Week 5: In Which Exams

This blog post is arriving a few days later than my usual Wednesday night timeframe, for reasons obvious to those that read the title (Exams). Most of my week was spent preparing for a multitude of exams while working a bit on some assignments and trying to get some asset creation done. I'm pretty sure I did OK on all my exams (at the very least a sixty percent; I tried to mark myself pessimistically so I could be pleasantly surprised). Enough about tests though, what everyone should be here for is to see the progress made on our game PIVOTal, which personally isn't too much because of, you know, Exams.

First things first, and update on my character model. Recently we started using Mudbox to add more detail and texture our low poly Maya models from previous weeks. I did some preliminary experiments with my character, but as this doesn't have to be handed in until the semester's end I can see that I will be trying to learn much more about what's possible and make the best model I can (hopefully 2 million poly's, super detailed, and professional quality). The tutorials have been really helpful and have taught me a lot of new tools that I can see will be very useful in my future.

Beware the Mud Man

Week 4: In Which My Weekend is Programming

So I definitely didn’t write a blog last week, mainly because I didn’t make any progress (I have other classes with other assignments too), so to make up for that I spent my entire weekend programming, flipping through books and finding as much help on the internet I could. Somehow programming kept my attention for at least 24 hours allowing me to learn tonnes about the engine we’re using and get enough assignments done to be able to write my exam. I also decided that, even if it doesn’t count, I’m going to try and do every assignment, just to learn as much as I can about the engine.

A Nice Gross Rainbow Arm

The first thing I ended up working on was creating an arm with each finger segment individually controllable. When I first saw that question I thought it would be really hard so decided to avoid it, but after messing around in the engine I found that it may actually be the easiest to implement. All it required was creating each joint with a pivot in the right place and connecting the scene together, and of course assigning button presses to move each joint. Working in the scene graph here would turn out to help me in creating…

Week 3: In Which I Stop Humanizing Abstract Concepts and Assignments are Completed

Well I didn’t get a chance to play Shadow of the Colossus yet, nor did I attend the Great Canadian Appathon, I just had too much work I had to get done over the weekend (also it was my birthday, so I did do nothing for about a day). I first had to get done some business that took up about an entire day, but explaining that work would do nothing but bore you.

I got a start on some programming work this week, mostly in trying to set up scenes in Maya and getting them to work with physics in the game engine. I have yet to add in interactivity between a player and the game (making it basically a video) but it’s a good start. This way of importing objects, with physics attached, is much easier than what I was used to from last year, meaning we would likely be able to set up our entire game world quite easily.

Watch the ball hit the wall, see it fall. That is all.

Week 2: In Which an Idea Takes it's First Steps

This week our group worked more on refining our idea as a whole, laying out level designs and various mechanics we’d have to implement to allow our world rotations to work. Everyone in our group worked on one or more level designs over the weekend, some focused on puzzle design, while other’s focused merely on mechanics. I chose to work on designing a level that could be playable at all of our main rotations. What I created involved the level decaying and falling to pieces while the world moved, although it could require more dynamic movement then we may be able to implement (especially a level flow that melted platforms in half). We also decided on a more concrete scale of our levels, giving a basic size to each room being 20 units by 20 units where one unit represents the height of the player character. This was so that each level could connect to the other nicely and fit well on a grid. In addition to this standard size for each room we agreed that if someone wanted to create something larger to just take the space of two or more rooms to keep our nice grid-like structure.

20 seconds in Photoshop, because I don't have a scanner,
and someone wanted lots of images.

Week 1 (again): In Which an Idea is Born and a Blog is Reused; Also Art!

Another year has started and so has our next game (tentatively title PIVOTal). Over the past week we have brainstormed many, many ideas narrowing it down and refining it to something achievable yet still challenging. We even managed to pick a perfect theme to go with our game (I’ll let that be a surprise, but I’m sure someone else must have posted it anyway).

We decided to make our game in a Metroidvania style, somewhat similar to Shadow Complex. As is common within a Metroidvania style game we have agreed upon trying (and hopefully succeeding) to make a huge game world, inside a factory, with many power ups and collectables. The main action of our game will be dedicated to solving puzzles with occasional combat. In order to make our game more unique we added the element of rotation. During the players time in the factory they will come across rooms that allow them to rotate the entire world (as if on a pivot, like our title; clever, I know). This rotation opens up new paths for the player to advance as well as alters existing paths to create new puzzles in order to return from whence they came.

Week Six (+2): In Which Forgotten Posts and a New Hope are Discussed

Well I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks and, sure, I can blame it on the fact that I didn't have Game Design class so I forgot, but I'll man up and take responsibility for it. The past few weeks have been filled with very little gaming and lots of working on projects and studying for Midterms. Added to that I've also started working on my own separate game, which has been the most fun I have ever had programming, because I finally get to be the one who decides on absolutely everything I want. I've only been working on it for about Three days now, but it's come a long way. Currently it looks like some sort of MineCraft clone, if only for the fact that it is easier to load cubes than anything complex, and the movement is very digital as opposed to free-roaming analog (that may be harder to change in the future). As for the code, I really, really need to organize it better, I consider myself pretty bad at making things readable, everything is in the same .cpp file and variables are declared all over the place. Lighting needs to be fixed to, I want my code to actually be correct and not exploiting random glitches I found that makes it looks smoother. It started out as a really simple 2D texture mapping program and hopefully by the time I'm done it'll be a full fledged 3D adventure game (or RPG, one of those two).

I don't care how hard the coding is, the hardest part will be coming up with a name.

Week Five: In Which I Play Lots And Lots of Games

This past week has been one of the busiest weeks I've had in the past while. I've not only been doing lots of work for the game, but also lots of assignments, and playing lots of games as well. First off my progress on the game. As you can see from my last few blog posts I've been working on modelling the level, and this week I continue with that. I have actually completed the modelling for the first track and have started some work on a second track. One thing I will have to change, though, is the scale of the objects in the track, they look good in Maya, but are way too huge when actually seen from our racer's perspective. I have also watched a lot of online tutorials and read some discussions to help me learn to use Maya's hypershader so I could texture the objects in the game. I managed to completely texture every object and have been exporting their texture maps which takes a long time. Once we can figure out how to load and apply these textures to our object our game, on a visual level, will be pretty much done.

A nice garden with a huge worm (From the perspective of the ship, too huge)

Week Four: In Which There is More Modelling; Also, I Played Some Games

This week as far as progress I've made in the game goes, is a bit less than the last few weeks. This would be because I've mostly been working on other assignments we have from other classes; Sound & Audio, Graphics, some of the Game Design homeworks, and the beginnings of my first Business assignment. Despite all this, I have managed to work on a bit more modelling for the game. The basic layout of our level is now pretty much complete, I may go back and change some things from time to time, if something looks wrong, but for now it looks good. Our game was beginning to lag a bit, so I did end up going into the level and removing as many excess polygons as possible, which turned out to be quite a few, and got our game back to normal. I also began work on adding a tunnel to the level (it's not a requirement, but it does add to the level). I started out with a basic tunnel, but that looked a bit boring, so I decided to turn it into a giant worm, which looked much better. After building it, I was constantly berated with suggestions to add to it, and so I did, which ended up making it look worse, so I completely remodeled it again, with a final image in mind. I have also now been given the task to create a texture loader that will apply textures to .obj files, as before it was just applying them to objects made in OpenGL itself. I plan to look for some good information to get started throughout the next week and to, hopefully, get a large chunk, if not all of it, completed by the end of the break.

Just a quick texture for now; This worm will look more wormlike eventually

Week Three: In Which There is Much Modelling

I posted last week that I was working on the level and had a version to use for our game. This week I was working on editing it to make it look better as well as creating other models to use for vehicles and characters. First off, the changes to the level. Previously the level was basically just a flat surface with a bunch of walls, because that was easier to do when we did it in OpenGL, but now with Maya, we could go crazy with what we wanted. Because our game uses space ships and they fly over the ground we decided that we could use the ground to create some scenery as you fly around. I first made the whole track bumpier to make it look more realistic (you are racing on the surface of a planet, They aren't typically perfectly flat). I also add some craters and started work on a volcano to go with our lava that we already had.

Crash landing, probably caused by all those Ss

I've so far completed two more ships to be added to the game, whether or not they will be used as actual racing vehicles is yet to be determined. One ship I modeled, specifically, to be a crashed ship, and has been add to the course in the bottom of a crater. It was merged with the course and had faces removed to lower our poly-count. I have also done work on a Millennium Falcon type ship. If this doesn't make it into the game as a playable vehicle, we talked about either having it fly over the course (the Millennium Falcon is huge) and have it crash in the background, or have pieces of it scattered about the game field. I've also been using this ship to test out texturing in Maya, but we're still not sure how that will transfer over into OpenGL. Also this week I worked on a model for a racer, which is definitely more difficult than making a ship because you have to make it look more organic. So far I have completed the head, with teeth and everything, which means I still have the body and will hopefully be able to rig it before the semester's over.

- N. Gale

Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted

When asked to do an in-depth criticism of a recent game, I thought, ‘It should be something I’ve completed ‘and ‘it should be something I liked’ so it would be easier for me to right about. At this point in time though I hadn’t actually beaten a game in a while, I was slowly playing through a few different ones but hadn’t really gotten into anything. So I decided to play some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, the third console game in the Assassin’s Creed series (One of my favourite series this generation, alongside Uncharted). Over the weekend I spent at least two sleepless nights playing it (I just couldn’t stop) and finished it Sunday, which just shows how much this game pulled me in and addicted me to it. The Game is part Stealth, part Action-Adventure, part Open-World sandbox type game, published by Ubisoft and developed by their Montreal studio, with the multiplayer developed by their Annecy studio.

The Basic premise of this game, as with the other two games in the series, is a modern day war between the descendants of Templars and Assassins that, using advanced technology and genetic memories, search for powerful and ancient relics. Using the Animus, these memories can manifest themselves as actual experiences for the people using them. Playing as an assassin, much of the game is focused on sneaking around and killing people from the shadows, but there is much more to it.

Ezio Auditore and his band of Merry Men (and one woman)

Week Two: In Which The Level Is Remade From The Grid Up

Just a few quick things I did after last weeks blog entry in this paragraph. I started on making bump maps and normal maps for some of the textures, just to get some practice for when we'd have our finalized textures in the game, I like to think I've gotten pretty good at that. I've also been trying to make a shader, a toon shader to be specific, I have it working in a separate file from our actual game, but will have to do some more work to implement it fully.

Now on to my big project for the week, rebuilding the level. Last semester when we made our level instead of making it in Maya and importing it, we instead made it completely in openGL; This caused problems with lighting as well as making it nearly impossible to edit, at least with any ease. I went into Maya, and taking all the main point of the track, completely rebuilt it, there were a few edits after to make sure everything lined up with the old track, but for the most part it worked out well. Now that the level is actually in Maya and can easily be edited, I have been able to go in and change around a few pieces and add in objects to make our game more closely match the vision we had for it last semester. By the time our game is complete I hope you can look forward to some amazing scenery as you race around the track.

Later on this week expect some impressions from LittleBigPlanet 2, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, and an in-depth criticism of one of them, as per my homework requirements.

- N. Gale  

Week One: In Which Progress is Made on a Graphical Basis

Although we have only had one week of classes so far and have yet to really begin work on complete our new goals for this semester I have started to do a few modifications to our current textures. If you remember the game What Does it All Mean by Something Clever last semester, you'll probably remember that although the game performed well, and included most requirements, it looked a bit too dark, or not as enjoyable as it could be. So this past week I have experimented by changing certain textures to various styles to see what would work best, I tried with some cartoony graphic, and have started working on some code in OpenGL that makes things appear cell-shaded. I have also tried implementing a graphical style reminiscent of the new Tron movie, which I think would fit well with a few other object already in our game (i.e. the force field and points bubbles).

I'm not yet happy with the results, but I'll keep working until I get it just right.

My Time as a Raccoon: Ten Minutes with Sly Cooper

I have always wanted to play the Sly Cooper games but never got around to it during the age of the PS2, so I though, when it was released as a collection PS3, I just had to get it. Knowing it would be somewhat similar to one of my current favorite games of this generation, Infamous, I picked it up around Christmas but got sidetracked by Donkey Kong Country Returns. Since I must now play a game I've never played before, it seemed like the perfect time to finally try it out, and I'm glad I did.

The game begins with quick little setup video, getting the main character into place for you to control him. The first thing I noticed was how cartoony the game looked, which is definitely a plus for me, and it works very well for the type of game it is. Once I pressed start I got i little talking to from a nerdy annoying turtle (images of Slippy flash in my head) and he told we what was going on and what needed to be done.

Oh Bentley, I predict many annoying conversations from you in my near future

Kryptonite

It is time for me to talk to you about a bad game, maybe one of the worst, Superman 64. I'll admit right now that I never actually completed the game fully, but I believe I've made it further than most people would be willing to go in this terrible, terrible game. Superman 64 is plagued by terrible controls, a terrible story, terrible graphics, and terrible sound ( I still don't believe I've used the word 'Terrible' enough yet).

The entire premise of the game is that Lex Luthor has imprisoned your friends in a virtual metropolis and you, being Superman, must go and rescue them. There you have it, that's the entire story, told in one short cut-scene at the opening.

The beginning of a truly epic tale

You can't hide from the Grim Reaper. Especially when he's got a gun.

I have always loved graphical adventure games from my first experiences with them in the form of The Secret of Monkey Island to the more recent, and more scarce ones, such as games like Hotel Dusk and Heavy Rain. The draw of these types of games isn't so much the difficulty and gameplay as it is the story and atmosphere of the game. The game I believe best represents this genre and my personal favourite is Grim Fandango, a 1998 computer game made by LucasArts.

The main story of Grim Fandango boils down to this; you, Manuel "Manny" Calavera, are a travel agent for the DOD (Department of Death), tasked with selling people tickets to the Ninth Underworld based on the quality of their soul, ranging from a walking stick (With built in compass) to a ticket on the Double N straight to the Ninth Underworld. After discovering a mistake causing someone to be cheated out of their Double N ticket, you set off on an epic 4 year journey filled with conspiracy plot twists, and many great and unique characters.

Each character has their own personality that changes along with the four year path of the game.

The Shape of Things to Come

And so my blog is finally created. I thought I would offer a look into the future of my blog, albeit the very near future, in fact, most likely tomorrow. As I have already written what I will post tomorrow (but have a physical inability to completely finish something till the last minute) it should be easy to outline my next few posts.

Firstly, I am required to play through a maximum of ten minutes in a game I have never had the pleasure of experiencing before, and of course writing something about it. For this I played Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus, a game I have always wanted to play and for some very strange reason never felt the urge to buy, until now that is. Secondly I will be talking about a game I find fun, Grim Fandango, and discussing the aspects that make it fun. Thirdly I will tell you why a certain game, Superman 64, is not fun, which I feel may have been a bit too easy of a choice.

Along with these random homework assignments I will be posting my progress on the game "What Does it All Mean" by Something Clever. This week look forward to a discussion on my work improving textures, and creating new models for the racers.

And thus ends the journey of my first blog post, written at 1am because, honestly, who needs to sleep. Now to end this post as I will end all posts, a dash followed by my name two spaces down and aligned to the right side of the page.

- N. Gale