Interactive storytelling

Dear and beloved readers!

I am attending three courses right now and trying to deal with a lot of stuff regarding my own life and the future of it, that is the main reason why it was a long time since I posted anything here. And also because I have been writing some posts for Naarthegame.net instead and reporting the ongoing development over there. So there is a lot of planning in all directions. 😉

So something’s are changing right now, I am trying to learn how to write narratives, not being a book reader is something that doesn’t help me at all (I will need to start reading books of course).  So let’s get this thing started;

 

In the course named interactive storytelling we have an assignment to deliver. The thing is to write a branching story with dialogs where the user will experience different outcomes based on the choices made.

My first plan was to portray the life of a poor boy in the streets of Iraq, the goal for this kid was to gather money to feed his family, so the reader would have to figure out the best way to earn money by haggling. I realized that the scope was going be too big for this assignment so I had to figure out another way to execute this Idea. After a some thinking I had a better idea!

I realized that I could use the journey of current day refugees trying to get from turkey to a safer place, with this idea I would be able to shed light over the current situation and maybe induce some kind of compassion towards what the refugees would have to go through.

So this is the story of Hamodi, a young boy that tries to make his way through different countries to get to Sweden. The way there will vary, depending on which way you choose for him.

I have been using real life sources from people that made it to Sweden, BUT, none of their names are used here and the story is of course  not a true story but a collection of stories. Anyways,  try it out and if you have some time over please leave some feedback in the comment section below so that I may learn something. The story will maybe continue if enough people would like to see it finished but for now I hope you like this one.

 

Download the story here: The story of Hamodi 

OBS: The software used for this story is called Twine, Check it out! Its pretty easy to use.

 

Big Game Project; Week 7

The week of beta

First of the late post was due to the fact that we had been working overtime the whole week as we fell behind schedule. We had a lot of deadlines that we had to complete and then realizing at the final hour that the presentation deadline was closing in. That one took a lot more time than anticipated and left no time for posting in this blog.

Anyway, the beta session did not go as planned, just before the testers entered the room our build crashed, so we had to quickly gather the things we had and throw it in and the results were flawed. The testers ended up with playing a patched together version, but they could still tell us what we lacked in our gameplay.

The feedback we received while they were playing was that the controllers were to hard for us to have for GGC, even though our target audience are experienced players we need to make it easier for non-players to be able to do some gestures.
Then there was the lack of feedback when you actually succeeded in executing a gesture, we need to tell the player when a spell has failed. We also should extend the “Harakat-Mode” (A bullet-time mode where everything but the player moves in slow-motion), so that the player will have more time to make a gesture.

We need to balance the enemies more, make them bigger, slow their projectile speed etc. Feedback when hit, a forced trailer (you wont be able to continue unless the tutorial is completed).

We are trying to clean up Everything we have so far, we are working on the spell effects, all of the textures are almost done and the level is almost complete. Animations are done and are waiting to be applied to the “Ghoul” and the boss. A lot of tweaking is being done this week, like enemy stats, spell damage etc.

Our programmers are working on the last spells, implementing easier controls and the boss AI. They will also work together with the effect feedback so that the game would explain itself.

We managed to borrow music from various artists for our project as long as it is non-commercial, different sounds are being outsourced and streaming in as we work.

We also made a quick trailer for the game, the music is from Antti Martikanien.

Visit our site for more: https://www.facebook.com/NaarTheGame

This week will be our final week, hopefully everything will be in order! The Gotland Game Conference will be held at 24th of May until 26th. I will write a last blog on how it went and maybe post some pictures.

Art by William Mayer

The team

Ahmad Ali, Producer/Lead Designer: https://ashvaganza.wordpress.com/

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Big Game Project; Week 6

The week of the Pre-Beta.

In this week we had to prepare the features that needed to be present for the next week deadline and that is the Beta week, at that stage everything should be ready and done leaving the last week (week 8) for polishing only and getting rid of bugs that are present in the game.

This week we aimed at getting the main feature ready and that is casting and combining magic, this involves the control mechanism of casting different magic with the movement patterns done by using the analog sticks.

The spells that existed for this pre-beta were (Xbox Controller);
Fireball, which is the main casting and is executed by pressing X.
Firewall
Fireflies
Fireblast
Blackhole
Gravity

And the combination Fireball + Fireflies = resulting in the spell “Fire rain”,
Also Blackhole + Fireball = Big bang.

Combining spells does not only mean that some spells are compatible and creates new spells, casting spells on the field and using them to your advantage is a tactical choice a player can make, Ex; Casting gravity to trap enemies in the air while making time to cast more devastating spells.

Some visual effects were present but not all of them, for the rest of the spells we used placeholders that indicated the spell placed onto the field. But all of them had environmental effects.

The enemies we had in this stage where only the “Hasharas” (Insects), small djinns that resembles a combination between an angler fish and spider. They are smaller and move in packs but should be easier to kill.

HUD
A Health and Harakat (special move) meter was present, there was also an indicator that showed how you moved your analog according to a spell and what gesture you executed.

Harakat Mode
This mode did not have a finished GUI layout, the Slowmotion/Bullettime was present and you could cast three spells that would be thrown at the same time when the mode ends.

Level
The build for the level is have a lot of textured props placed out; Stones, vegetation, glowing mushrooms, hanging bridge, breakable objects and more.
The light is being set and the central room is being worked on. Soon everything will be up and presentable.

Open play testing
An second play testing was held on Friday, where anyone who felt to try out the games would have the chance to do so, and also for us to receive feedback on what we need to adjust.

A lot of it involved the actual gameplay and how it felt, the combat mechanics with the gesture movements is something new and also confusing for a lot of testers, this is to be expected as it is a new way of casting spells. We need to teach the player how to do it in an easy way with the help of a tutorial.

The spell fireball did not have a cooldown which resulted in constant attacking the enemies with the same spell and neglecting the use of the other spells as it became unnecessary to use them. Spamming the fireball was the dominant way to defeat the enemies.

The enemies need to have their health reduced a lot as they come in large quantities and took to long time to kill.

The Harakat mode was not functioning in a good way which also was neglected by testers.

A lot of bugs was reported and falling off the cliff resulted in crashing the game.

Some of the animations needs to be blended properly as they was not synchronized with the character movements.

We have a large list of feedback received from the play testing, all of them will be compiled to a list that should be checked off as team work.

The Designer
The logotype for Naar is done, and also the group logo that would represent us as a team.

As you can see the turban on the Naar logo was remade and the fire background was removed which made the logo clean and consistent in the art style.

The tutorial have not been done yet but there are some solutions planned for it, we will place hints on how to use them in combat and how the player should use them tactically to their advantage. Most will need to be illustrated through pictures that are easy to understand, due to the limited time they have to learn it.

We have a short narrative written for the game but it is being discussed in the team, we have a suggestion about using it in the title screen in form of murals on the wall, there is another suggestion of having it all explained in a training area by a “teacher”, then jumping into action with defeated enemies at the start of the level.
Displaying a narrative in a 10 minutes gameplay is a difficult task to achieve, and therefore will take a lot of time to get done, I will need to find the easiest and most effective way to display it so that the player understands why the are in that location and why they are fighting these monsters.
Doing this with cut scenes may not be possible due to the lack of time, but that would have been the best possible way to do it.

As I as the producer and lead designer have a lot of tasks on my plate to do, these things have been on hold for a time, but next week I need to find a solution for this, in the worst possible scenario I need to skip the narrative part and make a tutorial in which the player have to read what to do before they start, and maybe read about the story through a start text that can be skipped by pressing a button.

Next week
In the upcoming week we will need to crunch and play test the game every day until the Beta deadline on Friday. A lot of the coding needs to be complete and all the spells should be present and the combat system should make it feel as a good gameplay.

And also a new enemy will be put in to the game (The Ghoul), we have the final mesh ready and will work with the animations as soon as possible.

A lot of visual information and screenshots can be seen at our Facebook site: NaarTheGame, like and follow it to keep updated of the development.
And we shall try to get a gameplay video up at the page too for people to see.

Wish us luck!

Team Members

Ahmad Ali, Producer/Lead Designer

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Big Game Project; Week 5

For this week I will try to discuss the alpha testing and how it went.

The goals for alpha was that we should have:

– A playable map and some fights that could go on.

– Harakat mode should be functional and the magic casting and combinations should be available.

– A menu should be implemented.

All in all the level will be whiteboxed and tested to see if it follows a progression. The build should be in a stage where the game features and gameplay are testable.

Now talking about the alpha session;

First off something went wrong with the build, the enemies did not work as intended, the boss did not spawn, but the level was there.

The level was a rough build so we did not have too much props on there, except of our target dummies for the tutorial.

As for fights the player could shoot a fireball, cast the spell fireflies then combine it by shooting a fireball at it to activate the spell fire rain. All off the spells had placeholders and would serve as an example of how the mechanic worked. The spells was cased with the help of the analog movements.

Harakat mode was present but only as slowing down time and did not have the proper function with combining spells and giving feedback to the player.

We did not have a menu or GUI, we decided to prioritize the main features instead as we were running out of time.

To summarize

We did not come as far as we intended with the alpha, the biggest reason for this was that the team members are constantly learning and in search of new ways to learn how to make our features work, most of the time things don’t work for us. The AI started to crash days before we needed to present the alpha.

During the alpha testing we had two guys from the industry trying our game out, we had to pitch our concept to them before letting them play. They liked the narrative of the concept and where hopeful of seeing it.

During the testing we received a lot of feedback in which we wrote down. We needed to put a GUI that would make the player understand what’s going on, and also a way to indicate the start of the game and to quickly being able to restart. They really wanted us to make use of the narrative we have and implement it in the game as it was an attractive feature, we should implement it by either doing a small comic or cut scenes (but they told us that we would not have the time to do that and we agreed).

As the alpha took place on Wednesday we had the rest of the time to try to fix our misses. The lead artist sat down and started to work on the GUI, and the lead designer started working on the logotype that would later on be used for the menu and the game overall. We made a quick rescheduling of what we needed and started to concentrate on doing a good tutorial at the start and work our way through the game.

We are running out of time and we may need to scrap a lot of things if we want to have a game that works, but hopefully next week will look better and we manage to reach the goal of our concept.

The designer

The first layout of the controller didn’t seem difficult according to the testers, sadly we didn’t have enough for them to test them on except for one enemy.

So far we have planned the mapping for all of the spells and should have them available at the start of next week, after that it would be easier to test how they work and if they feel natural.

The GUI should not take too long to get done, if we get that out of the way then we can concentrate on everything else, like animations, effects, textures etc.

In the upcoming week we have our pre-beta, and after that only two weeks before we have to have the game ready to play. Hopefully this week would be the one that brings us ahead of the game so that we can make it feel whole and complete, leaving more time for polishing the game and getting rid of bugs etc.

We have started a Facebook site for our game, and it is under construction, later on you will find in-game footage and information about the GGC event. Visit the site here: Naar Facebok

You can find each team members blogs below:

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com

Wish us luck as we will need it a lot!!!

Big Game Project; Week3

For this week I will write about the game concept as an overview where I begin with telling a little bit about the game, and go through how far we have developed through this project.

The game we aim to develop is a 3D adventure game where you play as a Djinn disguised as a man with big mustache, he wields magic to defeat his enemies in hunt for their abilities. The gameplay will consist of a small demo where you fight your way through a cave dispatching of evil minions to finally reach the boss for a final fight. We got our inspiration from games like “The legend of Zelda” and “Kingdom hearts”, it may seem to be a generic gameplay, but we concentrate on the way to execute the attacks and how to combine them. And hopefully this game will catch the interest of our players.

Last week I completed the Design Document where I asked the members to write down everything they wanted more detailed information about, and that turned out to be a good way to keep everyone on track with the design.

The programmers are working hard to get the controls and the enemy behaviours working, in comparison to last week they advanced a lot as they started to understand how to make use of Unreal Engine, they work hard to implement everything. They also implemented an extra checklist for themselves to break down the things they have to complete.

On the art side of the project All the animations for Qadher (boss) are done and also some extra animations for Mokhtar (Player), but we have problems with one character (a smaller enemy) that is that we can’t animate it in Motionbuilder as it has a custom rig attached to it, so our option is to animate it in 3ds Max but that hasn’t worked this far so we have to consult the teachers to find what’s wrong with it.

The level has a rough build sketch with the whole level set up, a lot of props are ready to be used (not textured). We have done a lot of test drives on the level and made notes for future editing as we aim to try delivering a sense of progression in a small story and at the same time present our features in. You can read more about the level if you folow this link to our Level designer blog (Andreas Calmius).

The lead artist also started working on a third enemy that will be inspired by the “Ghouls” portrayed in Arabic folklores, he works skillfully in his art and is almost finished with the concept art. Lead artist link (William Mayer) This week I didn’t have a lot of administrational work to do so I had the chance to help out with the animations, I worked on three different animations, both on the boss and Mokthar. I also received help from our 3D3 teacher Nataska to solve the problem with animating in place. The problem we had was that the programmers needed to use root-motion to make the character run in place which created a lot of problems in the engine where the character was running away from the main position and also the hips where locked in position and not moving at all. This was due to a problem in motionbuilder where the character placement was wrong, but I sat down and fixed these animations and now he runs naturally in the engine without the programmers needing to fix the issue.

The Spider character is our biggest problem right now, it can’t be done in motionbuilder so it has to be done in 3ds Max, so I took on this task and tried to get it done. I did not manage to get it done even though I skimmed through a lot of different tutorials, the problem seems to be that the rig together with the mesh won’t be animated, but I could make the mesh glide in to a final position. Something is missing or there is a bug problem, I will announce this problem with our tutors and see if they have a solution for it, but that will have to wait until Monday to meet up with them.

This is all for now, I will try to upload as much pictures as I can, and I may be able to get some GIFs in when I get the time.

Mokhtar (protagonist):

Progressing in colors

Hi!

I have been busy with a lot of schoolwork lately, doing different assignments and not much of them are aesthetic things which I could  present here.
I am working hard right now on a concept and hope that I get a “green light” to do it, I have failed this far to get it done right and still are struggling with it. The thing is that I have a hard time explaining it in English so that it can become understandable.

Anyways, I have been drawing sketches and stuff like that and posted them on my Instagram account in the meantime and trying to learn how to color my pictures.
And finally I have completed my first colored picture (even though I’m not that satisfied with it), but still I got the advice from a friend that I should be done with it.

So here it is:

My first completed color painting

 

I did not use any pictures for reference but somehow it looks like a character that could be used in Tekken games. I had help from two guys, Henrik & Nils who would give me advices on how to use different tools and what to think about.

 

I have another picture I am working on but dont seem to be able to finish but in time it may end up here too.

Even more 3D

It has been a long time since I have been posting anything at all, it has been a hectic ride! I have been trying to post stuff here but haven’t had the time, but I have been posting “notebook drawings” on instagram.

There are two assignments I have completed, one is about photogrammetry and the other one was the final assignment for 3D2. So lets do this!

First off “Photogrammetry”, but lets us use a easier word; photo scanning!
Ill do a quick explaining for the ones who don’t know what it is, so basically you take a lot of pictures of one objective from different sides and angles, then you put those pictures into a program and allign them together and voila; youve got a 3d object ready. Well actually its not that easy you will have to do some more stuff to get it right and you will get a high poly model that you may want to make a low poly from.

Anyway, the assignment involved scanning an object, putting it in a virtual museum and present it in class. I scanned different objects but they did not turn out good at all, this was due to the problem with shiny surfaces, the software has a  hard time working with refection, so one have to take a lot of pictures to try to make it. I photo scanned an orange and it turned out looking like an orange muffin (I now realize that this I should have taken a picture of it). With nothing working out for me I made a last minute try and photos canned my shoe, and it turned out great!

You can see the level of detail this brings, even if it doesn’t look exactly the same it is pretty close to reality. When photo scanning an object you will get the whole model done for you and also the texture will be put on top of that automatically, you can change the resolution of the texture detail within the software and other small adjustments you want to make. Usually one cant use this kind of high poly object inside a game as it would slow everything down, that is why one should make a low poly model based on the original model and apply the texture on top of the new model.
The things one can do with this kind of technique can be very useful when wanting to present old artifacts, or one can use this program and rebuild an artifact that has been worn out over time, and see how it would have looked back in the days.

So the second assignment involved choosing between modeling a telephone booth or a generator, this would later on be put in a scene and should also be presented in class. This was the hardest thing I have done so far, the amount of work and time put on this made me want to bang my head against a wall, when making this model I had more than 30 files saved if something went wrong (as the software tend to crash a lot and I would have lost two hours of work which happened a lot). And I also rebuilt the model several times, but this made me learn from it a lot too.

So everything i built in the scene is my own stuff;

So I was trying to recreate a street in the middle east, but didn’t manage to deliver the feeling before the deadline. And I got told that it would take a lot of time to achieve, so I modeled the street lights, the asphalt, the pavement and the brick house (which I am not proud of at all, but I liked everything else). I wanted to add dirt and stuff on everything but I never made it that far.

Lets dig deeper into the generator:

The amount of detail I had to think through with this one was giving me a headache, the texture work had to involve making the metal differ from the rubber materials. Most of the smaller details like bolts and smaller vents where done by using normal maps (Height maps giving the illusion that details aren’t flat).
Before handing the assignment in I added a collision box (without it a player can walk right through the model) and a light map (helps the engine saving memory when building the level and thus makes it work faster), that wasn’t that hard to do once you get the hang of it.

This was pretty much the update I had to deliver this time, this education turned out to become pretty difficult and we have a lot to do (Not so much visually to show). I am trying to get some drawing done but haven’t got the time, hopefully ill get the time soon enough, but until then.. ill try to post more.

This was the end of 3D2 and visualization in 3D, next up will be “serious games” and 3D3 and from what I’ve heard, its going to be a hell lot tougher from here.

Meanwhile you can just skim through my instagram here.

3D2 The next step

Hi!

I haven’t been posting anything for two weeks and this is mostly because i wanted to take a short brake after the previous courses where we had a lot to do, but i haven’t been doing nothing and for those who are interested you can see my drawing progress if you follow my Instagram.

Anyways, this week we have been going through texturing and how to apply it in games. The assignment for this week was to create tile-able textures, first material had to be metal and the second a non-metal. So here we go;

Metal texture put in UDK4

And as you can see i tiled it up and it looks repetitive to me, I redid the texture a lot of times but working with bare metal seem to be really hard and thought through. The thing with this screenshot is that i had zoomed it out a lot so it should not be this visible to a player as it is not going to be a floor tile.

Marble texture inserted in UDK4

Zoomed out the marble texture looks like blocks of chocolate, but in this I managed to get the detail i wanted and due to the “frames” it made it easier to tile as it would not be that seamless.

Hope I did not make you crave for chocolate! Have a nice one!

Final in assignment 3 Character Jorm is done!

And finally, the moment no one have been waiting for but me! The character model is done.
I added the texture and did a little finishing touch with the glow in the eyes and the liquid on his body! Moss and rock texture to resemble the rocky nature of him! And here we GOOOOO

And how i did the textures?

Diffuse map

The glow map This is the new thing i added to get the glow in Jorms eyes and liquids

Normal map Here I had to work a lot with inverting different things as i needed the light liquids to act as cracks. so i darkened them down before using the bump software “Insane bump” (which is free btw)

And the specular map, here as you can see… I did not want it to be shiny at all!

And finally how I went with the UV mapping

There was a lot of distortion in the map but I managed to fix everything by doing it manually, it took a lot of time but it was worth it!

The 3D1 course is done and I hope that this was joyful for people to look at, next i will jump on to 3D2! lets see how that goes!

 

Assignment 3 week8

So I was not able to deliver this post last week as I was not finished with building the mesh, and I wanted to ask for help before posting this so that everything was “right” before I did it.
Now to how far I have come with this:

Now that the structure is almost done, soon I will have to apply the texture. I did some distortions on the picture as you can see, but Nils was okay with it so I continued doing it, and moved the legs a bit so that the golem could “keep the balance” as it was standing.

There, the final update for assignment 3 should be up soon I hope, I need to get the texture done and apply it, and hopefully it will be good!