Game Encounters: Power Up Designs (Final) and Enemies

02/02/2015

Power Up Designs (Final) and Enemies


This past week I've finished modelling the power up designs for my team's game project.

I tweaked the colours, outlines and shading on all models and the team are happy with the results.

I moved onto designing the enemies. I first researched different types of military weaponry such as drones, guns, planes as well as flying animals for inspiration. I created a moodboard of all the images I gathered. 

From there I created designs in photoshop of possible enemy types for our game. These types are "Lazer Copter", "Machine gunner', "Homing Attack", "Spinning Blade", "Missile Launcher" and "False Power ups". 

The Lazer Copter will have copter blades to fly and fire lazers. The Machine Gunner has a single camera, two machine guns on either side and has a single rocket engine to fly. The Homing Missile is a single sphere which launches itself across the screen at high speed towards its target. The Spinning Blade is a sphere with a single blade which rotates in any direction. The Missile Launcher fires missiles. Finally the False Power Up is disguised as a regular powerup, but then flashes and explodes if the player gets too close. 

I then experimented with different colour designs from simple greys for metals to camouflage and even solar panels.

I decided to model the Lazer Copter, Machine Gunner and the Spinning Blade and modelled them in Maya using spheres for the body and eyes and cylinders for the arms and guns. 

For the blade on the Spinning Blade I used an image of a pen knife from google and using it as reference in the top plane I modelled the blade from a simple box.

I UV unwrapped the model using the Planar Mapping tool and exported the UV into photoshop where I added a simple gradient for the base colour of the model.

Games Encounters Group Project: Research and Designs

21/01/2015

Group Project: Research and Designs

Our assignment for the second semester is to design and create a flying shooter in a group using the Unity game engine. Our game can be either 2D or 3D, but the playable character must fly and shoot as it's primary functions. I decided to team up with Razvan, Joshua and Prem for this assignment.

As a group we brainstormed ideas coming up with new and unique ideas for our game. We all agreed our game should be an arcade style side scroller, as this will be the easiest genre to include the flying and shooting elements into our game. We also agreed to model and create our level design and assets in Maya, as we have little understanding on how the 2d engine in Unity works and we wanted to save time and start our project right away.

I gathered images and created a quick moodboard based on our brainstorming to get a better understanding on how our game should look, feel, play and be included.

We all liked the idea of having five levels with each level having it's own environment and enemy difficulty. We also agreed on having a boss battle at the end on the game to create a true 80's style arcade game. We all took up roles and separated to work on each element of the game and come up with the first set of designs.

I decided to focus on the powerups as what decent arcade shooter doesn't have powerups. I created another moodboard with a variety of classic and modern powerup designs to help get insporation for my own.

I immediately noticed that these designs use simple icons to express what the powerup does, simple and bold colours to help the object stand out and are encased in either a cube or sphere to help make it more appealing for the gamer. 

It took this on board and created some initial designs in Photoshop. 

I created designs for Lazer, Shield, Multiplier, Boost and Bomb powerups. Learning from the research I created basic icon designs with a simple and bold colour scheme in cubes and spheres. I also added shading using the techniques I learnt in Visual design. 

However I still couldn't get a feel for what these designs would look like in 3D. There was only one way I could find out and, so I went into maya and created the assets from these designs.

Lazer

I started by adding my designs to spheres and I immediately noticed how appealing they were. I also remembered the presentation from the last Game encounters lecture on how spheres are more appealing and less aggressive than cubes and focused my designs on spheres.

I also added a light grey highlight around the icons to help them pop out as well as a black outline around the object itself. Both textures are blinn however I turned the refection off on the left sphere to help compare whether our powerups should have a matte finish or a reflective finish. 

I continued creating each asset experimenting with the colours, lighting and shading with each one. 

Boost

Bomb

Multiplier

Shield

I will show these designs to my group and we'll discuss the pros and cons of each design, what features work and how to improve them. 

Games Encounters Winter Project: Final Update

10/12/2014

Final Update


In this term I have been trying to create a simple game in unity with the objective creating three trigger events, using no real textures or AI and gameplay lasting at least 2 minutes. This assignment proved to be tougher than I first assumed.


I created and used this storyboard to use it as a guideline for myself when i was modelling out my level and creating scripted events.

My level consisted of a series of thin boxes which is used to create walls and formed two boxes. One for the corridor and one for the elevator.

Down the hallway I added two area lights and a number of doors all scripted with a zombie sound effect. I obtained the sound effect from www.freesound.org. 

I created a button with a script which opened the doors, turned off the spotlight highlighting the button and played two audio sounds. The ding sound effect I obtained from www.freesound.org, but the elevator music I got from youtube. I applied GUI text to all buttons when you hovered the mouse over the button.

I struggled scripting the elevator controls button as I originally wanted this script to simulate different actions at different times throughout the game. However due to my lack of scripting knowledge I was forced to change my idea and, so this button was scripted to close the doors and turn all sound and lights in the room off. 

I created a scripted button to turn the lights back on. When the lights came on they would change colour to a warm red to help create an unsettling atmosphere.

I recored myself acting out a distress call with zombie sound effects in the background. I used Wavepad sound editing software to record two files. One with the distress call and one for the zombie sounds. I then merged the two files together and added a telephone audio effect to the final sound. This helped make the audio appear as if it was playing through the speakers.

I added a sphere underneath the telephone button which opened the doors.

As the player walks out I created two triggers one turning off the lights.

And another displaying a creepy zombie jpeg file. 

I created the zombie image by using a zombie makeup reference image from google and creating a charcoal texture layer to bring out the silhouette and editing it by adding a series of overlay layers. I then used an alpha channel to eliminate the background, so when the image is loaded into unity it will appear as if the head is floating.

I wanted to create a global script which activated every trigger script one at a time, but it was too complicated for my skillset to understand. I therefore left my game as it is which means that all scripts are active and there is no order for the gamer. I am disappointed that my skill level has limited my scritpting capabilities, but I am proud of the game I have created. I feel I shot myself in the foot early on when I wanted to create an elevator with only two scripted buttons. This created more hassle than the assignment needed to be and therefore cost me valuable time and has had a major effect on my final game. 

In the future I will learn to take my skillset into consideration and create a concept that I know I can create rather than just knowing it's cool and original. 

Visual Design: Anatomy

09/12/2014

Anatomy

Over the past couple of weeks I've been studying anatomy from the following book "A Complete Guide: Anatomy for the Artist". I focused my studies on the major bones and joints of the human body to help improve my understanding of how the human skeleton works. This will help improve my drawings as this will help improve my proportions, roughs, gestures and blocking out characters in my artwork.

I decided to focus on the key points artists use to mark out proportions when starting a new drawing. these points are the skull, clavicle, thorax, scapula, elbow, hands, feet, pelvis and the knee. I did by best to replicate the illustrations shown in the book

Skeleton

Skull

Shoulder

 Elbow

Hand

Thorax

Pelvis

Knee

Foot

I really enjoyed this exercise as it gave me a chance to experiment with what I've learnt over the past couple of months such as new shading techniques. This has definitely improved my knowledge and understanding of the human anatomy although I feel I need to improve my skills in drawing the feet. I struggled drawing the feet in this task and this is a area, which needs improving in my work.