challenges to face with the project, in which I did a poor effort to maintain. However I remind myself that I am only human, and there are going to be times in my life that are difficult to balance and maintain, but it is when I quit on those things is when I fail.

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Click Here to play Never Set made by Creature Feep Games!

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Today in our forecast of Never Set, we’re expecting some concept designs for logos and final developments!  This will be a shorter post than usual, as there isn’t much to report in this post.  This post is all about the process of creating the official Never Set Logo which was actually quite difficult to come up with. 

A quick explanation into the thought process:

When coming up with any kind of logo, I think of what the logo is going to represent. Seeing as Never Set has a strong focal point on sunset colours and the setting of the day. Because of this reason I wanted to use circular patterns and shapes to represent a sun/sunset. 

Above are the first few prototypes I created.  Below are continuous developments of certain designs.

I felt like the logo was really coming together. A few things I had in mind were that I wanted the text to be familiar even if it didn’t have the logo part with it. (think of legend of Zelda’s logo.) I pushed further.

With these final logo concepts I felt that Never Set now has an official logo! 

Here’s an example of the logo in use with official Art! (Alongside a cheeky Creature Feep Logo!)

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Well its been a hot minute since my last post. But lets just get straight back into it!

It’s Beta time!  Throughout Beta, it was a bit of a confusion. We decided to change our game engine from Unity to Unreal, for many different reasons. This didn’t effect much of our game progress as our level designer, Daniel, spent the holiday remaking the game. It ran a lot more smoothly and was easier going forward from here than it was with our luck with Unity.  With the change of engines, luckily this didn’t effect my own progress within the game at all. 

3D MODELLING

I’ll admit. I was pretty nervous to start the modelling on the characters. So I started off with the character sketch:

Just a basic front+back reference for me to work off of.

ZBRUSH

The first program I started with was Zbrush, where I started from scratch and modeled Tara.

She took a few days before she was finished. There were a few additions I put to the model that wasn’t in the concept art originally which were the gloves (Baseball gloves) and the eyebrows being 3D (however this was taken away on the final model.) 

MARVELOUS DESIGNER

One of my favorite programs to use when 3D modelling is Marvelous Designer. It’s just fun to mess around with the simulation feature and watch fabric cling itself to the model. Always gives me a good laugh.

So after Tara’s High Quality Model was created it was time to make her clothes. 

It wasn’t too tricky, which I was surprised with due to the fact that the last time I used Marvelous Designer was back in 2017 on an old school project which was a bit difficult to get around at first (had to redo that characters clothing about 7 times before it came out properly.)

The only differences from the concept art was that I gave Tara a crop top instead of the T-shirt seen in her original concept art. This is mostly due to Marvelous Designers weird problem with layering clothing (which I ended up figuring out how to fix in the next model) and also due to the fact that I was wearing a lot of crop tops this summer and really liked them. You know like-Creator-like-Character? 

You can see the 2D view at the end of the row of pictures above. If you’re really into making clothes, its actually pretty simple to get used to marvelous. I love working with the program and can’t wait to use it again.

MAYA

Far out Siriah how many programs can you use for one character?! The answer is at least 4.

So now that Tara is all glam and ready to hit the Mani’s, she needs to be converted into low poly. As opposed to Marvelous Designer, this is my least favorite part of the 3D Modelling process.

To be honest I was getting pretty impatient too. This was around the time when we began working with Unreal instead of Unity, once we came back from our holiday. 

The importance with making a low poly version of a game character is to optimize space for your game. Too many polys can really severely effect the optimization of your game. 

With the low poly completed, the UV’ing was sent to a higher up (my tutor because he could do the UV’s in half the time it would take me)

Looks funny.

BUT WAIT THERE’S ONE MORE!

SUBSTANCE PAINTER

This was probably the biggest learning curve for me as I’ve only really used Substance Painter like twice. But thanks to the supervision of my Tutor I learnt a lot from this time using Substance.

And with that, Tara was then complete! I enjoyed the process of going through Tara’s character creation, from drawing her to creating her in 3D it was a lot of time and effort but so worth it in the end.

That was only Taras process, Zac was a whole different ball game but basically very similar in terms of the 3D modelling process, so to save myself some time I’m just going to post below the screenshots of Zacs process and final model.

ZAC

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UI PROTOTYPING

Another challenge to conquer with Never Set is the screens that the player will go through when playing the game, pausing the game, going into settings, etc. 

ROUGH THUMBNAIL

With the help of my tutor, the rough thumbnailing of each screen also indicated (by the arrows) where the next screen will take you.  USING FIGMA

A powerful (and free website for individuals) tool that I used to help grey-box out the look and feel of the screens was a website called “Figma” its a fantastic website to use to help quickly give a prototype of what your screens could look like and have transitions. 

Altogether for the first draft of the main screens ui (including Main Menu, Pause, Settings, Load, Save and New Game) it came to 8 screens that were quickly iterated over an hour and a bit. After each look was created to liking it was easy to program the screens to work with the help of Figmas “prototype” tool. 

Above is an image of what each option would link to if clicked. 

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After a week off for a break, Never Set entered into its Alpha stage which admittedly started off incredibly slow. The motivation for the team had seriously fallen through and it took us almost two weeks of production time to really get back into the swing of things. 

Nevertheless, Never Set Alpha lives on!!

DIALOGUE AND NARRATIVE

As the game begins to take more of a shape, the important core aspects start becoming more of an importance. Recently I have begun writing down the many scripts we will need between Tara and Zac, most (if not all) of the story elements that will be given to the player will be shown through conversations between Tara and Zac.

Above is a screen shot of Final Fantasy 8 (contrary to popular opinion FF8 will always be my favorite FF game because it was the first one I ever played.) An old PS1 game that had dialogue and narrative through speech “bubbles” and even from time to time had dialogue options that the player could choose through to get different conversations. For Never Set I was looking at something similar to this class RPG approach to dialogue and narrative. The characters will be telling the story through conversations. 

A more modern version of this approach is from “Night in the Woods” (another indie developed game that has heavily influenced many areas of Never Set). In this game the dialogue and narrative is also spoken through conversations with the characters, however done in a more streamlined style, the characters each have a colour to represent themselves and tell the player who is talking. This approach style wise is something I am looking at achieving for Never Set.

SCRIPTING

Currently there are around 10 different main story conversations that Tara and Zac will go through that the player can experience throughout the game that will give main story beats to the player. To break them up there will be “filler conversations” where Tara will ask Zac about small information on the town that will be placed on repeat until the next main story beat is reached.  It’s been fun to create dialogue for both Tara and Zac, as it helps me make out their characters in order to create a more authentic and believable characters.

FIRST TESTING IN GAME

Currently we are working on the dialogue system which is definitely still around prototype stage. Because at the time we didn’t have the scripting ready it was difficult for us to know how to work on the dialogue system from then on. After a few conversation tests it is easy to find the first few bugs we need to fix.

LONG CONVERSATIONS

The biggest main problem at the moment is that some of the conversations scripted are too long and with the system that we had coded for now didn’t have a function to detect when the sentence was too long to therefore cut it up so it wasn’t cut by the edge of the screen. (as seen in the image above) 

Ideally our vision is our conversations to look something along the lines of the above image, however another problem we have come across is that words will be cut at random areas, giving incomplete words (such as “diet” becoming “die-t”)

These are small and very useful bugs for us to look at in order for us to finetune our dialogue system and bring it closer to the vision we are looking to create such as the “FF8″ and “Night in the Woods” examples.

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One of the most important aspects of Never Set is the enemies that the player will be facing with Tara. 

As a part of the prototype stage of the project and as the lead artist, one of the many tasks I’ve had to face is the challenge of creating enemies. There’s a lot to the manifestations in Never Set, they are dark creatures that hold their person captive until the human is strong enough/ willing enough to face them and defeat them. 

FIRST SKETCHES

I started off with sketches of things I thought were “scary” drawing reference from things such as demons or “Oni”. I didn’t feel anything for any of the current drawings shown above, aside from the three “animalistic” characters at the bottom. I thought that potentially drawing from the fictional town I was creating would help me bring the enemies to life. However I realized early on, that it wasn’t connecting to the story I was trying to tell. Manifestations are peoples fears and emotions. Nothing about these concepts really sold that for me, so I continued on to more concepts.

SECOND SET OF SKETCHES

for my next attempt I got some advice from my Tutor about just focusing on shape. Using a large brush and just the eraser tool to get some definition I worked out a few more concepts. However I felt the same was happening with these few iterations. They just didn’t seem to click with how I wanted the enemies to tie in with the story. They just looked like massive blobs and that was kind of it? 

I got pretty frustrated with all of it to be honest. I felt a heavy dose of art block that I could just never really seem to get out of. 

THIRD SET OF SKETCHES

After having another chat to my Tutor about how dis-satisfied I was with it all, he gave me a few pointers on things I could potentially try out.  I took a step back from actually drawing and thought about what were the most important traits I envisioned when I thought of the manifestations: 

- They were to come from the person they possessed

- Their presence was to be looming and dark, a contrast to the constant sunset colours of the rest of the game

- They were to appear to have a humanistic appearance, but their facial features were clouded, undefinable or even just gone in general. 

- When they appeared behind their human, they were to appear as if they were latching onto the backs of the person, as if they were a dead weight that you wouldn’t be able to shake off.

- if they had any facial features at all, they were to have incredibly beady/small eyes and a wide “joker” like smile. 

With these specific traits in mind, it became a lot easier for me to concept out the next few iterations, even doing things such as cutting off certain parts of a “human-like” body and seeing how I could play around with that. At the end of this concepting session I was very happy that I was finally going in the right direction.

From there I began to script out how Tara would react to seeing the manifestations for the first time and how she would come to get the idea that maybe fighting them was an effective way of getting rid of them... 

... Resulting in Tara using brute bat force to get rid of them. I liked the idea of different particles being used to differentiate different types of enemies, they would posses similar base bodies but their faces, arms, legs or whatever part of the body that was missing would be a different texture (either smoky, scribbles or just straight lines) as if they were just noise. 

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It’s been a lot of fun drawing the concept art for the characters of Never Set (more characters to come soon!) I almost forgot that the Environment Art needed to be done too!! 

I find environment art my weakest point in drawing, I never fully understood things like perspective and certain other aspects that were key to environment art. I’ve found an incredibly easy way to help me with this obstacle is grey boxing.

3D to 2D concepts

Grey boxing is a life saver, and helps with making quick landscapes and thumbnails in a shorter amount of time. I go into Maya and 3D model out a very rough grey box of something I want to draw out (e.g. a townscape) From there I angle the camera in Maya to a nice angle I feel I can work with, and I take a screenshot. From there I load the screenshot into Photoshop and just draw over it, paint over it, add colour, details, characters, etc. 

An important hub within Never Set is going to be Vending Machines. This is where the character will regain health/ act as a save point. Vending Machine areas will act as safe zones where enemies cannot follow you, a safe haven for you and Tara to chill out before setting off to continue on with your adventure together. Another key character will be seen hanging around the Vending Machines around the town... But more on that character later! 

Although the above screen shot has less detailing in it, I plan to expand more on it as I continue on with environment concepts. The goal is to create a small town that is big enough for the player to roam around and feel interested in, whilst being small enough in scope that my team and I are able to complete with strong details at the end of the project. There are a few stores I’ve been thinking of to help the player use as “landmarks” for ease of navigation, and a small florist store is one of them!

Working with these concepts is a lot of fun and is easy to accomplish anything that you can think of with short amounts of time. As well as concepting some details into areas, the colour scheme is something I’m strongly working on. Never Set has a phenomenon happening to the world in which the sun never sets. Achieving this look is imperative to the games visual and narrative. I want to achieve the right look that I’m trying to go for before the Alpha Build where we start really 3D modelling and texturing everything. 

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Introducing the main character and her designs!

NAME: Tara

AGE: 14 years old

I really enjoyed designing Tara, although she dresses a lot more stylish than I ever did when I was a 14 year old, I took a lot of inspiration on what I like wearing now/ what trends I like. I’m not trying to go for a specific era of style, but instead playing around with her personality and her sporty-ness, she wears a lot of loose clothing to run around in. The warm colours are a symbolism of the aggression and power she holds at the moment, as red and yellow are quite strong associated colours. Tara’s main weapon- the baseball named “daisy”- once her older sisters, is a simple baseball bat. In concepts 2 there are little daisies painted on the bat- a small ode to her sisters favourite flowers. Number 3 goes more towards the aluminium baseball bats, usually a lot lighter and easier to swing around.

I really enjoy drawing Tara, her design is easy enough to play around with and its easy to give her the attitude I’m pushing towards when drawing her, which is something I can find quite difficult with drawing the same characters over and over again. I’m excited to work on her character more throughout this project, and hope that I can convey her story well enough within the game.

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NEVER SET PRE-PRODUCTION WEEKS 1-2

“Our Protagonist battles the Dark Manifestations of people’s emotions to gain the mental strength to overcome her current conflict in dealing with her Older Sisters death and achieve new insight in how to deal with grief.”

This was the initial paragraph used to pitch the idea of Never Set. Of course that paragraph can raise a lot of questions. Who is the main protagonist? Why is she fighting dark manifestations of peoples pain? How did her sister die? 

Never Set is definitely the most ambitious project I’ve wanted to work on, and the story is definitely a strong core part of what the game is.  The original idea came to me as I thought of what kind of game I would aesthetically want to create. Something that had a sunset palette, with an aggressive young protagonist wanting to run away from home and wreck havoc and have adventures on the road with a sun that never sets (bingo thats where the name comes from ;) ). From this idea I came up with the first initial sketch of the main character, the art style I wanted to go for and the first pass of the colour palette. 

Introducing Tara, the main aggressive protagonist dealing with unknown circumstances in a world where the sun never sets. From this drawing alone I had everything ticked on what I wanted to create for a final project. The initial idea was small enough for me to be able to work on both the story and the mechanics.  Because I usually have a lot of problems with making the story for a game but not being able to back up the game with mechanics, I kept this in mind when coming up with the rest of the games idea. I put the story to the side where it was and focused on what the game would consist of. 

My personal preference towards playing video games is easily directed towards those with a strong story-line, well developed characters and fun mechanics that make me sit down and play the game for hours on end and still there was so much more to learn about the game. Kingdom Hearts was a great example for inspiration for this game. I originally played Kingdom Hearts when I was around 9 years old, and fell in love with the fun mechanics of smashing the “x” button a million times to hit enemies, with the game looking like it was out of a cartoon/anime. That was totally my jam for a long time. However I always sucked at the game and gave up quickly because I was a dumb 9 year old that didn’t care about really learning how the game plays in order to get to the glorious ending of fighting ya boy Ansem-Riku. As I became an intelligent young woman, I revisited my favourite game and realised theres so many fantastic systems to Kingdom Hearts that MAKES the game. Like honestly its insane the stuff you don’t look at when you’re a kid and you’re like “wow I was a stupid kid.” but I mean, I’m 21 and I’m still only just learning how Kingdom Hearts really works well.  I digress, the main point I wanted to get at with Kingdom Hearts is that ITS SMART. It rewards the players for playing the game the advanced way: Learning how each enemies attacks would go, timing your dodge/reflect/counter at JUST the right time and then BAM, being rewarded with extra EXP in the form of Tech Points. It makes you feel like such a badass when you figure that out and start playing like the eSports pro you always thought you were. (I would blow my 9 year old selfs’ mind if I showed myself how to actually play Kingdom Hearts.)  But THATS what I wanted to create. A game that rewards the player for playing it good. Now pulling it of is definitely a whole different post. With this in mind, combat was definitely a wanted must for my game. As much as the story definitely is a focal part of my game, I always found story focused games to be kind of boring and missing in the prime type of “action” needed to really stimulate me and my combo obsessive mind. But I didn’t want just a “cutscene, gameplay, cutscene, gameplay.” type game that really pushes me away from games like final fantasy sometimes (even though I low-key binge them sometimes, like Final Fantasy 8 is seriously my favourite ever but even THATS a post on its own) I wanted there to be reason to everything in the game, that all connected back to one theme.  Mental Health, Emotions and Pain and how its dealt with.

As stated in the first pitch line, our main character Tara is dealing with the loss of her Older sister. The worlds time freezes to a constant afternoon phase and everyone remains blissfully peaceful as if nothing in the world is wrong. Because that’s how I feel people deal with problems of all sorts in their lives. Tara is the only one in this world that chooses to face her problems head on- with a baseball bat. The sun never setting is a metaphor for when you’re dealing with problems or a certain hard time of your life and you feel as if time is always constantly stuck in one place, the pain becoming your constant companion and things repeating over and over until its physically and emotionally too painful to bear with. This is where the Manifestations of Peoples Fears come into the whole story. They’re what people refuse to deal with, emotions, problems, things that people put on the shelf and pretend never existed because its easier than dealing with it. But because Tara is willing to confront her fears and emotions head on, they take form in her world, a place where she can deal with them in a physical form (because who hasn’t wanted to just smash their problems with a fricken baseball bat sometimes?)  Theres a lot to this idea, I couldn’t even write it all down within one Post. Which hopefully will be executed in the game itself. This project is a very personal one to me, and I have two dear friends helping me making my vision a reality in the form of a video game. 

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Final Project: NEVER SET

Finally we’re onto our last project for Year 2 of Game Dev, its been such a journey and this is where we can all show off what we’ve come to learn in the past years.

So now its time to Introduce the name of my final project at Yoobee: NEVER SET.

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Wrath of Zeus Final

The game has been out for a while but the link is here! It was a fun game to work on, I enjoyed just focusing on a 2D style without having to worry about 3D! Not for the next project though! Lots... and Lots of 3D for the next one!

https://childrenofolympus.itch.io/wrath-of-zeus

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Wrath of Zeus - Final Week 5

And the final tree is up! 

I decided to make it like a Tier-System that will be shown on the games Itch.io page, just to give the players a preview of who’s in the game! But still you’ll have to play the game to find out whose at the top of the Leader Board! 

Next on the last week of Development: Social Media Visuals and creating the Official Itch.io page for the game!

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Wrath of Zeus - End of Week 4

The final Hierarchy of the classmates you’ll be facing in order to reach the top and take over as King of the Class! But who will you be facing at the top of the leaderboard?? Play the game to find out! 

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Project: Wrath of Zeus - Week 4

TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY

Some new progress on the 2D Sprites! I’ve done 8/11 which is FANTASTIC for me because drawing them over again is quite  arduous in terms of being annoying with time. Regardless the last three shall be done by the end of Thursday and I will be done forever and I can move on!!!! (Hopefully)

Some characters have specifics on them, (for reasons you’ll need to play the game to find out obviously ;) ) It has been an incredibly fun time making up a bunch of characters and as I draw, a story of this classroom forms in my head and entertains me. 

Up next: 

Trying to fix the three menus I spent some time on and finishing off the last three characters!

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Project: Wrath of Zeus - Week 4

MONDAY

I started off getting stuck into it with finishing off the Title Menu, Main Menu and the Pause Menu:

Sticking to the classroom feel, I decided to place the Title Menu on the Chalkboard (In this day and age who uses chalkboards anymore? But it looks aesthetically awesome so whatever!) and made the writing look as if the teacher had written it in chalk! Genius I know! 

Something that I really wanted to pay close attention to was the stuff on the side of the chalk board too, small notices and posters, bits and bobs that gave the main menu a certain “lived-in” personality, things you would find in a classroom like a “VOTE FOR STUDENT PRESIDENT!” poster drawn over with sharpie, calendars and small things that just gave a hint as to the setting of the game without having to say anything at all.

And when you press the “COMPETE!” button the board will switch to the main menu: 

In a perfect world where time doesn’t ruin your deadlines, I would have liked a really flashy animation of a duster wiping off the chalk and the next menu coming up. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and time is a man-made concept. Deal with it. 

Anyway off that tangent, the lightning bolt is a visual indication for the player to see what they’ve chosen (e.g lightning bolt next to play = the player wants to play etc.) 

However after a critique session, a few classmates/ the tutor pointed out that “new game” would make more sense, so that’s on my to-do list tomorrow.

The pause menu follows the same principles as the other two boards, when the player presses the pause menu... lo and behold, the pause menu will pop up!

Next on the list of half completed tasks: The Final 2D Sprites! 

so far I’ve only done 4 out of 11, however it really doesn’t take long at all to redraw them so I’m hoping to finish these off either by the end of Tuesday or the beginning of Wednesday. There wasn’t really any challenge with these and they were quite fun to draw again. The characters are from left to right: Nate our main character and who the player will be spending a lot of time with, Medusa with dreads that she painted green just for this special occasion, Generic Boy because I’m not actually sure who we’re going to make him into and Athena with a horse-riding helmet with a broom-end glued to the top of it.