Board game analysis: “Stratego”

Stratego

This is a Two player battlefield strategy, much alike the traditional chess where one has to capture the enemy flag (the king in chess), but the difference is that each player has a set of 40 pieces to place strategically before the game starts. I will go through the gameplay and rules and down to the very core mechanics through this review. There is a lot of different “future” versions available but not much differs in the gameplay but the design. In earlier versions there are a some minor rules differences but they are not mentioned in this analysis.

 

Gameplay and rules

In this strategy board game two players will face each other from opposite side of the board, from where one player possesses the red pieces and the other will play as the blue pieces, one side would be visible to the player which carries a picture and a number and the back of the piece will face the opponent. Every piece has either a number from 1 to 10, a bomb or a flag. The game board contains of 10*10 square tiles, whereas two 2*2 tiles in the middle of the board can’t be entered (the lakes) and also serve as choke points as you are forced to move around them.

Each player has to plan, set the tiles and fill their end of the board behind the lakes before the game starts, and the red player will start the game.

Each player moves one piece each turn, if a piece meets an opponent the player have to reveal the correspondent piece, the piece with the higher number will win against the lower number, if the pieces have equal numbers then they both will be picked off the board, but there are also exceptions;

First is the piece with number 10, also called a “marshal”, can be killed by a spy (piece number 1) but only if the spy attacks first, at the same time the spy cannot kill any other player (but himself of course), and the marshal can also be killed by a bomb.

The second is the piece with number 3 which is the miner, this one is the only one that can deactivate the bombs, otherwise the bomb finishes off every other piece.

The piece with number 2 is called a scout, this piece can move across numerous tiles in a straight line.

The first one to capture the enemy flag wins, however… if a player can’t move any piece, which will be when every movable piece has been taken out, the player loses the game.

 

 

The games core mechanics

 

Movements

This is one of the main core systems of the game as moving and placing your “checkers” is the way to proceed, this is the only way to find the opponents flag. This is also a turn based game where each player has to make his move and also plan for the next move to make.

Capture/eliminate (search and destroy)

This is the main goal of the game, to capture the enemy flag. To do that the player has to figure out where the flag is being hidden and start clearing the way to the flag. There is a side role here too, if the marshal is spotted, the spy will have a mission to kill him as he is the strongest piece on the game board 

Risk and reward

The placement of the flag or bombs follow with risks, if a lot of bombs are in the same place there is a chance that the flag is there too. But also the way to fool an enemy by moving your checkers away from the flag would leave the flag vulnerable but at the same time could distract the opponent. The position of the flag on the map does also come with risk, either you place it at the front lines or further back. Trickery becomes a safety measure as this game puts you on your guard through the whole gameplay, sometimes it helps to have a good poker face.

Battle system

This gameplay is a lot similar Chess. But here the player places his own checkers wherever desired before starting the game, this is part of the strategic planning. I would not call this much of a battle system, even though each piece carries a number and each higher number would take out the lower number, this would not be the complex battle system we would discuss because it’s pretty simple.

 

The most interesting systems of this game

I would say that the most interesting system would be the Risk and reward system. This evolve to more than only taking risks, but this would at the same time effect the planning you make as you start to make new assumptions regarding the opponents flag location, or revealing the position of your own flag, even if you are bluffing. As you can see this involves you as a person a bit more into the game, whereas you have to make sure that you won’t give away your position you will start to lure your opponent away or coming up with a strategy to making the opponent move more pieces in one area to reveal bomb positions (as the players can’t move these pieces).

This also promote other factors like memorizing opponent pieces, as this come to be very vital when you want to know where the Marshal is so that you can attack it with your spy. Getting rid of the marshal would be a great advantage, as most of the other pieces won’t be able to bring it down.

 

The goods and bad´s about Stratego

When I first saw the thick manual I was a bit unmotivated, but as soon as we read the rules and how to play it became clear that it would not be that hard, the lack of motivation turned into curiosity. The game was fast to adapt due to the simple rules and the ability to manually set up your own strategy.

I researched the game (as usual), and I came across information about it and how long back it can be traced, so Stratego is a “Upgraded”  version of the traditional Chinese board game “Jungle” (I do not know how much of that is true), the difference now from then is that the pieces where animals and they where visible to both of the players. Today’s version in my opinion is a lot more exciting as you do not know what the opponent has in store for you!

As this game is a two player game it does not take too much time to play through one game and one can quickly go for a rematch.

I tried to think of something bad about this game but actually its well balanced and thought through. So i guess it has everything on its plus side.

 

The target group interpretation

I would say that this is a game for 8+, as the rules are pretty simple to understand and how the battle system works. There is no difficulties understanding the map layout either as it is pretty good illustrated and easily readable (as it contains to “puddles” in the middle and the rest is pretty much green tiles). , or where and how to place the pieces. Sure this can sometimes call for strategic planning but this would not necessarily mean that two 8 year old would be at a disadvantage when playing against each other.

 

 

Summing it up

As you may have noticed by this analyze is that the game is not that complex and really easy to learn. The first round we played it I just placed the tiles wherever not thinking about anything but the flag position. We decided to play through the first round pretty fast just to get to know the game, I lost the game there and quickly started to plan for a new strategy. Starting the next round I started to plan every step, memorized the opposing pieces and then I started the advance, I was thinking chess and it actually helped out a bit in the gameplay. I think that the choice to not make the battle system too complicated was a big plus in this board game, this would promote the core gameplay even more and that would be the “Capture the flag” system. This system makes the player concentrating more on where to find the flag than concentrating on how to actually battle, the higher defeats the lower is a reasonable rule, but it is also balanced well enough to not make the highest piece invincible making a bomb disable it or a spy. All in all this game was the one I liked the most out of the previous ones I analyzed. As the player is the one to set up the game board, “Stratego” gain a lot more replay-ability, a player can easily come up with a new strategy and start the game all over again.

Different strategies can be made and I realized that there is not only one way to win this game, if you play aggressive enough you can take out all the movable pieces belonging to your opponent and making the player unable to move. I think that it is interesting how one cane win in two different ways, as most games concentrate on who would get the highest scores or who crosses the finish line first being able to win the game in different ways makes the player more vulnerable and thus adding further tension to the gameplay. As one get closer to the end of the game it becomes more and more exciting and it can also become pretty loud! A great game indeed!

Assignment week 3 part 2

These are the objects I modeled, the second two where cleaned later on by my two colleagues Seamus Newman and Viktor Kjellson. I will start to talk about the optimization that Seamus and Viktor did with my crates and later move on to the boxes i made. The task here is to clean the model from overlapping faces, problems with N-gons and reducing the amount of tris we have on our models etc. First off, these are the ones I made, and I am highlighting the flawed areas:

For this “basket”, I had started first of all to look for overlapping faces, as lovely as it was, it had over a hundred… i dont even know how i managed to do that, and i looked for N-gons, and yup a lot of them there too. I tried to fix it but then realised that the basket was modeled wrong from the beginning. So i remodeled it and you will see the result below.

This is the second box, as you can see there are 12 overlapping faces, and the N-gons where worse. And i really feel sorry for Seamus that took upon this task but he managed to fix it. I too looked into the box, and tried to fix things with it, but then again i realized that  everything with the box was messed up, so i started from skratch, with just a few moves i did a replica of the box with no overlapping faces or N-gons, and slowly i started to realize the difficulties in using extrude on the models without first knowing how this can effect the model. I will discuss stuff further down below, but now for the results Seamus had with the box:

A bit more shiny is it? i guess he added some spark to it. Anyways he did a great job, he got rid of the overlapping faces, and he also made the made the edges align great here and thus lowering the poly count of the whole model. That is a feature that I did not use on my new crate model, so this is something that i have to take advantage of.

Now moving on to Viktor. He chose to work on this chest:

 

This chest did not have any overlapping faces or messed up N-gons, so the work that Viktor did here was to lover the polys and connecting edges, he also erased stuff that was not necessary as it could not be seen on the screen (as i have marked on the chest above). So i tried to put it up in a order where one can better observe the work:

So this part used to be a cylinder, Viktor erased the parts that would be invisible on the chest, thus lowering the poly count of whole scene, and he also connected some minor adjustments like connecting edges to one another.

Now going back to the “basket” i made. The thing with this basket was that the whole thing hade overlapping faces, and on top of that unfixed N-gons. At first i tried to fix it, i moved faces all over the place  just to see how it was set up. I realized that the foundation of it was flawed, as i was removing to find the errors I was left with nothing but some flat surfaces. I decided to start from scratch, building the parts one by one until i got the whole model, and the end result was promising:

But for the bottom part i used a plane which I adjusted the measures to fit the sides of the basket. To make the right structures and avoid extra edges I worked on building each plank as i went, extruding and capping them one by one. Following the tip I got from our lecturer, was that i had to think every part like i would for the real world, and that help quite a lot. I was able to make cleaner objects with lesser polish made for it afterwards.

Keeping this in mind I now have a better understanding of how to model, and I am slowly getting the hang of the 3D software. Now for future work ill always try to keep track of the edges and faces, and think before every step to see that i don’t mess things up in the future. But I will learn more as I go, my goal would be that i become good enough to teach others to do the same.

 

Perparing for “assignment 2” in 3D1

I was looking at two objects i saw that the jar would be something easy to model and I knew that it was something that I would manage to complete pretty easy. Looking at the dagger I realized that this would be a more difficult choice, but there were reasons to why i chose it. If I would start modeling this one I would learn a lot more, the complex shapes and details would suit me well when I want to start working in more advanced 3D and I am eager to get better. And this would benefit me even greater as I want to model weapons etc. for the future and future game ideas. I figured that this start would help me reach my goals.

So I had to know where the dagger was from and the history behind it. I went down to the museum again and asked for some help. So as it appears, this silver dagger is a Danish dagger, owned by the fleet admiral Jens Truidsøn (I googled all the info about this dagger, and got the name from there). It was found outside Kopparsvik in Visby down at the sea bottom. Now how did it get there? There was two big fleets residing within the area to attend a funeral (a really big funeral), a German fleet and a Danish fleet. Even though they were warned about an oncoming storm, the Danish commander told the fleet that if anyone moved from their place they would be executed, the German fleet did not follow that order as they did not belong to the Danish fleet. This resulted in one of the biggest storms disasters in Scandinavia, around 7000 people died and washed up to the shore and more got stuck under the sea, around 14 ships sunk that day in 28 of July, 1566 AD.

The visual style I am aiming to achieve is the medieval one, inspired by a more realistic style such as the ones Assassins Creed illustrates through their games.

I will try to bring out the depth in the blade, the cavity you can see at the base of the blade. I Want to get the details from the handle, the tip of each side, and also the hollow part of it. I don’t know if I am going to be able to illustrate the carvings, but as I have understood it this can be achieved through texturing.

I don’t want the knife to look bent or big in any aspect, I want it to be perfectly symmetric, thus to keep it more realistic and not by mistake make it look cartoony. Or of some other material than steel.

I need to keep the handle in the shape that it has, if I make it thinner it may look more like a letter opener, and that is not what I want to achieve at all. The markings on the knife make it feel like its European, but the bottom bulb reminds me of French designs. So I will try to make it identical to what it is in both size and shape, and try to keep it from being the typical Viking knife or French dagger.

A dagger is usually something discrete and carried all the time, it becomes kind of a fasion when wearing it. So the details are very important too, but as it is an European dagger I want it to resemble that as well, try not to make it look like middle eastern in the style.

So what risks do I face here when modeling the knife? I think that the inexperience I have with modeling will be to my disadvantage, I may get some trouble keeping the structure and clean enough for future texturing. As some of the things on the dagger are so thin, it may cause some serious overlapping faces. So I’ll try to keep a space between everything and design it with care.

3D1, week 2 assignment

For this assignment I will model some crates and chest to try to follow an art style and I will also discuss the similarities and differences in these styles. I will present three different themes:

 

Medieval

So going for medieval I tried to achieve the same feel as if we looked at a chest from like skyrim, if we want to folow the artstyle of the medieval era we often think of alot of wood, metal and leather. as this is me being the rookie and wanted to take the easy way first, I made this square  chest to visualize the typical style you see through out the game of skyrim. Here we got Metal workings and wooden planks, as skyrim are trying to achieve the realistic kind of chest. So man made crates in a realistic environment.

 

And taking a little closer look at Assassins creed black flag, they use a lot of different crates so i wanted to try that out too. But still they use the similar stuff, that is the wood leather and metal. That is why i think that both Skyrim and Assassins creed portray that image pretty good.

As this was one of my first attempts at designing a chest, it took a bit more time than I had planned, I wanted to put some more detail on to the chest, as a pad lock etc, and I also wanted model the more advanced chest but it took like forever for me to do these ones. And as you see i attempted to model the first chest, as this has the basic box shape i thought that this one would be easy to start with, just to get a hang of it.

 

So getting inspiration from AC; black flag i wanted to try out some other crates for this, so first i made an ordinary rate, thinking that this may be something easy to texture later on. This crate is something that comes to my mind first, a crate that can be see in most of the games that try to achieve the realistic look, i wouldn’t say medieval thought, but it has the kind of old woodwork design.We can also imagine a lot of these small wooden baskets that often carries fruit etc. Now i would have wanted a bit more detail on these models, maybe find other ways to make them look professional, but the thing is that i still don’t possess all the knowledge i would have wanted for this. As I am still learning how to get around in the 3DS sofrware,

 

Cartoony
Now up for the cartoony section, as i misread the assignment i did not chose to try modeling the cartoonish  chests, but still ill try to analyse them. As you can see on the pictures i provided below the cartoony theme is close to chests seen in the reality but it also differs a bit, the shapes and colors are different, the previous chests were more rectangular, these have a more surrealistic style, bigger forms, bigger padlocks, a lot of round shapes etc. These chests in particular are taken from Zelda: Wind waker, as that verision of the franchieses art style was cartoony.

 Sci-fi
Metal, led lamps, lights and hard but tank styled art. Something that comes from outer space. A perfect example of that would be Warframe, looking at the chests here they look more digitally made, with metals and iron plates and light diodes like a spaceship. The different storage systems here does not have the traditional squares anymore, averything seems to be mechanical. The storage “box” at the second picture is something we cannot relate to at all (or maybe some can), but the lamps on the box draws the attention so we have to inspect it. These chests are portrayed more digital, like safety cases that can endure a lot of damage and bumps.

Summerising

So well the only negative thing with this excersise was that i didnt get it in time to understand how to get it done, but anyhow. I still learned a lot from this assignment, how to model a chest by using different solutions, you can achieve any type of model you want, there is actually many ways you can solve a problem you have, i think much of it has to do with one willing to try, fail and learn from it. Sometimes it is just better to start from scratch than try to fix the model. The one i liked modeling the most was the “skyrim chest” even though i didnt add any detail i still managed to make it feel realistic, all this reminds me of carpentry class i had in highschool when i first built my own small chest. I would have wanted to make it so that i can rotate it, i mean like opening an closing the chest, but that has to do with joints and stuff, but we haven’t went through that yet.
Now paying attention to these elements of art one can better include them in the desired art style one thrives for, as it is essential to a game or a style to work as a complete unit, if something dont then it will pop out alot and the style will not be that atractive anymore. So its a bit confusing to see a cartoony chest in warframe… it would be better if we just recognize and stick to the appointed style.

Analysis of the board game Carcassonne

The main assignment here was to play the game together with a group to later on analyze the mechanics and assemble it all together in this report. My group contained of seven people and we chose to try this game as it was said to be one easiest one to understand and to play, comparing to the other games we looked at.

Carcassonne is a turn based board game where players compete against each other in order to complete lands with the help of different tiles (game board tiles, a brick to build roads, cities etc.). Each player builds the map with the help of randomly picked tiles to complete parts of the world and try to gather as much points as they can. To receive points a player have to place a piece (or a “follower”) strategically on a tile and depending on where one places his follower would determine how much points the player would receive after completing a “road” or a castle”. Placing a follower in a city makes it a “rider”. Placing a follower on a road makes it a bandit, completing a road would also give the player standing on the road some points. You can also put farmers on the “grass” (green areas on a tile), these points will be counted at the end of the game, this is due to the reason that the players need to see how much land is completed around the “farmer” giving the player points for every completed road or castle. Placing a follower on a cloister tile will make it a monk. Carcassonne is a game of a lot of risk and reward, where you may have to share lands to complete your own tiles, the tiles can’t be put everywhere either, every tile has to have the correspondent land, road or city to fit.

Gameplay

The game contains 72 tiles total, and all the tiles are face down and shuffled over the table, one tile will start the game and contain a single terrain (this one starts face up). For every turn a player picks up a face down tile and places it in a way where it has to connect together with the other tiles. Connecting roads together, cities to cities and fields to fields.

For every new tile placed, a player can add a follower to claim any points if it connects to others and gets completed, but at the same time these tiles can be shared if another player has put their follower in the same “feature”.

The game ends when the last tile has been placed, all the tiles with the followers will be counted and given a score for it, the player with the most score wins the game.

The points will be different during game play and at the end game. There is also some tiles that has a “Shield” icon on them (I believe they call them pennants) where a player can get extra points from. The only followers that don’t get their points counted are the farmers, where their points get counted when the game ends.

Every point received will be counted on a separate game board. For every city completed during play you get two points per tile + two points per pennant, at game end you get only one point per tile + one point per pennant. For every road tile you get one point, the Cloisters give you one point + one point for each of the surrounding tiles, max point for a cloister would be a total of nine points.

Best sides

The game is not as advanced as it would seem, it’s pretty easy to learn. It promotes social interactions between players, discussing what would be the best move to make, scheming and planning.

Starting a new game would not be repetitive as the map would always be randomized, where the player chooses how to build the board, depending on what kind of tile the player picks up.

The freedom of choice; You can choose how you want to build, the different variations often turns to new possibilities and opportunities which one has to take advantage of.

The excitement; The hope for the right tile to show up in order to complete the area that is being worked on, and the hope that your opponents don’t gain that tile brings excitement.

The creation of new roads and cities are to be considered artistic.

Hard to win big, the winner will not be announced until the end of the game, showing the player progression, and there will not be a looser until the very end (in other words; no one dies).

Bad sides

The game should have a timer as some players tend to take far more time than needed and thus turning the board game into a bore game. With the help of a timer each player should be given a set time limit so that the game can proceed without delay.

The name of the board game does not tell us anything about the game, also a difficult name to remember. I took it upon me to research the name just to get a better understanding of the creators idea, it turned out that it was named after the city of Carcassonne in south of France “famed for its city walls”. This would still not help me to remember the name of the game, if I would have wanted to recommend it to a friend. If the name was chosen for the medieval castle there this would be a bit far-fetched. In my opinion there are a lot more popular names one could have used for this board game, but I guess that this could be up to discussion.

Target group

The target group is 8+, at first it looked like a children’s game but after playing for a while one could understand that it would need some planning and understanding of the rules. The good thing about this game is that anyone can play it, if playing with family and having younger players, you can help them out but at the same time not risking your own gameplay. In Carcassonne it’s also pretty difficult to win big as every player will gather their own score. Out of the five rounds we played the difference in score wasn’t that great, even if we had people that had past experience with the game.

Conclusion

The most interesting function in this game would be the establishment and sabotage, at the first game rounds where we needed to learn the rules and understand the mechanics everything started out friendly, putting tiles together and claiming territories without any bigger conflicts made the game a bit easy going, but as soon as people started to settle in with the rules everything started to change. Careful planning and discrete takeovers was a game changer, it wasn’t that friendly anymore, but it also brought a lot of laughter when others did not manage to gather the points intended.

After playing the game I can now strongly recommend Carcassonne to my peers, the combination of the rules, the map building with the help of tiles is something out of the ordinary. A joyful experience for someone like me that have not played these kinds of board games (I have mostly been playing Backgammon) and was not fond of them before. The thing that intrigued me the most was the tile design for this game, the way that these 72 tiles have been put together to make it possible for players to build different maps for every new game they start, never make it feel repetitive and always gives the player a randomized map and forces the player to come up with new strategies to try get the highest score and win the game.

Playing these rounds and also observing the others play (as we could only play five players at a time), I was thinking of new possibilities to gather more points and playing it safe. I managed to see that in this game one can try to be manipulative and lure the players to make certain moves with some good arguments. But that would also be a difficult thing to do as the others would call out your bluff (or scheme). Playing with people that have played this before I managed to pick up some moves they made during the game, picking up a tile you could not use for your own gain left the option to instead sabotage for the other players by placing your tile in a way that your opponent would not be able to finish his city etc.

Even though the tiles are randomized it does not change the fact that one can memorize the tiles, this can turn out to be to your advantage, but mostly only at late game, if you are close to complete a city and you know that there are a small chance for you to complete it, then you should go for a more safe option and try to gather your last points in a different way, even though they are single points.

At the last game rounds we played, we added the river expansion to the game, just to try it out. This did not add that much extra to the game, I think that this expansion made insignificant differences, as it mostly provided with a few extra tiles of land. So for the expansion part I did not see it as something necessary to add to the game.

Time limit is something that should be added to the game, as I grew tired of waiting for other players to make a move, waiting for them to decide where to place their tile made me impatient and in the end I just wanted it to be over. Something I think that one can add to the game or buy, is an hour glass as an extra feature to the game. With that you could shorten a game by a lot and avoid players getting bored in the process.

Playing this game several times gives you the possibilities to think and rethink, this is a good thing as it opens the mind and teaches you to quickly rethink every strategy you had so far and come up with a new one. Concluding this report I would like to say that this was a nice experience and also an amusing gameplay.

First week of 3D, Analysis

A picture analysis with the help of some “elements of art”

Evil within

Line: Most of the lines are vertical by looking at the trees, this gives us a feeling of inferiority. For example if we have to look up towards something or someone we feel small, things that are above us tend to feel more powerful. This can be seen through pictures taken of a person from a down-top perspective. We can also see that the tree branches also stretch out diagonally, by portraying something diagonally we convey a feeling of a movement in direction, this is often done cinematically where pictures or objects are tilted a bit (A better example will be provided below). Combining both vertical and diagonal we get chaos, especially in this picture were we are supposed to feel the horror.
Shapes: The trees are pointy and sharp, instinctively we avoid these “shapes”, as sharp things reminds us of knifes or claws we tend to be cautious. The tents have round shapes and don’t intimidate us.
Space: As space is not usually used in modern pictures this one was pretty hard to point out, but I would say that the silhouettes here against the bright background would be the positive spaces. The hanging corpses give the main focus in the picture.
Values: Extreme contrasts, the brightness in the middle gradually getting darker reaching the edges of the picture, in the midst of the darkness you have some torches that give some warm colors but it is nothing compared to the cold white and blue colors that covers the rest of the picture.
Colors: The dark and cold colors here give us the feeling of discomfort and depression. Combining this with the rest of the features of the picture with the shapes and lines we feel both fear and sadness.
Texture: The fabrics of the tents, the wooden materials, the clothes of the living person, barely distinguishable grass on the ground.

As you now can see the thinking process of this analysis I will continue to analyze the remaining pictures but not as thoroughly as the previous one.

Far cry

Lines: Here you have a horizontal line stretching in the background, this often brings a harmonic and relaxed feeling. The diagonal lines would be the metal of the glider, and even down at the beach you can see that the lines stretch out through the picture.
Shapes: natural shapes but also some man-made stuff (like the vehicle or the small cabin). So this doesn’t feel like it’s a dangerous area, the organic nature here are overwhelming.
Space: So here I would say that the negative space would be the glider metal and the hand.
Values: A high and colorful setting, a lot of bright colors.
Color: There is harmony in the colors, as the blue and green go together with the yellow beach, it delivers the warm environment that we soar above.
Texture: nature, metal, the rubber tire, the organic skin of the arm and the red cloth hanging on the side of the glider.

 

 

Middle earth Shadow of mordor

Lines: Diagonal, this shows the line of action in this picture by looking at his arm.
Shape: An organic enemy, man-made structures in the background and the armors. Taking a closer look at the enemy being strangled; pointy ears and sharp teethes.
Space: The picture is pretty much concentrated on the two characters here, so the background is blurry and most possibly not as important as these to two.
Values: This picture here is pretty bright, where the light seem to come out of his hand.
Color: Cold colors, blue and white. At the background we can see a hint of red, these two in a combination reminds us of cold early mornings.
Texture: Man-made metal and structures here, enemy organic skin. Texture of hair and fur. Bones and muscles. And the “condensation” coming out of the humans hand.

 

 

Watchdogs

Lines: Diagonal and vertical lines, it looks like he is moving in slow motion.
Shape: He would be the organic one in this, the rest would be man-made structures and cars, square buildings and more round metals as the car.
Space: here it’s not clear at all due to the chaotic environment
Values: Darker colors.
Color: Night setting. City lights dims the scene. Even the gunfire is a bit discrete. And there is also a contrast in colors.
Texture: The fabrics and leather, the metals and concrete.

The second assignment, 3D building

We had to choose a game to illustrate by modeling in 3ds max and also to use a keyword. We chose the game “Journey” and the keyword “solitude”. To illustrate the stage we put a lot of effort in trying to make a realistic desert and choosing some structures that would resemble the game, we also wanted to try out some basic texturing by creating some water. We learned a lot together as we explored different areas regarding the 3d software. We imported all the objects made into one picture, placed out all the objects in the picture to portray our message.
Other students thought we achieved our keyword, this due to the player standing alone and observing the abandoned location, the tombstones used was strengthening the message. The color combination was chosen in a way that would resemble the game, to bring the relaxing atmosphere we intended to have, we also tried out the color of the water and saw that it gave the level a bit more life, and it didn’t feel too empty.
As I observed my colleagues I could quickly see the difference in levels between them, one of them combined “uncharted” and “journey” and used the keyword “fear”, it made it pretty hard to read, but it was also a hard decision he made. But I realized that modeling can get you really far if you just use your imagination, to model spikes is really easy now that I think about it. Looking at others opened my mind a lot and I am getting some new perspectives.

Starting the second year!

New year and new knowledge incoming, for this year i have put main focus on learning 3D, so for that i have chosen 3 different 3D courses (this concern different areas, modeling, texturing etc).

I was hoping to blog during the summer but i had too much on my plate, but in between the heavy work and striving to achieve other goals, i sat down with a paper and pencil drawing different pictures to keep learning.

I haven’t used my computer for drawing at all so i am a bit rusty i guess, but ill try to post something as soon as i start drawing again.

So i have write down some stuff i need to draw on a list, otherwise i forget about old projects and start on new ones, this will leave me with a lot of unfinished pics.

Some skisses, trying to learn how animals are built.

Coming up next; 3D picture analysis, and a level design. This will hopefully be put up at the end of this week.