NEW SITE

I have a new portfolio/blog website - so if you are interested simply go to dameanlyon.com

Ok there is a lot to catch you up on. The last few weeks have been a bit hectic but have produced a lot. Mostly I have been focused on art work so that is a relief, but in addition to my work I have been producing a short film and banners for Forward Solutions. Forward Solutions is an entrepreneurial  company that mainly focuses on training items or tools for military personnel.

The most recent product is the BTM-1, a small simulation explosive that is meant to train military and law enforcement people in how to handle disarmament/avoidance of IED’s (Improvised Explosive Device).

Moving on to school and our game and art projects. Our most recent rapid prototype is a game driven to teaching engineering students Thermodynamics – one of the hardest theories to grasp from what the Engineering department states. Our game is a 3rd person exploration game. The premise is a you are trapped in a space station and you need to find a way to escape. You will use exploration, laws of thermodynamics, problem solving, and potential combat to work your way out. My part in this is of course all of the art. Initially I began with the though of doing a platformer, since this was a rapid prototype and older games like ‘Super Mario Bros’ and newer games like ‘Rayman Origins’ have the greatest appeal to people who don’t generally play video games. After drawing up several character designs my group changed the format to a more realistic setting. My new points of reference being ‘Metroid Prime’ and ‘Dead Space’. I don’t have any delusions that these games can be created so easily but it will be a fun challenge to try and tackle.

I have already modeled a corridor and a splitting hallway that can be repeated easily. At first I tried to do a very high res hallway and use a transfer map to created the detail on a lower poly model. The programmers are working with XNA and I remembered from my work in ‘Heroes of Hat’ that a shader needs to be written to handle bump/specular maps. To alleviate the weight of there shoulders I revamped my model to much more simple but still contain enough elements to hold the same feel as the style of games we are exceeding to. Unfortunately I don’t have the model at the computer I’m posting from so I’ll show you later. What I can show is some of my earlier character concepts.

For my game art class we have had a few assignments.

The FIRST of these is to take a standard alleyway model and apply a texture, normal map, and specular map to create the best product that you can. I used several existing tag png’s for the graffiti and created a tiled brick, cement, and street texture off of stock photos. I also used a Gobo to create the tree silhouette on the side of the building, and created the street poles and newspaper to add a little more to a mundane scene.

The SECOND was a series of drawing assignments. The first was to draw 3 pictures of your family doing an activity. The second was to do a few pages of weapons. Third was my own assignment to try and emulate a new style of characterization.

1st – I would show you the others but I tried to do them in pen and they aren’t my proudest of drawing moments =(

2nd

3rd – my next personal project will be to try and emulate the level design of the game ‘Rayman Origins’ which has some of the most incredible artwork, and color design.

The THIRD – is an on going assignment. The assignment is to create a building with normal/specular maps, under 3K tris, and a total of 1024×1024 texture size. The building choices are between the Wells Fargo building in Salt Lake, the Grand America, or the State Capitol Building. I chose the capitol since it seems like the most difficult and a good challenge. I finished the model, UVs, and first stage texture and normal map last night. The next step is to create a better texture for and normal map for the area with pillars. In the first run I simply created a texture in photoshop – but in this next run I will create a model that I can used to do a Transfer Map w/ambient occlusion, and normal map, to pull the best results out of my simple model.

Oh! and last but not least is the speed model challenge. In the beginning of every Game Art I class we receive an image from our professor. We then have the next 45 minutes to an hour to do our best to model (not texture) whats in the image. Here is todays work

Post Mortem & More

Cheese Monger is finished. We presented to the client ‘Beehive Cheese Co.” which went very well. Both professors as well as the client stated that I really captured the lovability of a character and look within the game which in turn allowed me to stand a little taller for a few minutes =) There was no real negative feedback but I know that many of the visuals could improve. Since it is a prototype I won’t obsess about it though.

After the presentation we did a post mortem assessment of how things went. We broke down everything in the time line and everyone put of posted notes about what they felt went good/bad during the project. Even through the good we discussed what we might have been able to do better – the main thing being more constant communication.

On the side I finished the head of a big enemy character that I had thought up several months ago during the EAE summer camp (a high school 3D modeling course for the University of Utah – which I helped TA). I had worked on the character for awhile but I couldn’t ever get the feel right on the face. I used the sculpt geometry tool in Maya and quickly messed with the shape to find something I found much more appealing.

On the side of school, this month I’m going to be doing more art for Rogue Corps. They have a weapons convention soon and want to display a new website and an animation that displays the setup of IED’s (Improvised Explosive Device) in the way that they are used in war today.

Why can't I freeze time!!!

Well much of my work for this week is already finished. I have completed my;

• 500 tris or less character
• Mass amount of game design and virtual worlds reading
• 3D model and animation for the Cheese Monger character
• Imagery for the menu system in the Monger game
• 5 pages of tree drawings
• Logo for an outside company

The 500 tri character wasn't too hard of a challenge.  It was fun for me to dive in and work through the character quickly. I knew that I didn't want a copy so I tried characterizing Darth Maul to a more lanky toonish character. My professor gave me some good feedback after I did the texture to try and embed highlights/shading to make the texture less flat so I used a little photoshop to paint in highlights and shading - then put in some directional lights and glow effect on the saber for the final render. 

The reading was very interesting - most of it was based on the structure of a game. Both my Virtual Worlds, and Game Design class reading discussed how the rules, barriers, and tools are what help make the game fun, as well as, are what define games apart from experiences. There of course are the difficulties of making interesting narrative, challenge, character, and other things that make a good game, but the meat of the discussion was making sure the base functions and goals of the game are great. 

In Fat Knight we made a lot of work for ourselves in using 3D objects in a side scrolling game. It created more work in trying to optimize character to function on a mobile device instead of focusing more on character design. In Cheese Monger we are still using a 3D for the level but for the character I rendered out a sprite sheet to save processing time and space. I have only done a simple animation for the run, jump, and a getting ready to run animation. These should be more than enough for a rapid prototype.

The Menu System for 'Cheese Monger' isn't really in depth - it is only a basis to show how things would be laid out and not how they would be as a finished product. I'm happy with some elements of what is laid out but the main screen seems elementary to me and could do with more research in to what make UIs appealing. 

Drawing is again what made me thing I could do this job. The 5 pages of trees was simple enough for me since the only focus for this week was to make sure I focused on the lines while drawing trees - as apposed to my habits of trying to shade things. After the 2nd or 3rd tree it felt very natural to create random twigs and branches that could pass for a trees true silhouette. Speed was a self proclaimed roll for me in this assignment. Habitually I will take a deal of time to ensure accuracy across my image, since much of our work needs to be done quickly I made sure that I didn't spend too much time on details no one would be able to pick out and focus more on the big picture. I don't have my final page but I will post most of my work. 

Rogue Corps is a company owned by my brother. Most of it's function is to keep injured veterans (mostly those whom now function with prosthetics) in an active lifestyle. I have done other projects for my brother and his company including weapons spec model and concept gear to be sold to the military. To advertise the company more he asked me to create a logo to go on t-shirts and other items to be sold at functions and sponsored in athletic events. His request was to include a Crow design from another company, a soldier with rifle and ball cap, his style of prosthetic (since he is a double amputee himself), and the american flag not to bold on the character. It took a few days of back and forth to match what he had envisioned but it is finished and already doing very well generated attention and sales to the company. There are already over 200 orders for the t_shirts in the first couple of days and it is going to be present and the upcoming Tough Mudder comp, and the Marine Corps marathon in Washington, DC. 

There is a lot more work for this next week but I'll save it for the next post. 

Beginning a Master's title

   It is the first week of the EAE Masters program at the University of Utah and I am BUSY! Although it is a lot, I'm excited for the work. It was great to meet up with my team and have the excitement of starting a new video game project with an enthusiastic group. I'm attending a Rapid Game prototyping class, Game Design class, Virtual Worlds study class, and a Game Arts class. I have my work cut out for me as one of three artists in the entire program =)

  Currently my group is working on a project for the Beehive Cheese Co. A representative came down from the company and let us try some AMAZING cheeses. Two days later we pitched a game and now in the process of making it happen. There are 7 teams all prototyping something to show but 'Cheese Monger' (my game) has the most promise. It a 3rd person runner - a combination of the new Sonic, and Temple Run. I won't spell out the specifics until the game finishes it's many renovations but it offers the best image and repetition of branding for our client. 

The first gameplay image for the pitch

This is the first take on a character for the game. My attempt was to appeal to the public audience who would think of an actual cheese monger as more of a cook or butcher. Our client loved it but wanted some renovations to fit more of the average type of monger - whom is more typical to be dressed as a hipster.

After changing a few the things our client is very excited with the new style of character. 

My list of things to do

 - Create a hive texture for the track

 - Model a track

 - design obstacles & collectable characters/icons

   Other classes have me up to my neck in reading material but my game arts class. One of the reasons for my choosing this career path is my enthusiasm for drawing in my AP Art classes during high school. Through high school I was asked to design many things for the schools clubs, local bands, and some graphic designers who did skateboard and snowboard designs. Even in the military I was asked to use my skills to design prints, new emblems, and murals for units and officer's clubs. My point in all of this is my assignment for the art class. It is well know that a basic knowledge of drawing will help you in all other aspects of game art and design - so our assignment is to draw. 

   This week it is simply to draw 5 rock formations but I'm trying to add a few so that I might have a broader range of skill and style.  I'm working on characters, and a broad range of styles - this week I'm working between pixar's cartoonish round types of characters and the more elongated/exaggerated characters of Team Fortress. 

I used to be more of a pencil artists but I have found that using pens makes me commit more to my drawings and think more before I let my pencil just run away with my usual style. 

   Fat Knight has hit a few bumps but is still close to it's finishing - I just need to find the time to do a few more animations and icons for a power up system.  

Ok all caught up - catch you next week.

A Big Revision

Hello and it's been awhile. Heroes of Hat has been having great success and I can't wait to see how it does in Indiecade & Dream Build Play once our latest update gets released. So now that all but the promoting of HOH is done - it's on to a next one!

Fat Knight is a mobile app project that I had worked on about a year ago. It wasn't ready for release but we did have some designers from EA and Avalanche who recommended that we don't let it go. You can check out the current/broken version here. The changes from that version will be: Full 3D characters, a viking level with 3 new enemies and main character, boss fights, an Oriental Level with another set of new enemies and main character, a series of power ups and special attacks. Oh and it will function properly.

What I have done so far:
 

• 3 Enemy characters concepts - designed for the viking level
• 4 3D models for viking and knight levels (Not Textured)
• Main Viking character concept and 3D model

For this week I still need to finish my last viking enemy and begin character concepts for the boss fights. We had a team member drop out so we may have to cut the Orient level. So that we don't invest too much we will work solely on the knight and viking level till they are done and polished before moving on to the later. The team consists of 2 artists and 2 programmers. A very small group but we are cherry picked as the best and hardest working so it shouldn't be a problem.

Close to the cutoff - National Photographic/Yellowstone

Much of my time on this project has been spent fixing things. Fixing rigs, textures, UVs, triangles on models and redoing it again. Since we finally have the "It's good stamp" from our client on all the animals we have been able to get most of the animals done. As of my own work I have done the rigs for every animal but the big horned sheep and have completed the; 

-walk cycle and trot for the wolf 

-run, walk, eat, startled animation for the deer 

-walk, run, stand up, get defensive for the bear

-fly cycle for the eagle

- slow and fast swim and a jump for the fish.

It's been awhile - Hereos of Hat

Like the title says it has been awhile since I posted. I have been eager to give my updates on this project but I figured the actual project took a higher priority. 

I have been working like a dog to build the last sets of levels. I think on my last update I was working on the forest 2 level but much has happened since then. I have finished making the cave level, castle level, and refactoring the first forest level for a longer tutorial section in the beginning. Animations have been added to the goblin to fit the new feature where players can hit each other and be stunned for a second. I think I have made around 30 models or so for these levels but none too complex. We added dandelions to the swamp level as well they look pretty good - I wish better but I am restricted by the poly count and style of the game for the level of detail. 

It has been a very exhausting couple of weeks to get these levels built for todays release. TODAYS RELEASE - wow it is already here. We will be submitting late today for review so if everything goes smooth, and I'm not counting on it, we will be on the Xbox Indie Game Market soon. Once we submit I will begin moving over to making sure everyone is testing other developers games and advertising our game. I want to get a Kickstarter up to fund our submission to many of this years competitions for indie games and for swag to pass out when we do events but I need to research what we can do as far as incentives for people when they help us out. 

Heroes of Hat - Promoting

As far as sprints go this one has been a little bit more low key for me as far as my art work. I finished the Forest II level and I cam up with a new platform system for the swamp levels. Jon Futch (Lead Programmer) and myself are almost always on Skype with each other for several hours a night. We have found through this process that it has allowed us to solve problems better faster, and with a quicker feedback as if we were truly in a work place. So usually I will stay online while I work on whatever my task is and Jon while message and say hey I need something, hey I wanna do a bouncy platform what do you think would work...and so on. So this weeks question was how do we justify the moving platforms and how can they be separated from the bouncy moving platforms. So I researched more swamp plants and other artistic renditions of swamps such as Rayman Origins and others to come up with a lilly that is carried by a spinning swamp lilly. It ended up really good and already looks great in the game.

Most of the week has been bouncing between interviews and promoting the game through playtests. I honestly have to get to another one THE UTAH INDIE GAME NIGHT right now so I will update more in a bit.

Yellowstone - New Direction

I know this is the first time that I'm writing about this project so let me try and catch you up to speed. Right now in my Game Development II class (separate from the senior capstone project) we are working on a prototype game for a large company . The point of the class is to make a 3D game specifically for a client. In the beginning we had contact with the client but once it got close to needing to get started we had difficulty meeting with them. To try to keep the experience accurate Marty Clayton our professor and former assistant art director at EA took there place as the client while still trying to capture the same vision. Now we are getting some attention on the project so I figured I should start blogging about it.

The game is essentially a photography game based in Yellowstone but can expand to anywhere - which will be our pitch.

In this project it is the first time that we are doing an actual production line. Before I was always did everything start to finish character concept-model-rig-animation-export/integration. This time since we are the larger group in the class I am almost solely the animator since I have by far the most experience + the only one with the knowledge of rigs and how to get 3D animated models in a game. So far there has been some issues with the models. At first we had the plan to make every animal very characterized since we don't have the time to make them realistic. We received several bumps and bruises since the beginning phases of animal modeling proved that we couldn't really stray far at all from the build of the animals we are doing without loosing the functionality in many of the animations that we and the client wanted. This moved us to make the decision to make the shapes of the anima accurate and leave all the characterization of the animals to be done in textures. I have animated two deer, one buffalo, and three bears now before we came to this so it has been a learning experience of "how things really go sometimes" said by Marty.

We do have another animator but he is very elementary in his knowledge of both rigs and animation so we had to make the choice of whether he was going to hurt us and we should let him go - or to keep him on and not rely on his work. I knew that if we let him go all the work would fall on me anyways and he really wants to be an animator so I asked if we could keep him on and if worse came to worse it would all fall on me anyways. Marty was able to help me out a bit with bringing on a animator from the Masters Program - since Heroes of Hat is taking up a lot of time and this project is BIG. We had our first meeting last night and she seemed good to go so it is boosting my moral a bit.

This weeks tasks
    I have already done a few animation for the newest bear and I've completed all the animations for the main character. Since I'm still the only knowledgable one with rigs I will be doing the wolf, bison, big horned sheep, and deer rigs by tuesday. Hopefully I will get the chance to add a few more animations but the rigs are my only committed items for the week.
 

I need to get back to work on HOH so I will post videos and images of this game next time.

HEROES OF HAT Release!!!

Booyah! We worked through the spring break and we got the game out Saint Patty's night. We had several issues with lag but once we shipped it out and the debugger wasn't running, it played so smooth. I did notice though that once I saw the swamp level I had made in game it looked a little sparse. So this last week, besides finishing the new file path system, I brought the swamp level one assets a bit closer like I had done with swamp two. To add I also cluttered up some of the water space with smaller mushrooms and smaller cat tails. We had a large argument over the break about the lag being a Polygon count issue so I was wary at first to add much more since the swamp levels have much more than any others currently.

I researched the Poly count thing and found that we were so far lower than many of the other xbox standards and even Wii standards. Our largest character for the game is around 4600 polygons. After I researched I found that Marcus from GOW is 15000 with normal and bump maps, Link from the new Zelda is 6600. The lowest surprisingly was the Master Chief from Halo around 2200 if I remember correctly. That being said our character polys were not the issue. On the other hand with scenery we had at the most 45000 tris 22500 polys in our largest level. I found a site that told about system specifics and the OLD Xbox could handle 125,000,000 polys a second. All that being said I new it wasn't our issue and I wouldn't let the issues be handed off to the artists to spend hours and hours working to fix something that wasn't broken. As it turns out it was just a garbage collection issue as we now know and have fixed so I'm glad we didn't waste any time with trying to cut down the polys that we didn't have to. Even after that knowledge my new swamp is still only 33000 polys for the entire level so we are still doing great.

I still struggle to get much work from the other artists so I'm a bit stressed out about getting it done. I know that I can but this 7-8 hours a night till 3am is wearing on me since my boys wake up at 8. It makes me dream of a workplace with a nice desk and larger screen to work on =). I can't wait to have 8 hours of the day to do my work.

I have begun work on the Forest Two level (the one with the GREAT TREE). I have had a hard time coming up with visual justifications for some of Jon's wall barriers and platforms. at first I was going to try to do things with tree branches and leaves but the issue was that the tree wasn't big enough in the screen, and it is supposed to be the only large tree around - making it so branches could not come from random directions or look too thick too far from the tree. A fix came in the idea of making a type of Ewok village in the tree. Once I got some work done on a hut I tested it out and it works for a lot of the scene. I still am stuck on what to do for some of the large wall barriers but I'm going to run it by the other artists tomorrow and try to come up with something good.

Tedious

This last week has been an adventure into the world of Relative Paths. Currently our game is hitting a snag in that it is too big for our release. Currently our game would have to be a $3.00 game but we want more people to play this game and enjoy our hard work so we are trying to cut back the memory size to a $.99 game.


Since the beginning of our FBX exports we have been doing an 'embed media' option. The issue with this is that once it opens to the game it creates a file and stores the image reference in that file. This doesn't seem like much of an issue since the file and folder need to exist anyways but in our game we re-use many textures so we end up with 30 or 40 of the same texture file - it's becoming a learning experience on a need for a more efficient process. Another issue is found when the other artist cut corners in texturing and would apply 3-4 different textures to a single object instead of making a single png image and then mapping out the UVs.

To fix this issue we have set up a new file system for myself and John Nielson to work with. It emulates exactly how the file structure for our game is currently set up so that we can have the easiest switch over. What I'm doing is taking ALL the fbx files for the game and opening them extracting the embedded texture to a new filing system then re-exporting the fbx with the file path through the workspace root to the texture.  To fix the other issues I'm identifying all the fbx with multiple image reference along the way and creating one image then mapping the UVs to match. So far I have put in 17 hours or so toward all the assets and I am almost done. Once I am done with my work John will begin taking the images and rescaling them to save even more memory. Along the way he will make sure that they still look good in the game so that we don't loose our quality.

We currently need to cut back about 70MB on our size but we are trying to do more since we are still in development of the Village and Cave level.

Along side that other work I was able to fix the twitch in the goblins hand and finish all of the exporting and importing work to get my level art for the swamp levels in the game. Last night Jon Futch showed me what was in the game so far and I'm really excited about how it looks - although I still need to create one asset that will look better for part of the levels obstacle system.


On the programming end we are hitting a snag with some lagging once the game is run on an Xbox. Since Jon F is the only other one besides myself seriously working over the break to get our release back on schedule I have asked him to try to work out what is going wrong. Since Jon was on level design and this problem is taking up a lot of time I will take over for the Cave and Village. I have already been doing all the art for the levels but this is the gameplay part of design. Jon already had a good idea down for the cave on paper. I just need to take the tools that we have and make sure I build and space everything correctly.


Last but not least I need to continue my work as the Team Lead and start doing more work on Kickstarter, Facebook, and Twitter. I did create some more promo art that you can see as my Blog image above but I still have a bit of work on that as well.

I cannot wait for the world to see this game. I truly believe it has great potential and the potential to move outside of the indie game market.

Swamp Work

Last weekend we had a really good turnout at the play-test. We probably had 45-50 people attending and many of them were between 8-17 which gave us a great raw opinion on the game. We had several EAE students show up as well who provided many good suggestions. We have compiled the surveys and our observations and a quickly working to make changes before this Saturday's first release for Xbox indie game testing.

For the week I have been fully committed to finishing the swamp levels. I have artistically designed both Jon and Nicks swamp levels. I built both with the export work and everything but we ran into some issues with the way they were set up. Much of our struggle we found were because of groups between the DrawMesh and Collision mesh so the translates didn't work properly. Second, some of the textures that were on James's assets were jpgs and not in the proper size but those are a quick fix.

To resolve this I had to go back into each objects fbx file and delete the group, re-position and freeze transformations. After I fixed all the fbx files then I had to reimport all the objects and place them in the maya scene again. I have completely fixed nicks and I wanted to make sure all the exports worked properly in game before I started reworking Jon's swamp level. Tonight Nick told me everything was fixed so tomorrow/today I will fix Jon's. It should only take about 2 hours or so to fix everything.

Also during my work tonight I added a walk cycle into the bow draw. During our play test on saturday people didn't like that they were locked into place during the bow charge so this should fix the issue.

Besides all that I did some quick promotional art for our twitter and Facebook page, cleaned up both pages and made several updates on our progress. Yesterday I found a local printing company that would be willing to do a product line of t-shirts and stuff for us to link up with the page. I mostly wanted to do some t-shirts for hand outs during this summers game competitions and at the end of the semester on campus to promote other students support.

The water and background are not completed on either but we are looking more for the bright colors of this bottom picture to match the game. Also the brighter tree textures will be in both.