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. |
In relation to WildMagic and Havok, after our tutorial we started playing around with some of the physics and collisions, finding it much easier to implement than last year. For example, we spent most of last year trying to get a collision system to work well with our game, but in the end still had something less than desirable. Using Havok on the other hand allowed us to add simple collisions in seconds. Having the basis already there for all these things we had to program ourselves last year should allow us more time to create something far superior and adding more unique elements to make the game enjoyable (not a single looping track with no win condition).
On the Maya side of things I began modelling my character (the main character for our game) and experimenting with different modelling techniques. I modelled the head three separate times, first starting with a simple plane and adding and manipulating each vertex to get as accurate as possible, this had the best detail and edge flow but took the longest (an hour and a half – two hours). The second way I did what we learned in class, start with a sphere, get some points in the right spot and add more detail with edge loops, this worked pretty well and took a bit less time than starting from scratch. The third way, though, was both better looking than starting with a sphere and much, much faster. I was able to in roughly ten minutes able to create a good head by using a premade skull as a basis, then taking a 10x10x10 subdivision box and sculpting it around the form (I’d show a picture but Maya crashed before I could save). I also experimented a bit with blend shapes just to get an understanding of them and feel they could be very useful for smaller animations such as eyes and lip-syncing the mouth.
 |
| An experiment in blend Shapes with my best, so far, modelled head. Disregard his drunken look. |
For next we are all again going to come up with level designs, but with our ideas more refined we can hopefully come up with things that will eventually be added in. I plan to most likely redo my entire character again as I keep learning new and efficient ways to create good models (and the fact that I learnt our limit was in poly’s, not tri’s; so twice the detail if I want). Other than that I’ve been playing a few smaller games, mainly Cloud and Dyadin (early games from Jenova Chen; maker of flOw, Flower and, one of my most anticipated games at the moment, Journey). Also, I love scene graphs, just thought I’d say that, I just love being able to see how everything connects to each other and the results of their interactions, maybe that has something to do with using Maya and Unity a fair bit. Now hopefully I’ll have some free time this weekend to play the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus collection.
 |
| My character currently, although I'm almost definitely going to completely redo this |
No comments:
Post a Comment