State of the Game

Hello Everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week was pretty busy, as I worked on a plethora of things to push the game in the right direction.

First, I finished up the character’s basic stride cycles. That, and a jump sequence. That is all now seamlessly blended together to form an animation for the body that works great, regardless of the speed of your walk or direction. It’s a bit hard to show all that off in a quick clip, so I might release a video later in the week or next week to show that off as well.

Not only that, but If you remember the Weapon Dispenser and Vehicle pad, those had to be set up to work in UE4 with proper blueprints. All of this was done using a combination of Animation Montages and state machines (hence the pun)

Another huge thing I worked on was in cooperation with Alex and Melissa, on designing the main base for each team. You can see the finished model on Melissa’s blog, but the layout you can see right here:

As you can see, it has a garage that is slightly more open, an open stairwell section, the weapons area, and another open room which could can just be an interesting dynamic area to fight in. The garage building is actually 5M tall to accommodate the build pad’s height.

The second floor is the most dynamic. The spawn room is the bottom right, which has a ledge for people to jump off. The ledge makes it much easier to escape spawn camping, since you have so much surface area to come from. The room above the weapons room has an area to jump down, allowing for easy access to there for anyone close. There is a single 1M height increase that leads to the roof of the garage.

The third floor is pretty self explanatory. It houses the holy grail, the shield generator.

That was the main things I worked on, but I did do other aspects. I designed a concept for the base defense turrets. Each teams base has a set number of heavily armed turrets that need to be taken down before the generator can fall. These turrets are immune to damage when not firing, so you have to enter combat to take them down. Once down though, they stay down. Here’s the concept:

It’s a tower, really. All of them start off underground and activate a few seconds after the game begins. The turret head itself is tiled down until it reaches it’s normal height, and then opens up itself. The decal on the sides is the shield generator, and glows when the shield is on. There is also an Idea of a turret icon in the middle of the object, but that might not be the final icon.

As well, I got into fixing some issues with the character rig, and starting the vehicle workflow. More to come in the future!

This week, I have:

Worked on the main base design (6 hours)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Made turret concepts (150 minutes)

State Machine work (12 hours)

Vehicle work (4 hours)

Weight painting fix (3 hours)

Wrote this blog (45 minutes)

With two weeks until the public demo at ImagineRIT, we have a lot to work on. As well, my main thesis grade is this Thursday, and while I don’t have much more to improve on it does mean that I will have to figure out how to show off my stuff which takes away from actual progressing on said work. Next week, however, I will be doing another weapon animation set or sets. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Big Strides

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. As this week draws to a close, game development moves that much closer to completion. In terms of the art, that means a few more animations, and more learning. I took a few hours today, and one yesterday, to research how blend states and state machines work in Unreal, in depth. Using this knowledge, I’ll be able to put together a state machine for the character very, very soon. When that task comes of age I will show you the progress.

Now, on to what goodies are here for this week. I’m assuming you’ve looked at my post Thursday, in which I encapsulated most of what I have done for quite some time. If not, check out the various recent animations I did here.  Among those animations are the backwards stride (more of a hop though) and forwards stride. After that, I began transferring some of my work and re-purposing it. The main things for that were the animations for the normal stride of the character. Currently it is just forwards and backwards. However, since the character is at a 45 degree angle to forward, that means the strafe right animation will be very similar to striding forward. This is due to the direction the character is facing. Don’t believe me, try it out and do it yourself (I know I have). It feels natural compared to other strafe animation’s I’ve seen, especially ones that are at higher speeds. The same goes for the strafe left; it will be similar to the stride backwards animation. With that the strafe animations will be done very soon. In fact, take a look at the strafe left animation:

As well, I took an hour and reworked an idle set for the character. Eventually, I’d like to add more idle animations to the character, but this is a good set of subtle breathing for a man in combat.

This week, I have:
Done concept art (1 hour)

Met with the development team (120 minutes)

Forward animation creation (7 hours)

Backwards animation creation (6 hours)

Strafe Left animation creation (1.5 hours)

UE4 training (2 hours)

Next week, I will have the other strafe animation finished, as well as a basic state machine for the character moving and jumping. I will also work on more weapon animations, which will more than likely be one of the starting weapons. Also, more concept art is in the work and I’ll be able to show you that soon. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Thesis Reflection

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. It’s Thursday, and I know it isn’t the usual time, but it’s time for an update. This week, a major grade for my thesis is due, and part of it is to put what I have right here. Of course, I will be continuing on with game development as usual, and will post again on Sunday.

Anyway, so far, my thesis is a collaboration project, made by Melissa, Alex, and myself. My focus has been animation, rigging, and modeling, among other things. As a capstone as to what I have I have all of my old progress to show, and some new ones.

Here is all of my current work that I have done:

I have modeled 4 weapons:

The SAW

The Neutrino Catapult

The Auger

And the Reciprocator

I also created a modular kit to be used in an environment. Here is an example of some buildings:

(The upper building trim was created by Melissa)

As well, I did animations for both the Vehicle Pad and the Weapon Dispenser, those of which you can see here.

On top of that, I have a video of my other animated works, which can be viewed here. In order, they go:

Abettor tank Idle animation || Character model backwards animation || Character model forward animation || Character model weapon equip

Keep in mind, the character and the weapon in the last animation were not made by me, but by Alex.

Well, that’s all folks. Until next time, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Let the animations begin!

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. Two weeks ago, my university went on break for the “spring”, and it was very cold. It was time to recoup, and I apologize for the lack of updates that week. I did however begin working on animations during that time, and despite remoting into my desktop it went pretty well.

As for this week, I took care of a few things. The first thing I did was polish up the animations I started over the break. As both the animator and gameplay balancer, I get to know first hand how each weapon will behave, and how many frames each animation will need to be. With there being 3 categories of weapons (Primary, Secondary, and Heavy), each grouping needs to have a standardized time to *deploy* each weapon. The following is a heavy weapon pickup animation

Along with this, I began doing more motion capture data. Unfortunately, the data I collected this week is not enough to work off of. That means animation must be done by hand, using them as references.

I also took a few hours out to actually work on the sniper rifle again. It’s not finished, but it’s close. Most of it’s shape is there, just some detail on the main body left to do.

As well, I designed the last starting weapon; your default, trusty sidearm:

It’s a overheat weapon; it has no ammo supply that is refueled in the field. As the overheat meter fills up, there are two exhaust ports that open more and more on the weapon. When overheated, the exhaust caps fully open for roughly 4 seconds as the weapon cools. As an added effect, coolant flows from a container in the grip to the barrel slowly.

These two weeks, I have:

Designed the starting sidearm (120 minutes)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Weapon Equip Animation (14 hours)

Character Walk animations (8 hours)

Reciprocator model (5 hours)

Wrote this blog (90 minutes)

Next week, I will get the basic character animations done. If I have time, I will also work on the first person rig or the sniper rifle more. It’s crunch time! Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Forwards, backwards, then forwards once more!

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here! This week has been a rollercoaster of events. As we’ve been building this game, we’ve had lots little bits of progress, but no real errors that will make us have to go back. This week was a time where (I) ended up not nearly as far ahead of where I should be, considering how much work I put in this week.

Let’s start with some good news.This week I took our character and ran him past a fancy autorigging software I purchased. The results were pretty nice for the minimal hours I spent on it. Here is the idle animation for the default character:

And now for some bad news. I missed the memo that this software does not work well going into games, specifically the UE4 engine. So all my time spent rigging the first time ended up being… well, useless. I guess the best take away for me was the fact I had more practice weight painting.

So, what I found was that Unreal comes with a character rig helper plugin for Maya, for FREE! (boy do I feel stupid now… I’ll see if I can get some sort of refund.) It seems to work well, but you have to mostly finish the character in one shot, so that is never fun… But once I figure out the kinks for that I should be fine! I’m practically back to where I was with the paid software, but considering I planned on spending so many hours NOT redoing what I already did it makes me feel a bit behind… anyway.

Let’s bring back some more good news! So, the good news is I managed to come up with a concept for the fastest land vehicle in the game, the Jet Bike:

The jet bike is a hovering 2 man transport. The pilot of the vehicle steers a large ATV sized vehicle around. Like a true hover vehicle, it has a frictionless nature, allowing it to strafe and drift around corners. This not only gives a new set of movements to players, but it also makes the vehicle interesting in of itself. Oh, and did I mention the jet bike can leap? A second person can ride in the rear rumble seat to provide fire-support or as a second person to be transported across the map. These vehicles are found at most bases on the map from the start, allowing for (relatively) fast transport anywhere within a minute or two. As with any well balanced game, there are tradeoffs. The first is the obvious, that when the vehicle explodes all occupants die. Combined with the low health of the jet bike (compared to other vehicles) means that a few well placed anti vehicle hits will shut down the fast assault party pretty quickly. If anyone has an idea for the name of this beast, feel free to comment below! All suggestions welcome!

This week, I have:

Jet bike concepts (180 minutes)

Met with the development team (150 minutes)

Rigging the character <unusable> (10 hours)

Rigging the character <usable> (11 hours)

Next week I will start doing more animation work for the guns, as well as doing work on the Reciprocator Sniper Rifle. On Monday, we are also getting ready to apply for a grant as well! It could potentially bring in a LOT of startup money for us. It’s starting to get exciting! Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

A year older, a year wiser

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. As evident by the post title I turned a year older last week, going from a twenty something to… a twenty something. What that obviously means for my classes is that all non-major classes had a lot of work for me to due, specifically, work that was due on or directly after my birthday. (Woo….) What that means is the amount of work I did this week is lower than what I want (even though the past few weeks have also been slower than I have wanted as well) The three main things I managed to do this week were as follows:

I worked on getting the sniper rifle basic shape, and gave it a name. Since the weapon looks somewhat similar to a construction tool of the same name, I decided to give it the name “The Reciprocator”. Not only does it extend out and in like a reciprocating saw, but it also is designed to go through thick material; the sniper rifle can pierce through multiple targets, so make sure to line up your targets! Originally, the sniper rifle had two clips, which for the sake of making sense and a better visual appeal, it was decided to bring it down to one clip with two containers. The rest has stayed the same, though I may add some tubing at the bottom for more visual interest.

As you can see, you can see a very noticeable reduction in size from the extended and retracted versions of the Reciprocator. As I move along and work on making the Reciprocator much, much more detailed I will make sure to keep the fact that the weapon is based around this collapsible design, and really show that.

I have a good number of ideas for how this weapon will be animated. As stated before, I really want to give every weapon a unique feel to them. Not only that, but similar to battlefield: hardline, there will be less seen animations that will play every so often. They were a great source of inspiration for me, and if you’ve never seen them before, you can check them out here. While not every animation will have a comical feel to it, the important take away is how unique they all are, and that is what I will strive to do when I get to that point.

As well, I got around to working on the weapon balance for all of the 11 weapons currently planned for the game. It isn’t finalized, but I did spend a little bit of time planning that. I am trying to keep all weapons useful, at least in certain situations. The feel for unique, purposeful weapons that are well balanced is a solid selling point that players in the First-Person-Shooter genre want. I will hold myself to that.

The last thing I did was mess around with a piece of software I got today, for rigging our character and future characters. The design of the software is great, it reduces a 2 40 hour work week rig down to something that should take less than an hour. However, either maya or the program is mis-behaving. After quite a few hours messing, I think I figured out what the issue is, but cannot figure out how to solve it. If it wasn’t for that simple fact, I would have shown the character with a few poses but I guess that will have to wait until next week, then!

This week, I have:

Modeled the Reciprocator (150 minutes)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Weapon balancing (90 minutes)

Auto Rigging testing (6 hours)

Now that most of my other classes have their work straightened out (and my birthday has passed), I will be doubling down on the game project next week. I will be focusing mainly on getting the auto-rigging software to work right, so we have our characters to show off to Epic Games by two Mondays from today. Beyond that, I will also make solid progress on the Reciprocator. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

It’s the little things

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I spent doing multiple different things; as the beginnings of another class (which I will be focusing on animation for this project) ramps up, I will begin to do both animation work and modeling work… which I am really excited for!

As far as modeling goes, I finished off the Auger ARL as an asset, and began working on the sniper rifle. It’s not really much to show right now, but I a good sense for the topology of the mesh. There will definitely be a picture of it by this time next week.

As well, I have updated and added more white box models for our programming side to test while the art team gets everything taken care of.

I also took some time to make sure the art teams full art output process still works for our version of Unreal (for those who are curious, we will be using UE4 version 4.6) and that the transition from Maya to Unreal goes smoothly. It’s good that I did too, as I was encountering errors exporting animations from Maya. It was taken care of, and things seem to go in pretty well. It was really nice to see the efforts of people start to show some return as props were in-engine and working.. While, at this time I can’t show any in-game shots with working weapons, I can tell you that the moment the team is allowed to do so you will see some nice game-play shots here!

Oh, and does anyone remember the Neutrino Catapult? I sat down with another member of the art team, Alex, to work on getting it textured. He’s a great artist, and after only giving a sense of direction in terms of what I thought the material components of the Neutrino Catapult were, he came up with a very beautiful piece of destruction! Behold, the work of multiple artists:

This week, I have:

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Color maps for the Neutrino Catapult (45 minutes)

Auger ARL UVs (6 hours)

White box corrections (1 hour)

UE4 Animation and game-play Testing (2 hours)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

Next week, I will get decently far into the model for the Sniper rifle, as well as doing tests with animation! Not only that, but we are going to be pulling some stuff together to present to the creators of the engine we are using for grant money! Exciting stuff! Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

The Auger ARL

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. In a sort of antithesis of last week, this week was somewhat slow and very singular in my work (well, almost). There was a lot of out of project events that had to be taken care of. Part of this week was meeting several people for different events. As I briefly mentioned last week, I met with a representative from the RIT on Monday to discuss getting a location for a demo of the game as it stands. It went very well; while there was no exact “yes” word, everything pointed to being able to get a solid spot at one of the prime locations during ImagineRIT. As we move closer to the event, scheduled for May 2015, I will post more on the event!

The other was meeting with another development team from a game that recently made it to steam. I was able to get a multitude of good information about not just their game, but the process they had to go through to get everything how they wanted and how they got the game on steam greenlight, and finally got it greenlit.

I spend most of my time this week with the Auger; polishing it up, and starting the UV process. There is still some UVing left to do, but otherwise this weapon is complete. Here is a nice, finished look at the Auger ARL:

It now has its sight, which is an iron sight. I opted to choose an iron sight over any other type is simple the nature of its function. Since it is an SMG, designed for close quarters combat against people and short-mid range against vehicles, a scope really wouldn’t be necessary.  It has a small screen on it to help tell the user it’s ammo count and any issues it might have (don’t worry, there won’t be for the sake of good gameplay) and also add intrigue. Overall the piece looks much more interesting of a silhouette and will be a monster when wielded properly.

This week, I have:

Worked on the Auger ARL (6 hours)

Met with the Development Team (3.5 hours)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

Net week, I will finish up the UVing of the Auger, and begin work on the Sniper Rifle! Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Jack of all trades.

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. Last week was a myriad of many things, hence the jack of all trade post title. The only thing missing for me to do (in regards to this video game, anyway) was animation. Other than that I was working on a little bit of every part of my job.

I spent a good number of hours working on the Auger ARL. For those who don’t remember, the Auger is an Automatic Rocket Launcher, somewhat larger than a normal SMG. This will be an extremely potent weapon for taking out armor, as well as general close range combat. Not only that, but it has a really interesting reload design, where it’s ammo pool is loaded like a casset tape. It will make for some real interesting animations. Here is a WIP of the Auger ARL:

As well, I did some work on designing the remainder of the weapons to make. While one of them is still being tweaked, I do have a very solid design for the sniper rifle. Just like all weapons, the sniper rifle has it’s own unique silhouette and animation style to it. For example, this weapon is designed to be collapsible. When you equip it, you extend out the stock, and the rest of the weapon extends with it. It is fed by two plasma cartridges, so reloading needs to go to both sides of the weapon. As well, it has a spinning piece on the barrel, not just to break up space or make sense with how the weapon works… but spinning things are just cool. Behold:

Another thing I did was get my game design juices flowing, and refine the map a little more with our environment artist. There were certain parts of the map that needed a bit of refinement to make gameplay that much better. Since we are going for fast paced action with beefy characters and lots of strategy, we need a lot of space for players to work their magic and develop interesting strategies. The old map had too few paths to choose from when leaving your main base, so we decided to free up the base. Here, you can see that the big mountain (next to purple’s main base) is now bisected.

I think that opening up the terrain more will give players more leeway and overall, make a more enjoyable game.

This week, I have:

Modeled the Auger (10.5 hours)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Map layout for game design (120 minutes)

Weapon design (120 minutes)

Wrote this post (45 minutes)

Tomorrow, I meet with a representative from RIT to try and put this game in a solid position to get showcased at Imagine RIT, a festival which would draw in a lot of viewers, as well as some other stuff. As well, I will be finishing up the Auger ARL and getting ready to work on the sniper rifle! Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

New year, new goals.

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. It’s 2015, and as such classes have started back up. With them starting back up, regular blog updates will resume. Most of my break was spent working on future projects (which you may hear about if you keep peeking in hear much further into the future.) The rest of it was background work for the current game.

This week, the development team buckled down and prioritized what we need to do to get this game out the door. As of now, no official release date is set, but again, stay tuned for future updates.

Now, onto the meaty portions. While we have a whole new slew of concepts, the main one I did that was very much approved of was this:

This is the transport, or as we call it, the battle bus. This mean vehicle is designed as a support vehicle; It has a dedicated driver, a gunner with an overheat weapon, and two rumble seats that players can use to fire from outside the transport. As well, the vehicle can resupply allies nearby with it’s pair of ammo dispensers. This vehicle adds a lot of tactical and small squad/fire-team options, especially with a large style map we have.

If you pay close attention, you will notice it has extendable spikes on it, as well as a winch. Part of the design process is re usability; not simply for the sake of making things easier for us, but putting a real world take on them. In the distant future, the goal of many devices is to be as useful as possible. To that end, a vehicle for a military would sort of need to be designed to maximize it’s use. You could replace the back seats and turret into a crane or excavator, or attaching a dozer blade to the front. Things like this give such a chassis flexibility, and (at least currently) that is something a military seeks.

Beyond that, I was tasked with whiteboxing the rest of the missing critical components. These placeholders are simply here as temporary items for our programmers until the art team got the finish models in place. As well, I had to polish off part of the Abettor tank which was not done over break.

This week, I have:

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Worked on the Abettor tank (8 hours)

Whiteboxing placeholders (180 minutes)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

Next week, I plan on working on a new weapon and getting it mostly set up, and will be posting some more concept art for future works. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!