At quality time this Tuesday we got scolded for not putting up our artwork in the game!
But me and the guys have been working a lot with graphics lately, and even I did some modeling:
siren light made in 3DS MaxWarning sign + pole, made in 3DS Max
I’m working on the menu screen, our input is almost finished, ill try to post some pictures tomorrow. And I’ve got an in-game footage here:
The level is still under construction but well have it done by tomorrow hopefully!
AND! We have a Facebook page where you can track our progress. And hopefully this would end up being a successful conference.
A meeting with the group was held with our course coordinator, the call it “Quality Time”. So the point of this meeting is that we present what we have and how far we have come. We passed through the checkpoints but there is one thing still, and that is the graphics. We still don’t have all the textures in place, so we have Adam and Alex working on that.
Here is a screen sample:
A in game screen shot
The walls have been changed to a darker color, and a texture for the concrete floor has been applied. Along the sides of the walls we are going to place some lamps (orange and blue) to set the scene đ Adam and Alex have worked a lot with doing this and their work shows to be very promising! This is starting to look good!
I am now in charge of creating the menu, so i have been talking to our lead programmer and he asked me to make some level selection art, I started it today but didn’t get that far, at the same time I am planning the layout for the main menu. I’m a bit behind with this task, the reason for this delay was the panic spread among some of the group members.
At the start of this week we were told that we were a lot behind the schedule regarding the textures, but we have also been told (not by our teachers) that for the alpha we usually are supposed to show that the game is interesting and for that we only should concentrate on that. So no textures, only placeholders (For those who doesn’t know: a placeholder is an object like a cube for an example, the cube is only there to represent a box, it is not a complete asset). As this “panic” was on the loose I decided to sit down go through 3Ds Tutorials for modeling and texturing to try to be of some use regarding the 3D parts.
Other than Lead artist I was assigned another title, that is the Lead Tech. But the producer took it upon himself to build the Input. So I visited the workshop where we build our input, I wish that i had snapped a photo when i was there so that and you could see the great handy work going on there (I had a good laugh), I can clearly say that I am a bit worried about that part, will it work? will it become stable? But i guess that i have to trust the programmers to complete that task. Why are the programmers doing the handy work? That is because our Lead programmer Jonas is doing all the coding, and he is doing a great job! This may sound harsh but the thing with working in Unity (A software for building games) is that most of the stuff is already coded. Say that we want to apply gravity or a collision to an object, we only need to push the right buttons (I have done it but I am a bit too tired to write it all down here, if you wanna know anything about Unity just go through tutorials as i did). So he adds new coding that aren’t basic, and he does some cool stuff there đ
So we have two extra programmers at our disposal, one that is the Producer, he looks to the schedule and appointments, and he also does the presentations. The other programmer is our Lead Designer, he also sat down and built the level so he would like to call himself the level designer too.
This reminds me of a part I haven’t brought up yet, the Lead designer was a bit upset about the change in game concept and i can understand that (because we had to rebuild the level). The change from a puzzle game to a obstacle course meant that we had to rebuild our level to fit the new design, for this i started searching blueprints for obstacle courses etc. But I couldn’t find anything that would be helpful in our level design, after a while i remembered a Japanese game show called “Takeishis Castle”, I sat down and started to analyse their setup, and redesigned them obstacle courses to correlate with our game. So i drew more around 15 different rooms, it is a lot of rooms so i don’t think that well have them all in, but we have some of them playable right now. If i get the time ill try to build some of the levels in Unity, but i have got too much on my plate right now.
For this weekend i need to present some concept art, i made two quick ones today here they are:
Concept artA quick sketch of the balls that are will be used for the race
And i almost forgot about the character that was going to sit on top of the ball, i made a lot of sketches, and when i say a lot…. i mean A LOT! I only hope that i gained some experience from that. But anyways ill share two turnarounds with you:
An RC robot that would hold be sitting on top of the ball and holding itA more advanced robot that would sit on top of the ball.
And the most lovely thing is… that we are not going to have a character on top of the ball anymore… đ
This ended up becoming a long post, hope that you’ve enjoyed it. I have to get some sleep now!
In this new design I used previous experience that I gained from creating the banner and tried to apply it to the creation of our group logo.
First i made a lot of sketches of different styles and layouts, i filled a whole paper to add a lot of variations:
Sketching for a logotype
I asked the group which one they prefered and that ended up being the puzzle ball.
My first question was how i could design a puzzle ball by using Photoshop, was it better to use illustrator instead? so i tried to do it in these two different ways but it was to hard to make them symmetric enough. I consulted my fellow student Camilla due to her advanced experience regarding this area, she told me to use Maya to model and adding a texture to a sphere. And later on apply it to illustrator. This gave me an oppurtunity to try out Photoshop CS6 3D tools, so i looked up a tutorial and worked it out (it turned out to be an easy task). I added a texture from a file i had and adjusted the UV-mapping. But every time i tried to apply the texture Photoshop would crash, so i took a programmers advice and did a “Print screen” and saved the file so that would be able to add some lineart.
I made some different layouts and asked the group for their input.
Alt 1Alt 2Alt 3
The third alternative was preferred but i didn’t like it that much so i tried another one and added some effects and colors.
Alternative 4
But I think this one was a bit overkill for a logo, and I didn’t think that it expressed the right feeling, I wanted a clean logo so i started researching different types of logos that were used for game developing companies.
After settling for a font-style and the construct i finally came to the result i wanted, one that would be clean and simple. I also made a black and a white version so that i would be easier to apply on to different backgrounds. And these are the final results:
Black logoWhite logo
If you didn’t notice it, I added some thickness to the puzzle ball lines this was in order to make it consistent with the thickness of the font, i drew the lines for the puzzle ball through Illustrator and finished it in Photoshop.
For next week i have some different stuff to do, more sketches for the obstacle course used in our game, i need to start building the input device we are using (Ill post some pictures of the workshop). And if we are lucky we can show you some in-game footage of the game we are creating!
A Student Game Design Blog - By Ahmad Ali 