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