Ukie GameJam!

So over last Monday and Tuesday I participated in the UKIE GameJam! This is an event where they lock a smallish group of game designers in a room together and throw in a pizza or 2 at dinner time and hopefully at the end of the 48 hour experience there are a couple of games to show.
It was my first time doing a games jam ever so I was a little worried about how much I could offer not being very experienced at coding or really completing any games based project yet.  Thankfully there was quite a lot of modeling work we wanted doing for this project so I took on the modeler role :)
It was pretty intense but I was really happy with the amount we got done in such a short time span.  So we had Kai as character artist and animator, Ana as our master coder and me as modeler.

Early stages of development with Will Freeman @spadgy_OTA he was a big help in the concept stage!  Also helped us reign in the ideas a little to keep them plausible.

Ana our second year coder! did a great job putting everything together and also added a very effective car crash animation which has had everyone laughing so far :)

Kai set us up with some very cool animations which were crucial to the project!

Our game was a 'dating sim, plate spinning' exercise.  Our main character Bret has one last chance with his girlfriend Brenda.  She has accepted one last date and Bret wants to make sure this goes perfectly... so he clones himself using a fridge like machine in the back kitchen of his restaurant, of course.  His clones are then sent out to act as musician, cook, bartender, waiter etc to ensure the date goes perfectly.  The only problem is that Bret's clones are a little unstable and need micromanaging to make sure they stay on track.  This leaves Bret splitting his attention between keeping Brenda entertained and making sure none of his clones go haywire!  

Level blocked out :)

Setting up the initial static camera to keep all the characters in frame. 

While testing out the UV's on my models I wound up with a fun disco intermediary for the game level!  Looks like a real hard game of twister!  

Not a real mainstay in Game Jam work but we did have to incorporate a cut-scene to set up the story.  In an ideal world we were hoping to have a clone generating mini game but there just wasn't enough time.

A look at the final product, This is the violin camera focusing on one of Bret's clones complete with a mustache disguise!

A great part of the Games Jam of course was the catering! which came in 3 parts, free pizza from Square Enix Thanks!! fruit and ice cream from our course leader Jon and chicken and mac'n'cheese from my wife Jen yum!

So it was a crazy experience but we did manage to ship! though it was a little touch and go towards the middle of day 2.  There are also quite a few bugs left right now... eg. no victory condition yet but there is a good fail screen and if you leave the game to play itself it is really funny!  We are planing to work out the last few bugs before we put it out on the net.

T-20 days!!!

So big meeting this week! Our presentation could have gone better but there was still a lot of modeling and texturing being done right up to the last few hours.  We were told however (pretty starkly) how important it is to focus on having working features placeholder sound effects and complete animations rather than polished textures.  But we know now and I always found the best way to learn is to make mistakes and then be called on them... at least that's what I tell myself to get to sleep at night :p

So today we introduced a Kanban strategy with the help of Sion, on of our tutors :). It was a little scary to see all the features we were hoping to implement in only 20 days but seeing who is doing what is realy useful!! Also it's a great way to predict how much time we have and how much time our tasks are going to take. So below is a picture of the features we are hoping to implement before we broke out the post-its! And the very small line of numbers at the bottom is the tiny amount of time we have to do them all in eek! I'm actually quite confident at the moment that we can get it all done but I'm sure future rob will laugh at my naïveté :) especially since I am moving house at the same time and also planing to work on the up comming UK Game Jam next week yay! Looking forward to completing a project in such a short time! Also gonna work with one of the second years Anna Patricia a rather eccentric Brazillian who comes up with some v cool ideas! So stay tuned!

So my latest task is to tidy up our character model, rig her for our canned animations and to create a custom jump animation.  We had an initial model to work from but despite it being very well built for animation there were quite a few tweaks and rebuilds I had to implement to prepare it for a game environment.  I am pretty happy with the result but have not tackled the hair yet..... I'm sure there will be a couple of posts in the near future documenting my journey to insanity while I try to make the character look good enough :p pictures to follow when I've done some screen grabs :)

Have a random picture of some crazy NFTS students filming dogs playing on the grass! Glad to see we have a bunch of people doing edgy artistic stuff :p

One other highlight of the last few days was introducing Jen to Niddhog! A brilliant 2d fencing combat game... Wish I could say I was the yellow character though :p

So sorry for the lack of interesting photos in this post but don't worry next time I will have some cool textured walls to show off and some cute little mushrooms... that look a little bit more like shells than mushrooms but it's really nice to see a level coming together.

It is a great experience to be working on a computer that can actually handle a completed and textured level :) previously when I was self teaching with Digital Tutors (totally recommend btw) I would always have to give up when the project got up to particle effects or complex texturing as I saw my old desktop grind to a haut when I asked if it could generate 100 smoke particles rather than 10. But seeing my completed level in unity lit well with all it's normal maps etc is a real treat! Really looking forward to having more completed projects under my belt!! And having a level completed with sound and a good looking character!

Yesterday a few of us caught the new Aronofsky movie 'Noah'

..... I can sum it up in one observation, the audience laughed!! when Russell Crowe dramatically walks towards Emma Watson wielding a knife with the intention to murder her new born daughters.  It was by no means a bad movie I just felt since it was directed by Aronofsky I was expecting something more subtle and dark.  There was so much focus on spectacle I think some of the subtleties were very easy to miss. The dream sequences were very powerful and almost felt like they approached some of the visual beauty of "The Fountain."  In my oppinion there was one beautiful scene between Noah's middle son Ham and the main antagonist Tubal. There is a lot of backstory, leading to Ham considering to kill his father, but these two have a great dialogue exploring the side of life where humans are dominant to animals that completely contradicts Noas teachings to his sons.  I felt that dynamic between these two could have carried a whole movie on its own with all the important events from the actual Bible story being background elements framing Ham's internal conflict.  Unfortunatley in the end it recieved very little screen time. Clint Mansells music was great thoigh as always.

Mini Presentation Day

Long but productive day!!
managed to tidy up a bit of my normall mapped vine cage and render it at 2048 x 2048px which immediately revealed quite a few shortcuts I had taken :p but they are all corrected now and its nearly ready for its final stages! yay!
Had a bit of a mare trying to get my max file into Mudbox as each time I imported the file there were some wacky vertex's flying around but once I cut up the file a bit more it all seemed ok... guess there are no excuses not to dive into mudbox tomorrow then.
Our presentation to Jon and Ben went pretty well.  There were no major changes just little tweaks and a certain level of urgency... chased with a few kinda crazy ideas with regards to complex animations. We only have a few weeks left and we are still modelling :p But I do agree it would be really cool to have some nice animations in the final product! Guess we will see, but here is a really nice still we accidentally wound up with while discussing Sam's new level.  Really starting to get excited with this project!

But the highlight for the day was when Jen arrived! Got some nice moral support and a bit of entertainment when I sat her down with the classes Vita and listened to her play Hotline Miami!
Anyhoo time to go home! and just before 12:00 that's a record for this week :)

Abnormal Normal Mapping

yaaaawn!!
Ok finally caught up on my hub modeling, the mushrooms are in the right place, the doorways all line up and the walkways look pretty cool!! also got them checked off by the art director so yay!
But today marks a pretty big achievement... well almost achievement.
I managed to successfully normal map my vine design for the central pillar!!
wooo! this doesn't sound like a whole lot but as you will see in the pictures this was quite an undertaking.

The first picture showes the original hub from about a week ago.  This was quite radically changed adding an emphasis on vertical camera views and more interesting use of character directing.  The new platforms and mushrooms really add a sense of wow as you enter the room!
So as you can see from the second and third picture the central vines were quite a key part of the design.  This is a little tricky however since there are more polygons in the vines than there is in the rest of the room by about a factor of 10 or so :p
To fix this I originally tried to normal map the entire stack onto one low poly cylinder.... this didnt work out and instead yielded a kinda cobweby very low res tower.  After talking with my 3D tutor Ben I was informed that trying to project a single untiled texture over such a large column was a bad idea... makes sense now cant believe I didnt think about it at the time :p
So the next stage involved creating a flat tillable 3D texture and then wrap it around the low poly column instead.
The current stage as shown in the 4th pic is pretty nice I think.  The texture is only 258x258 in resolution and needs a little tweaking to get the tillable look perfect but for now that will do! I think I may even sculpt the 3D vines in mudbox quickly to give them a cool look as well.  Depends on time I guess.
anyway more photos!!

There is one last picture I would like to add which I found as I was going through my phone to find the above pictures.  This is a bit of a memento to what I thought wold be a cool adition to the level but ultimatley became redundant after this second change.  The corkscrewy spindly cool twisty barrier roots!

Yea kinda looks like a poo but I had these looking cool in mudbox and animated to twist into the floor as the player got close!
I'm glad I got to make them though! maybe they will make their way into another game some day.
So off to bed now, presentation in about 10 hours or so! wow I can actually get a nice amount of sleep tonight yay!