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.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
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.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Swamp Level
last night I did a big push and got all the exporting and importing work done to make the level be able to pull in with ogre max. My job is to make everything from my end flow as smoothly as it can from me to the programmers so it takes a bit of time to do the naming conventions, file types, file path links, and then rebuilding a scene that has already been built once. The only thing that we have left is the application of a few textures for Nick's swamp level and that one is done. Once I get Jon's level layout I will begin on the art for his level and hopefully have it done by Tuesday.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
little late
I apologize for my late post this week I have been fully committed to this game and a lot is coming together very quickly. This last week I had to redo several things. I had to fix a twitch with the dragon rig, re-export the snail enemy, and re-export the bumble bear - all of which required a rebind and painting of weights. The dragon level is now complete the only piece missing is the spikes that extrude out of the top of the cages but that is a very quick implementation that is just waiting for the 2D art. It took a long time to work out all the exporting rules, and alignment but I'm very happy because I made it very easy for Jon to implement. Also this week I modeled textured and animated the Bomb Throwing Jester Enemy with a box full of bombs prop. During the week I hadn't seen what I asked for which was art being implemented into the game so I took it upon myself and put together a background in our first level. I still have a twitch to work out with the Zug but that is a small fix now that I know what it is.
We found a twitch in the dragon's and goblin's animations once it's put into the game. This is because in the exporting process we bake the animations into the joints so it sets a key frame on every frame to the joint. During the systems process and for an unknown reason the x rotation on the foot joint shoot from -1.98 to 398 with no visible change. The problem comes when it's pulled into a system like the computer that runs at about 60 fps so that extreme rotation is actually seen but I fixed the frames and I'm going to do the same with Zug.
For this weeks tasks I'm going to begin making the levels look good. Since were two days into the sprint I have already got a bit of work done on the swamp level and on the second forest level, but I need to do the tedious exporting and importing and redesigning it with the proper imports for OgreMax to build the level properly. With this process I will most likely be doing much of the 3D modeling since the swamp levels are short on those types of assets. I still want to do more polish on the levels that we have done but I think making the other levels that we already have descent so they are finished is more important.
We found a twitch in the dragon's and goblin's animations once it's put into the game. This is because in the exporting process we bake the animations into the joints so it sets a key frame on every frame to the joint. During the systems process and for an unknown reason the x rotation on the foot joint shoot from -1.98 to 398 with no visible change. The problem comes when it's pulled into a system like the computer that runs at about 60 fps so that extreme rotation is actually seen but I fixed the frames and I'm going to do the same with Zug.
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