Scrap Pirates: The last week of production before GGC

Gotland Game Conference 2015 marked the deadline of our production time in this course and we have now reached that point. As the last week of a production can be rather chaotic and present sudden, urgent needs in a project, I have been working part of my time with sound effects for the game as we noticed that we needed more of it. In terms of graphics, I finished working on the space parallaxing background as well as started the production of achievement icons for the result screen.

Old version

Final Version

It is one background with two foreground objects in order to be able to make a more advanced parallax than one simple image. This is not visible in the current version of the game, but we made most assets for the game with modularity and the future in mind.

The old image had too many independent parts and felt a bit sparse and unconnected as a scene. I got the feedback to tone the independent parts down and put more of the colorful clouds in and bind them together to make it feel larger and more cohesive. To me, It definitely feels like an improvement and it is all thanks to letting other, talented people give feedback. So I’ll give a note to self and to anyone doing creative work: Don’t cower from showing your work and taking feedback! It really helps!

But at the same time, one has to still remember to stay true to oneself and make stuff that feel good on a personal level too. Especially in game design, a lot of people have different opinions on what kind of features the game should have. If you try to please all these voices at once, the game might change too much and you can lose the passion you had somewhere on the way. Balance is key.

To sum the whole experience of this eight week period, it has been intense but smooth. Having a proper pre-production period and a Scrum plan was definitely beneficial for the group, and every member worked hard. Having an office where we sat and worked face to face was for sure to our advantage as well. It beats distance work in terms of efficiency by far!

Now it is PostMortem time and I’ll write about my experience with creating environmental art and creating the world for a 2D game. Once it is finished, I might upload it here as well.

I hope my post have been helpful or at least interesting for anyone who reads this. It is quite hard to know how to document the progress of a project the best way at times. There is just so much going on at once!

Until next time! 🙂

Scrap Pirates – Week 7

Due to health problems I’ve had to stay at home this week and done whatever I’ve could from there. Most of that work has consisted around iterating and saving up new background tiles, finishing the box blocker tile set with thicker outlines and more interesting energy core, and put together various background decals on a sprite sheet.

 

An updated background tile without lamps as they will be put on separately instead. It took a while to do as I for some reason had to make them tilable again. The box blocker was iterated to fit the units in the game editor and to fit in square tiles.

I started working on the parallax layer of a space scenery but have yet to receive feedback and discuss it with the rest of the group. It’s more like an experiment to see what we should do with it to fit the cartoony style of the game. And there is also the question about the scale of everything. It needs in-game testing together with everything else for us to know. But I can show you the WIP nonetheless.

Next week will be the last week! Let’s do our best!

Scrap Pirates – Week 6

The sixth week has come to the last day and it’s soon to be only two weeks left. Today we will have our second open play testing and next week will be beta. Things are steadily progressing forward and features keep getting implemented and iterated.

I will firstly present my reiteration of the door panel. We wanted it to grab the attention of players more and communicate it’s purpose more clearly, so I added hands in the center of the panel. The red hand will be slowly fading in and out to catch the players’ attention. When the panel is pressed and turns green, a thumbs up icon is displayed.

While there are countries where a thumbs up sign has a pejorative meaning – such as for example Russia, Greece, countries in West Africa among others – we decided to use this anyway as it is a fairly global sign of approval due to social media.

I have put together a collection of dirt and scratch decals. The tricky part with it was that blending modes such as Multiply in Photoshop won’t be kept as the file is saved to PNG, as well as the risk that the effect would be different if one found a similar function in Unity. Also, different decals would have to use different blending modes and such to get the desired effect that I’ve had in mind during their creation. It would create extra work in Unity if I decided to take that route. So I concluded that the most simple solution would be to adapt all decals to a normal blending mode. Once I had realized this, it wasn’t a difficult thing to change. However, I figured that i had to do this with all other decals that I’ve made as well as they have a shadow outline.

Slicing guide for the person who will implement the decals into Unity; in case the program wouldn’t figure it out automatically. Also with an opaque background so that the decals are visible. On the real sprite sheet they are close to invisible due to their opacity.

The second problem that I had when working on the dirt was that I could not color pick and blend them due to their opacity. The background would affect the picked color in a bad way. What I did was to use the smudge tool instead and blend out  my started cloud of dirt until I got a less detailed and more smooth and painterly feel to it. I did a similar thing to the rust as the orange edges would blend out around the spots.

After that I made a default door with the characteristic black lines of the foreground elements, to make it pop out from the background properly. We thought about adding lights that would shine red when the doors are locked but felt that it looked cluttered. Therefore I kept the dark grey area blank.

What I am working on now is a sudden request that appeared during the week; a force field device which keeps magnetic blocks to pass through. It is deemed required for the level design; so I got to working on it as soon as I got the request. There will be a tilable, long part, a corner part and attachment parts to the ground and walls. It is still WIP and will be changed quite a lot to fit the recent feedback of my other group mates. It will for example change into color scheme similar to the door, get the corner part slimmed down among other things.

That is all for now; until next week!

Scrap Pirates – Week 5

Greetings!

I hope the red day of May 1st is a good one. Myself, I’m sitting in school, painting rust!

This week I have made the top extension backgrounds and keep my fingers crossed that I now am finished with the background tiles. I have now started making decals to place on the walls to create some more variation and life i the background. I managed to figure out how to animate my fan/turbine asset and am now studying dirt, rust and other types of deterioration that might be suitable in our game environment.

To study photos of rust in comparison to how it’s been painted in games such as Deponia, they can look really different. There is a depth of understanding that must be gained before one can create it on their own. That is what I’m currently doing right now, exploring my way to creating a type of rust effect that looks good together with our environment. Keep in mind that the rust that is shown on the picture is not finished yet. The rest is finished, though; and a player avatar for scale.

As it is right now, it can easily be recolored to a green hue and be used as some kind of algae growth. I’m playing around with the shapes and the transition/blend of different tones in the rust texture. The value and saturation will also be tweaked to melt into the environment better. I’ll probably gain an in-house title of Dirt Master by the time that I am done with these decals.

Until next week!

Scrap Pirates – Week 4

I’ll show some of the work I have done this week and tell what I have learnt from it. But first, I will tell about a major decision which was made for our project…

Two weeks into the production we have a better understanding of how long it takes for us to make specific things and many of us realized that three unique levels is an overestimation on what we can achieve. We value quality before quantity and scaled the scope down to one level. This way we can focus all our effort into making it as polished and alive as possible.

A large part of this week has also gone to the background tiles. After testing the first version in Unity, I gathered feedback and got to know about problem areas in order to make more finalized versions. The main part was to get them tiling seamlessly. After fixing that and doing some final polishing, they should be done.

However, it was also learned that the levels will be built a lot on the vertical level as well. The backgrounds I have made don’t necessarily tile in a natural way on the height because of all the horizontal panels. So it was requested that I make a background with a new look to work as an extension on the height. We happened to miss this during the planning and production of the now finished background tiles, so there are some hours left on work until the background tiles can be checked of the list.

WIP of extension. I’m exploring what the panels look like when tiled. It will not look like this in the end.

While the backgrounds were tested, I made a panel for opening doors and a pillar to divide the backgrounds every now and then. I learnt that the rendering technique I had used on backgrounds didn’t necessarily work on the assets and was requested to remove most of the dirt and details which I had painted. I will be more attentive of this as I get to make my next asset.

There was an interesting division in the group wherein which symbol in the panel should represent “activated” and not. 50% thought that the separated hexagon represented an open door, while the remainder felt like the full hexagon represented a closed circuit and therefor should be the green, activated one. We went for the latter, but might make changes if we learn something useful during our testing.

Big Game Project “Scrap Pirates” Report: Week 3

Hi you all!

I am glad to see anyone reading this as I don’t tend to make very regular updates. However, this will be at least a weekly occurrence in the future five weeks at the least. For we are now working on our Big Game Project: Scrap Pirates!

As the third week officially marked the start of the production period of our game, it is start to properly report on the progress. Here is some brief info of the game, my role and some WIP-pics.

I’m one of the seven team members who are working on the 2D metroidvania style co-op game Scrap Pirates. You will as a player manipulate magnetic abilities to solve puzzles and fight the enemies that stand in your way, in order to find scrap parts and therefor gain riches. The game will focus on exploration and overcoming challenges together with a friend.

My work in the project will mainly be circulating around creating environmental art for the game. That comprises backgrounds and both functional and decorative assets for the three different levels. Together with my Lead Artist Christoffer I’ll design and produce graphics which feels coherent to our style and communicates the game design clearly at the same time. This week I have been working on the background tiles for the first level we will build.

Wall tile with large, shut window.

Small Windows. I have yet to make holes in the wall for them. 

Large, “open” window with character for scale. There will be a view of space in all its prettiness once everything is finished and implemented.

I am keeping everything on separate layers and they are in general divided like this (in order they are created, not stacked): Lines, flat colors, shadows(multiply), light(screen), dirt texture(multiply), color differentiation(overlay) and then whatever finishing touches I feel it needs.

My work on the backgrounds are still very much a work in progress and the work will stretch over onto next week as well. As they need to be tileable they need extra care in order to look good and not be strangely repetitive. I will also add some separate decals for the level designers to add freely on top of the backgrounds for extra variation.

I’ll give you another update in a week from now. Thanks for reading!

“Needle” WIP – Base Mesh

Long time no see!

We are working in groups to go through the pipeline of making a character, from concept art to finished model with complete texture sets and an animation tree. My two comrades are Alex and Nils and I am in charge of the concept art and modeling. This is what we got so far:

Meet Needle, our tough post-apocalyptic archer girl.

Character Turnaround

Base mesh – ready for rigging

It felt surprisingly painless to start modeling her. Perhaps it is because I made the turnaround myself and have already gone through the thought process of how she is constructed. Maybe it’s also because I’m not a complete beginner to 3D this time, too. The only thing I noticed is that the software is confused with the face orientation of the hair. I had similar problems with it on my previous character and am not sure if it’s something I’m doing wrong when mirroring meshes or if it’s a bug. It didn’t prove to be a problem last time however so I’ll probably have to wait it out until it’s time to texturize.

3DI: Assignment 3 Hand-in

Meet Alfred.

Here is the character rendered in UDK

Diffuse Map

Specular Map

Normal Map

 

Opacity Map

UV-Checker

UV-Map Layout

3DI: Assignment 3 Update – Mesh

This is what my finished mesh looks like. I feel like the UV-mapping has potential to go fairly painless, since he wears a lot of clothes which will have natural seams. If anything it’s his bald head that might cause trouble.

  

3D I: Assignment 3 – Update

We are supposed to have a finished mesh by now for UV on Tuesday, but I am far from done. With all the school work we got on the game design course right now, I simply can’t keep up with everything. I also feel very unsure about both the head and the body of the model, as this is my first time modeling one. We ran through a wholly different technique in modeling faces (covered in my previous post), so I didn’t really know how to start build a face from scratch. Most things are sure to be improved on this model until the final version. I would need at least one more week with assistance to get it done as I’m keeping all the other current assignments in mind. I will work as much as I can on this until Tuesday.