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 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!

3D Computer Graphics I: Week 7 – Anatomy

For one of the first times during this course I had some past knowledge of the subject we addressed in class – anatomy. I took the Life Drawing class this summer which went a bit more in depth than our official 2D course in terms of the human body. The methods we used were theory, figure drawing and sculpting clay. It was great practice for me and I improved a lot. What I did not expect was how useful sculpting was to deepen the understanding of the human anatomy, but it was very useful. Everyone who want to improve their knowledge of anatomy, especially for art purposes, should try sculpting a live model. But of course, I am far from an expert yet. I just got the basic theory down. I will present a few drawings from this summer and bring up what I think my greatest weaknesses are at the moment. I will also make a plan of how I can improve for the future six months ahead.

Here is a part from the final assignment that I did for the Life Drawing course. We were tasked to capture the rhythm of a pose from a classical painting, draw a new version with the construction, to then draw a complete drawing with anatomy and some simple shading to indicate the shapes. Lastly, we had to draw the same pose again from a 90 degree angle, to become fully aware of how the body is positioned. All of this is great practice.

Sketch from figure drawing class

Wait.. are the legs equally long?

These different drawings demonstrate something important that I will need to practice more – to keep the length of the limbs equal, especially the legs. On the sketch with the chair, the bent leg appears to be longer than the supporting leg. In dynamic poses where the character don’t stand with square hips and straight legs, it’s difficult to get it right. I’d say that the main way to get better at it is simply by practicing drawing dynamic poses.  To me personally, I experience the side angle view to give the most distortion in this.

Hands and Feet

An other weakness that I am very aware of are hands and feet – especially hands. It’s so easy to tell if it looks wrong, but still so difficult to get it right. And I’m usually too interested in the face and the rest of the body to want to pay just as much attention on the hands and feet. My dear teacher Pernilla said that one should spend as much time on the hands as on the rest of the body in total. They are very intricate like that. I just have not put enough mileage in my hand drawing practice to get it right. I am very much aware of it. With this problem as well, practice and mileage is an obvious answer to me. However, watching tutorials and learning even more about the anatomy of the hands and feet should give me a more solid base to start from.

My still unfinished sculpture. I worked on it for five days. Someday.. I will finish her!

Sculpting

I would also like to address once again how useful sculpting is in terms of learning anatomy. I’d strongly recommend sculpting with clay or something else that does not involve a computer and software. Using your hands to shape clay gives you direct control over your sculpture without any restrictions or complications. When I worked on this sculpture during the summer course, I really got to discover the directions of the different “planes” of the anatomy. The twist on the side of the torso due to the latissimus muscle among others, the flatness of the hip bone area contrasting to the rounded belly. I could go on for ages. Working with the human body in 3D gives so much more depth (literally!) to what kind of decisions you have to make when creating your piece.

Drawing on Top Of and Copying

And a last technique that I have learned from Life Drawing: Drawing rhythm, construction and anatomy on top of something, to then redraw it on your own afterward. We got several assignments like these and develops the vision of seeing beneath the skin, to what is underneath. Being aware of what the shapes actually are is important in order to create work of your own.

Edit: Everyone should own a book for reference. I have Albinus on Anatomy. It’s really cheap and Swedish residents can get it by clicking here.

3D Computer Graphics I: Assignment 3 – Body WIP

This is what Alfred’s body looks like after the Wednesday class.

3D Computer Graphics I: Assignment 1

This post will be dedicated to our first assignment that I finished and handed in last Sunday. We have been working on it since week two and gone through step by step the whole process from rough model, cleaning up and optimizing, UV-mapping and making three different types of textures. I will go through each of them.

Finished Crate

Diffuse Map

The diffuse map is basically an unlit color texture, which is meant to give the model its color and a contribution to its texture. What is said to be the most comfortable way to creating diffuse maps is by using manipulated photo textures.

What to think about: An optimal photo for the use of texture work is taken from a straight on angle with no skewed angles. It should also be taken with no direct lighting, optimally on a cloudy day. The reason to not have any shading or extravagant highlights on a diffuse map is because this will happen through other maps instead in order to be able to look at the object from many different angles without it breaking the illusion.

Specular Map

The specular map is what is used to define how shiny an object (or details in an object) is. It is a lot more important that one might think at first. In fact, some might argue that the specular map can be more important than the diffuse map in some cases. This is due to how we humans perceive objects at a distance. Before anything else, we tend to spot whether something is shiny or matte. Color gets distorted through the atmosphere but shininess remains.

What to think about: You use a greyscale image to define what is shiny and what is matte and also how shiny or matte these are. White equals 100% shiny while pitch black equals 100% matte. One spots very quickly if a specular map does not feel correctly adjusted so one might like to be thorough and do a lot of testing before saving the final map.

Normal Map

The normal map gives an illusion of depth to what actually are flat polygons. This keeps the poly count down massively.

What to think about: You start with making a greyscale image where the white is full protrusion and black is full intention, while the grey in the middle is neutral. After you have a greyscale of the topology you process it in software that can convert this to a RGB normal map. I used a trial version of Crazy Bump for this (and it could create a separate specular map of the same greyscale image). One might wonder what to model and what to create with the normal map and one can go about it like this: Does it break the silhouette? Model it. Does it not? Make it a normal map.

Summary of Assignment 1

Just a few weeks ago before this assignment, I didn’t know anything about modeling and texturizing. To learn the literacy of 3D graphics from zero prior experience has been and still is a time consuming and tough journey for me. But I have learned so much, and even though this crate is very simple, I will let myself be proud of what I’ve made to then focus fully on our next assignment.

3D Computer Graphics I: Week 4

This week has been devoted to the basics of creating a texture for our models. Also, for the theory lesson we got a recap of color theory to refresh and deepen our understanding of color and light. Here I will show my chosen model with its diffuse map and explain how I’ve chosen its look, in terms of visual style and color theory.

I decided to go further with my cartoon style crate for two reasons. First reason is that I like the cartoon style so it gave me a clear vision of what I wanted to do with it. Second is that I believed that it would be one of the easier ones to make a texture for, which would be good as I didn’t know anything about UV-mapping prior to this.

Since the cartoon style is a caricature of reality I felt like going for a caricature style of a regular wooden crate. As a realistic crate would have a standard, desaturated tone of brown, I gave my crate a stronger saturation to make it bright yellow/orange to the tone instead.  It has a very passive color scheme as the crate is made by the same wooden material all over. It’s bright and warm colors gives it the impression of being a non-threatening object which fits perfectly into a cartoon style game.

The box with its diffuse map, rendered in UDK.

I learnt a special thing when it comes to cartoon style props as well as other styles that have distortion and skewedness. The easiest and fastest way to create a skewed prop would be to first create both model and texture as if it were a straight, symmetrical object. That will simplify the process of UV-mapping and texturizing the model immensely. To map my already distorted crate proved to be very time consuming. I had a hard time figuring out how to get the UV checker straight everywhere. It was not possible to make it perfect in some places. It also made things trickier when painting the texture, since I couldn’t use an exact copy of any side for the other. I had to adjust edges manually to fit each side so I just ended up making all the six sides without much copying. Mudbox helped me a great deal to get started on it, though, since I could use a wood-patterned stencil and 3D-paint a lot of the texture at first. The work in Photoshop was a bit trickier as I had to check how I should adjust the edges of the texture for each side and switch in between programs constantly. I am also unsure of whether the resolution is acceptable or not. I think it is slightly on the bad side and want to pay more attention to this for my next model. However, this model might get away with it because it follows a cartoony style and can still look good oversimplified. I am happy with the results though and am frankly surprised with how my first texture turned out. I am looking forward to taking it even further next week when we’re going to look into normal mapping.

The model with UV-Checker on.

Board Game Analysis 2: Carcassonne

This week, my group and I have been playing the board game called Carcassonne. It is built like a dynamic puzzle where the players build up unique combinations and worlds during each game. No game turns out exactly the same way and it is open for both cooperative and competitive play.

When a player begins his/her turn, they start with taking a Land Tile from the draw pile. The only rule they need to follow is to place the tile next to the side of another tile already in the game world and that these sides are of the same terrain type. This usually means that the player has a large variety of locations where to place their tile at. Once the player has placed their tile, they can choose to place a follower on some of the existing terrain on the tile if it does not conflict with other followers that are somehow connected to that portion of the terrain.

– Best sides –

What appeared to me as much obvious was the fact how much me and my fellow group members seemed to enjoy playing this game. I think this is because the game has a clear goal, non-complex rules and several different ways to reach to this goal. Last week we played a game that had such freedom of action that trying to figure out a play style felt confusing. Carcassonne has just the right balance to its mechanics that one can grasp the core gameplay quickly but still see the complexity to some of the dynamics that one wants to play for a longer time. There is a fine line between “midgame-points” and “late game-points” which allows several types of strategies to gather points. None of the strategies feel overpowered and makes room for a lot of replay value and enjoyment.

Another aspect that I felt was the duality in how the players cooperated to build a world together but still tried to play competitively to gather points. It’s not aggressively competitive like some other games unless the players make it so. This allows for play styles and types of game sessions which let the game cater to many different types of players. I think it is interesting how the game manages to do this.

– Worst sides –

To be honest, I see few bad sides with this game. It is difficult to figure out bad sides of a game when the experience with it has been so good, one might be blind for its weaknesses. But if I were to mention anything that brings down the level of fun from time to time, it is the random element with how the Land Tiles are picked up. The players have no power over which tile they get to use during their turn and one cannot save tiles for later. When a player gets a Tile with a curved road three times in a row it only feels frustrating. Maybe there is a way to take advantage of these tiles in a smart way that I did not figure out, but half of the group members experienced this at least once. I am not sure how this could be best solved, but I would suggest being able to keep one tile in stash so that one has a slightly better chance to do something about a repetitive, undesired Tile. It might not make much of a difference though; it would have to be tested. Anyhow, it is the only frustration that we experienced since it’s a random element. Other than that, I feel like it mostly has fun and interesting dynamics.

– Core game system –

The player is given two types of tools they get to use during their turn. These two are the Land Tiles and the Followers.

Land Tiles

The Land Tiles are like square shaped pieces of a puzzle. They are featured with different types of terrain and these types are visually reaching out over edges of the tiles. This defines which pieces can be connected; the pieces have to connect by sides with the same type of terrain. These terrains are:

• Field
• Road
• City
• River (expansion)

There are also tiles with Cathedrals in the center, but they are not related to the edges. Instead, they might have fields or roads on its edges. But they do play a part in the following section.

Followers

The second object in the players control is the follower. They are attributed with the players color and the player has seven of these to place out as they wish. The player can place these along with the Land Tile they are currently placing during their turn and depending on where the follower is placed it will be named and attributed in different ways.

• Farmer – When placed on a Field. A farmer will be permanently placed and potentially gives points at the very end of the game.
• Knight – When placed in a City. A knight returns to the player as a follower and gives points if and when a city is completed.
• Thief – When placed on a Road. A thief returns and gives points to the player when the road it’s on is connected on both ends.
• Priest – When placed on a Cathedral. A priest returns and gives points to the player if the Cathedral is completely surrounded by tiles in all directions.

These are the rules of the follower system in which the player has to think strategically in how he/she wants to gather points in the game. There is no obvious answer and it has a lot to do with what the other players choose to do. If someone already has placed out many farmers, placing out farmers of your own might risk not giving you any points.  Similar scenarios can happen in cities and on roads though compared to with fields, these two give quicker feedback and are more likely to be in the players’ control. No one gets a penalty for completing a city with different players’ followers within the walls – both get the full amount of points. This pushes the possibilities for coop further.

– Most interesting system –

After playing and observing a few game sessions, I find the system of the “Farmer” follower the most interesting in the game. The Farmers dynamic functions by not knowing if it will be lucrative or not until later into the game. Many players place these out early in game, and once the world grows and gaps get filled it’s difficult to place out new farmers if there already are other farmers connected to that land. This forces the player to place them in the blind and hope that they turn out to be profitable when the game ends.

What I experienced during our second play session was that one can benefit having unconnected farmers surround secluded cities that exist on an edge of the game world. I managed to have two lone farmers on a piece of land each, divided by a big city. They gave me points for the same two cities that were completed in the area which led me to a clear victory. This might be the optimal way to use the farmer whenever it’s possible.

– Target group –

The outside of the games box tells us that it is suitable for children from ten years and up and I would like to say that I agree with this target group. When I checked online, players of the game had voted the age of eight and up to be a recommended age, so I’d like to say that eight year old children might be able to play this. There is no game dependent text at all. Also, the properties of the objects are simple enough for a child to grasp during his/her first game session so that children can easily play this without the aid of an adult. This game feels very suitable for both friends and family.

Between two to five players are meant to be able to play this game together and the number actually affects the gameplay quite a bit. Playing as five players is more chaotic and less controlled since there are more minds and wills at work.  When we played the game with three players instead, the players synced together and placed their tiles more as a cohesive group. But since these three players got more turns for themselves to spend, they were a lot of the time out of followers as they were all placed in the world at once. They kept getting tiles where they wanted to place a follower on but couldn’t. This shows that the amount of players creates a new type of dynamic in the gameplay. I’d say that the game is more fun with three players, but playing with five has is good points as well.

– Summary –

Carcassonne is a dynamic puzzle where the players place out Land Tiles and Followers to create a world together and gather as many points as possible at the same time. The freedom to play cooperatively or very competitively, passively or aggressively makes each game session unpredictable in a player controlled way. The random element when drawing the Land Tiles is the only element of frustration as the players don’t feel that it’s fair at all times. Other than that, it is well balanced and has no obvious weaknesses. The rules are very simple which makes the game available for players of all types of ages and would be a very nice game for family to play during Christmas holidays. But despite the simple rules, they allow for a depth within the dynamics of the game that lets players become engaged in different strategies and want play more.