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!

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!

Vehicle Design

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. Last week, I was working on concept art for a number of things. I spent a few hours working with my team’s environment artist, designing building layouts and polishing up a modular kit for them to use when creating the level. All of this is stuff you can find on her blog right here.

However, the main focus on of my time this week was starting the design for the vehicles. We sat down Saturday and discussed the basic aesthetics for the vehicles; their general shape and design, and slightly on their behavior. Out of the 3 vehicles that we are setting out to create, I chose the largest one out of them to really design and push out a heavily detailed sketch. I would like you to take a look at the next major piece that I will be working on for a few weeks: The M-182 Abettor Light Tank.

The Abettor is a 2 person vehicle, and without including any stretch goals is the highest health vehicle in the game. The driver gets to use the main weapon, a paired set of missile pods. Reloading of the main weapon will take a long time, as more rockets are fed into the pods from the chassis. This contrasts with the vehicles single fire, or semi automatic, nature. Every squeeze of the trigger is one round, so if you want more rounds down range you better have a fast trigger finger.

The secondary gunner gets to use it’s ROWS (Remotely Operated Weapon System) affixed to the top of the turret. It’s similar to the SAW in performance, but will have a slightly higher damage and weapon bloom than the SAW. This is an overheat weapon, which means you must take care of making sure the weapon does not overheat. There are visual indicators on the weapon itself to help you judge how heated the gun is, on top of the game’s UI.

When creating the vehicles, like anything really, you have to make sure it fits into the big picture. Vehicles generally bring in tactics which are unavailable to infantry players (brute force pushes, blitzkriegs, sieges, etc.), and forgetting what vehicles can or can’t do will generally spell bad news for most games, not just shooters.

Players don’t like not knowing what is going on in the game they are playing. It leaves players frustrated and unwilling to continue that game. How many times have you stopped playing a game not because you were losing, but simply because you couldn’t understand HOW you were losing. Snipes from weird section of a map that insta-kill you. Taking damage for apparently no reason. These are things which may or may not being intuitive, but it still will frustrate players, and you need to minimize these things whenever possible because it will cause most people to eventually stop playing.

No weapon in this game is going to one hit kill a player at full health, even tank missile rounds. We want players to be a lot more tanky (no pun intended) than a lot of shooters that have existed in the past. With the weapon set that will be available to infantry, this allows players to get up close and try and deal damage to a tank with a anti vehicle SMG(which I will be working on soon), or sit back and try and engage in medium/ long range battles with the tank using a weapon like the Neutrino Catapult.

The reason the primary weapon for the Abettor is missile pods is two fold. First, the slower nature of missiles allow for players to better deal with the rounds of the tank; dodge, and position themselves for it’s combat. Secondly, is to keep the grand scope of things in mind. If we get to the point where we decide we want aircraft in the game, the Abettor already fulfills the job of an anti air vehicle. It’s secondary cannon allows it for more engaging team play while not making the vehicle too overpowered.

This week, I have:

-Met with the development team (180 minutes)

-Building Layout Design (180 minutes)

-Modular Kit Work (4.5 hours)

-Vehicle Research (30 minutes)

-Vehicle Design (4.5 hours)

-Wrote this blog (105 minutes)

In the coming next two weeks, I will be modeling the Abettor Tank and getting ready to do all the animations associated with it on the third week. Until next folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Gameplay First

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. As I said earlier, this week was a lull in game creation. Even though there were all the other class projects and papers being worked on, I spent some time talking to the development team about level and vehicle iteration. Developing some thumbnail sketches for the vehicles was mostly what I did by myself, however; concepts which did point us in the right direction, but didn’t really nail anything we truly wanted. It’s a good thing to make sure that whatever it is, that it fits in this world.

This ties into a topic that has crept up a lot recently in many discussions, and that is what you truly need to make a game. I’ve heard many, many reasons people want to get into this field; to be the next big game designer… though, when I ask them what they want to make, they respond with some deep discussion about the story, or how everything will look. Only every once in a while do I hear anything about the game itself. Story, and theming, are important aspects to consider when making a game, but these should not be the first things you discuss when creating a game.

What makes a good game? Game-play! The ability to interact with the audience, and engage the person in something that they will enjoy doing (if successful, on a regular basis). This isn’t supposed to sound like a broad statement; it’s supposed to be a reminder of what a game is at its core. A game has interactivity, but a game has to have something special to it.

Now, I’m sure you’re reading this and saying: “Isn’t that redundant question; isn’t this something that all games are? Aren’t all games, by simply being intractable, a game full of game-play?”

No.

I worked creating a game around 8 months ago; I was only told it was a game that was artistically based off a famous painting, the garden of earthly delights. I signed up to get my foot in the production door, and to be honest was rather excited when it all started. However, after a couple of weeks of development, I realized that something didn’t sit right with me. During a meeting later down the line, the art team was trying to figure out where all the art was going; helping the art team know what the player will interact with and how is important to designing the art that you will have in game down the line. The information we got back was vague, at best. We didn’t understand what the game was, and how it was played.

About a month later, we got to sit down and talk with the lead designer of the game during a large meeting. When we asked for basic information on the game, we heard a decently interesting story for how the art ties together. Then we pushed for how do players interact with the game, and we didn’t get a satisfying answer. The lead designer’s response was “narrative, and quests” as a response to “What are the game mechanics to the game?”, and that simply isn’t good enough.

Why am I sharing this with you, my fellow readers? I’m sharing this because so many people think of game design like they would think of how to make a movie; with story on the forefront and the behind the scenes technical on the backburner. In this regard, game design is the opposite of movie creation. This is a real example of something that a large number of people who enter the game design field do, and it’s not going to go well for them if they stick to that.

When making games, game-play MUST be the driving force of your game. I am not saying that a game cannot have a deep story; most of the games I plan on producing have a very interesting and deep story, but this comes after I already have a solid understanding of how the games will play. It’s like making a cake; the icing is a great accent, but if the cake is made of stones and dirt, icing isn’t going to make the cake good when you taste it.

Successful game companies know this. Blizzard even has this as their first rule when developing games! Gameplay first. When developing a game, or a mechanic in a game, a level, or even a part of a level for a game, you need to ask yourself the most critical of game development questions: “Is this fun?”, and “Why is this here?”.

Refer back to the core of your game with this. It’s not just good enough to say it’s a FPS, or a platformer, but what exactly is your game and why is it that your game mechanics make it a great game; a very fun game. These terms are synonymous. People keep playing games because they are fun, plain and simple. Some find extremely challenging games fun, some people find team games fun, and others find games with many possibilities fun.  It’s extremely subjective, yes, but you need to understand that question as it pertains to both the specific example and the game as a whole… because they are also linked.

“Why is this here?” You need to justify why that building is in that location, and why it’s laid out like it is. You need to explain why that tank behaves the way it behaves the way it does. Realism is not an answer for this question; realism can be part of the answer, but simply by being realistic it does not justify its behavior. Now, if you answered the first question well enough for yourself, then you can answer this second question. It might make you have to put on the good ‘ol thinking cap, but you’ll be rewarded for it with a better, more solid game because of it.

Some of you may know, but I am a huge Real Time Strategy fan. One of my favorite RTS games would have to be Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. It had a lot going for it, though there were some things they could have done to go even further. A lot of units were redundant, and rarely used because they didn’t have a use compared to other units. Most of the maps weren’t really planned to take advantage of everything the game had to offer. These are examples of resources wasted, that could have been spent making things that better align itself with the core of the game. If they asked themselves those two critical questions, it would have been just that much better of a game, and would have really gotten many, many more sales. There is so much more to talk about in terms of RTS game development that I’ll save that for its own discussion.

This isn’t something exclusive to big companies. Riot was a small company when they nailed every gameplay design question on the head when they made League of Legends. Minecraft was made by one man with a vision and deep understanding of what his game was going to be. Who knows, if you ask yourself and your team the right questions, you will certainly have a leg up on the competition from those who don’t. (Double true for indie companies, but again, that’s a conversation for another time) Play your cards right, and your game will have a solid chance to be right up there with the very best of them!

In the coming week, you’ll see me back on the production pipeline, with some nice results for you next Sunday. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Meaningful progress

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I’ve been pretty frantic. Practically every course I have has had a project and/or test due this week as well as some real life issues, so I wasn’t able to do as much work as I normally would have. However, I still managed to work on a number of various things for the Parallax Project.

The first thing that I’ll show off here is my work in progress mesh for the Squad Automatic Weapon:

As you can see, it’s got the very basic shape down for the model. The way I go about doing my game modeling process is I first go for making a medium poly mesh. When it gets to that point, I’ll then generate a low poly version that you play with, and a high poly version to help the model look even better using normals.

Since this weapon does not fire any true rounds, we have the opportunity to experiment with different ways of making a weapon work. There is no spin to put on a ball of gas, or on a lazer, so the barrel can be any shape we want to design interesting forms. In this universe, plasma weapons don’t have circular barrels. We went with a more square-trapezoidal barrel form. In the following week, I’ll finish this weapon up and talk much more about this weapon as it gets finished up.

I also did concept art for the next thing asset piece I will be working on, that got a lot of positive feedback on, and that was the Vehicle Pad:

The vehicle pad, when idle, is similar to the pads you see on a lot of other videogames. It is mostly a flat platform where the vehicle comes from. The big difference here, is that when it starts to build the vehicle, it really comes to life. On the right side of the picture, there are 3 stages of construction, that illustrates the different ways the machine will behave over the course of a vehicle’s construction. As with the Weapon Dispenser, the Vehicle Pad will have a lot of character in it’s animation.

The last thing, and what took the most amount of time for me this week, was checking out the map that Melissa was working on for her thesis in the past few weeks. (She’s a great environment artist, you can follow her here.) Using my game design and level theory thinking, I put it under the microscope and figured out what worked and what needs changing to make this a successful game.

I loaded up the map, and took an Arial view of the layout. I located the bases on the map and put big gray markers on where they were. The Purple and Green bends are the respective team bases, which will have a dam-like appearance to them.

After I got the locations of the bases set up, I wanted to see how the map would function. I went through and did time trials to judge distance.The time, T, was an average of 4 trials I did for each category. Understanding base distances helps figure out the likely paths players will take. For example, from the purple base, it is faster to get to bases 2 and 13 than bases 11 and 7. Purple team players will start off going to bases 2 and 13 before migrating to the other bases. Also, the position of bases 3 and 13, being in a thin canyon strip in the bigger open canyon, so the paths they can take will be slimmed down. From base 13, the best option to go for would be to base 5, or back to base 2 or the home base.

There are some more items in there, such as the TTK and TTKr. TTK, or Time To Kill, is the approximate time a weapon will take to kill a player 1 on 1 if they have perfect accuracy. Then you have TTKr, which is a real form of TTK. Players are never perfectly accurate, and after doing a lot of digging and looking through existing game stats, it seems that the average accuracy of a player is 30%, so I took the TTK and adjusted it accordingly.  Another thing I looked at was the time it takes to transfer control from one side to the other. We decided to double the time from 20 seconds, seen in the graph, to 40 seconds after going over the data.

The main reason we wanted change this is this diagram:

Currently, using standing walking speed of humans, the distance one can travel in 6 seconds is represented in the red circle. Since we decided that the map should be increased by 30%, as well as increase the average players walking speed, travel times will stay mostly the same. This just means that the map will be more open and will allow players to round corners and dodge shots a little better. The increase in speed, roughly 30 percent, is shown in the yellow ring. Under regular walking speed, that distance would take 8 seconds, and in a shooter game when milliseconds count, that is a huge game-play difference.

After doing that, I did some tweaking of the base locations and numbers, as well as pathing. All the red dots are changes in the location of the base. The yellow dots are additional bases, so we can have some overlap. The brown paint strips are changes in the thin canyon gorges. Black lines indicate roads, or other major avenues of travel.

I also took a look at the relative height of the map. While the extreme heights of the map are good, inside of the canyon, where players can interact, is very very steep. Some of the canyon pieces are placeholders, so there isn’t much the game design portion of me can critique that. I still think we can get away with nice variations in the height of the terrain while toning it down a little bit.

This week, I have:

Work on level design (6 hours)

Model the SAW (5 hours)

Design the Vehicle Bay (180 minutes)

Had group Meetings (180 minutes)

Wrote this post (120 minutes)

Like I said, next week, I plan on having a completed SAW model to show you guys. I’ll also be putting together a design doc for the project to help keep continuity of the project. Until next time, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Concept arts and modular kits

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I did a lot of environment asset creation. I spent most of this week, modeling, and prepping a modular building kit to be textured. Curious about the concept for it? Take a look!

For references of this, I took a look at several games. PlanetSide, Mass Effect, Killzone, and various Google searches helped me design the look of the modular kit. After iterating for some time on it, I eventually came to a kit that looks like this:

It will look even better when textured, I’ll link to that when the kit gets to that point.

After talking with my group, I’ll now resume doing what I did for the first week, and that is modeling this baby here:

This is our Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW. It fires plasma rounds from it’s massive plasma pool in the stock at a pretty fast rate, which will end up somewhere between 600-700 RPM. I know how huge of a difference that is, but I’m on the fence on how competitive we want this to be in a CQB (close quarters battle) scenario. Regardless, as the starting weapon it will assume the role of Jack of All trades.

When doing weapon design and balance, or any balance really, you need to keep an eye on the big picture. For example, having every weapon perfectly balanced against each other, perfect symmetry, is almost never desirable. This would make picking up a new weapon useless (unless you are the sort of person who picks weapons based on looks and not functionality). On the flip side of this, you don’t want to have new weapons as upgrades in a typical shooter; this creates an almost identical effect as the first example, except everyone will be fighting over that “one” best weapon.

So, Krim, it sounds like a no win situation? What would I, as an aspiring game designer, do? Asymmetry balance! Always make the tool set have strengths and weaknesses, this is where you don’t get upgrades, but sidegrades. This may sound like a brainer right? Not really. Game balance is one of the main reasons a game can succeed or fail, many games fall short due to not balance issues, but fundamental broken logic wheels.

Hours this week:

Modular kit (14 hours)

Meetings (180 minutes)

Financial Research (120 minutes)

Writing this post (60 minutes)

In the coming week and a half, I plan on modeling the SAW, which still might have it’s name changed/augmented. If you have a good name suggestion, put it in the comment section below!

Dispensing the Animation

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here! This week, I managed to get most of the work for my other classes out of the way at the end of the week, so I’ve had plenty of time to work on this project. It’s not a full work week by any means, but it’s much closer to one than I’ll probably get for a while, with the other classes and all.

Our team has been working on a variety of things this week. Melissa, the Environment Artist, has been working on the layout for map itself. I’ve helped put in some input to the Game Design portion of the map creation. As I stated last week, it’s set in a canyon, so the whole map will be inclosed in massive walls. Minus that, there will actually be a variety of terrain heights to keep things interested and vary the gameplay. We also said that the whole map will not be dirt, and there will be a few bases on metal platforms, which will help define the bases.

While discussing map layout, I remember listing to an Environment Artist for Planetside 2. He talked about the process for how one should go from concept to finished product. If you want to watch the video, just click here. Be warned, it’s a bit lengthy!

Alex, on the other hand, has been working on designing the starting character you get to play as. We’ve started by working on the helmet; we checked out a lot of different designs based off real helmets. Initially, it was far to curvilinear (too much form based of smooth elements) than what we have been working on, so there was an iterative process for that.

As for what actual work I did, besides helping Alex and Melissa out with a few sketches, I went back to the Neutrino Catapult and briefly cleaned up some parts of it, and then UV it.

For those who don’t know what UV mapping is, I’ll briefly explain it. If you remember when you were a kid (or adult) when you made objects out of construction paper, where you had to cut and fold the edges to form an object like this:

courtesy of educationworld.com

You’ll remember that, once you cut those out, you can fold them into a shape; in the above example, a cube. Practically, UV mapping is the practice of doing that… in reverse. The reason for that is it allows you to go into Photoshop and paint on the 2D surface, where each part of the virtual paper correlates with an area in 3D.

Once that was done, I could move on to a brand new asset. It’s a weapon dispenser, called the Patron (A fitting name in my opinion). BEHOLD!

It was one of the few things already started, and so I had to finish up touches on the model. After that, I had to rig it so I could animate the object… and that’s where things got irritating.

The stock Maya 2015 package has a lot of instability issues, notably when weight painting a model. A combination of random crashes and me not saving every 2 seconds caused a 2 hour work period to turn into 5 hours. After working on that, I was told by a colleague that the Maya 2015 package has a software update which fixes a lot of problems. To everyone with Maya, go and get that update. You won’t regret it! It brings Maya back to the stable levels it was before.

Like all of the animated assets in this world, I want to give it a sense of character to the object. As a device that rapidly constructs weapons, I wanted to give it a sense of how fast it works, and how it is very loud when running. A good reference for me was the ratchet and clank series by Insomniac. All of their animations truly breathe life into objects, inanimate or otherwise. While most of what they do is very stylized, I do like how everything has it’s own feel to it. All animations, vehicles, and animation assets will have their own behavior, like above.Oh, and if you haven’t played a Ratchet and Clank game, I highly recommend it!

This week, I have:
Helped Alex with character design (~90 minutes)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

UV mapped Assets for texturing (5 hours)

Modeling Touch-ups for the Paton (4 hours)

Rigging and Weight painting the Patron (5 Hours)

Animating the Patron (8 Hours)

A total of 28 hours, getting closer to a normal work week worth of work!

Next week, I’ll continue to help Alex with his character design. Other than that, I will probably be working on another weapon, but there is a chance I’ll work on something else! It’ll be a surprise as to what you’ll see, but stay tuned!

A title, a plan, and a catapult!

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week has been a lot more active in terms of actual work for the thesis, now that we are solidifying plans. My team has gone through two meetings since I last posted, talking about various different topics on our thesis. The first thing is now the name of the project: Parallax. We dived a little deeper into the lore of the universe(s) to help guide our creative hand. Often times, game designers put off story until the end. Think of a game that had a rather weak backstory, or a setting which just seemed out of place. Typically, when that happens, it’s due to when during the process the team decided to designate work for the story. Actual story-writing for a good number of games happen at the rest of the process, and the writer then has to go back (and often hand wave) a reason for the functionality of a weapon, the planet, or the whole setting in extreme cases.

Another thing discussed during the two meetings is the layout and setting of the first map itself. It will be set in a canyon that has been excavated for mining. The overall flow of the map will be a sort of Z shape, with the center housing a massive mineshaft with scaffolding covering it. This gives us a lot of room to make the map look unique, while also retaining the precious symmetry needed for a competitive game, when this moves further into production. One of our inspirations for this was the game Warhawk. Warhawk is a 3rd person shooter game for the PS3, released in 2006. It’s massive maps gave a lot of room to play in, while also being interesting to look at. It had tight controls and clean, distinct silhouettes for everything. It made it easy to tell one thing apart from another, and was extremely fun to play!

There are a number of great games that we draw inspiration from. Game designers, world builders, and film makers alike all draw inspiration from the world around us, and even other works. Another great and fantastic game would be the game PlanetSide2 for the PC, and eventually the PS4. The maps are extensive, with lots of combinations of modular asset pieces are blended together with the huge amount of terrain data. Massive battles rage on as literally hundreds of allies and enemies duke it out on one of five perpetually ongoing 64KM by 64KM continents, and best of all, the game is entirely free! If you haven’t seen or played this game, I highly recommend it!

(Kudos to DrathamusGaming for the screenshot, a commenter for the PlanetSide community. If you want to check out PlanetSide2 for yourself, click here.

Yet another thing we talked about was the Army exoskeleton that you’d use when traveling through this world. This coming week I’ll assist Alex in design sketches for the character. Obviously, any animation related to the character will be on hold until the character is complete, so no complete weapon will be ready for this week. I will, however, be making progress towards, which I will show roughly the same time next week.

Speaking of this week, what have I been doing? Well, I’ll give you a nice image of the newest weapon I have created for this project. Presenting! The Neutrino Catapult!

The Neutrino Catapult fires irradiated discs at high velocity, which shatter upon reaching a target and releasing a burst of energy. It does this with it’s set of four magnetic accelerators, making this a Gauss (or Coil) weapon. The explosions are equally effective against infantry and vehicles, and can send them backwards if caught in the blast radius. Each clip contains a set number of irradiated plates that are held at the back of the accelerator rails. Due to the backwards motion of the gun, the heavy stock and angled foregrip are there to compensate for such recoil. If you love how this weapon looks, you’ll need to check back in the coming weeks, when the asset is animated!

This week, I have:

Concept sketched and Modeled the Neutrino Catapult (14 Hours)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Designed a weapon that you will see in the future (120 minutes)

Wrote this post (75 minutes)

In total, that makes 20 hours spent this week on this project, not too shabby!

 

Like I said, in the coming week I’ll be doing a lot of concept sketching for the exo-suit model, as well as touching up another asset I worked on over the summer, so look forward to a more pen and paper approach next Saturday/Sunday!

Hitting the ground running.

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. It’s been a while since I’ve last fathered an article on the magic of the internet. Last week marked the beginning of my Senior Year at the Rochester Institute of Technology. As per normal, Seniors have to do a senior thesis. The 3D Digital Design (3D cubed, for short) major requires an extensive project to display what you have learned. This is one of the main reasons for this blog, to keep people up to date with my Senior Thesis Project.

At this point, you’re probably saying, what’s your thesis? It’s a series of Art assets designed to go into a video game. This is a colaborative project, with two others in my major, and 3 others (this number is likely to grow). Each person has a unique set of Technical challenges and Design projects to work on. For myself, I’ll be following (mainly) where my strengths are: Modeling, rigging, and animation. Of course, I’ll be doing a bit of everything, but that will be what I will be focusing on. As for the game itself, it is a First Person Shooter, set in a distant future where two versions of the same country fight over resources More information on the actual game at a later date.

We are finalizing are asset lists this coming Monday, in an extensive meeting, so I can’t give exact details yet. What I can tell you, is that on top of Game Design duties like balancing and lore writing, I’ll be tasked specifically with a lot of the animations that you will see in the game. Here, for example, I made a concept reload animation for a chamber loading pistol called the Radart Gun.

(Credit for the WIP model goes to Alex Berkowitz, one of the others on my team.
Please Note: The hands in the animation are from an old model, there only to show how the weapon is reloaded.)

While the above example isn’t too fancy, many other weapons will have much more interesting and complex animation to them. I will take on the role of modeling a large percentage of the weapons in the asset list I’ll post soon, as well as assets that move, such as the weapon dispensers or vehicles.

Our general, cohesive athstetic we are going for is a hard edged metal. We want to stay away from the current trend of technology; we find the ultra curvy-minimalistic tech you see from the current games, movies, and general art to just not look as good as one with more hard surface models. Take for example this weapon from Mass Effect. It has a series of reflective outer panels, but you can also see the inner workings (somewhat). Geometry wise, this is what I am talking about in terms of the hard edge metal.

As far as colors, we are looking to make this world bright, and vibrant. A lot of “modern” shooters tend to have a very grey style, and we want to shy away from that. We will attempt to remedy this with overly saturated fauna, and colorful weapons, vehicles, and static objects. Take for example, Sunset Overdrive by Insomniac Games. It’s crisp, bright colors and lighting make the game seem very fantasy. Combined with our Sci Fi weapons, it creates a nice blend for an art style not very common in games these days. This doesn’t mean that everything will be super saturated or not have dark colors, but it means we will not have the shades of gray attitude a lot of games have.

One last thing I want to touch up on for this week, and that is the design team’s goal as a whole. One of the ways a game can fail is it’s inability to communicate what the player needs to know to play their game. Our aim is to deliver a product, that from any point in time, you can take an image of what is going on and instantly know who is doing what. In quality games, the art team has to help the player tell their side from the enemies, and what is happening around them. If they can’t, then not only did the art team fail (and the lead artist probably should be removed), but the game will suffer greatly as a whole. We want to hold ourselves to that, and make sure any future players can figure out what is going on.

This week I have:

Rigged the Radarts Model (30 Minutes)

Animation Demo of the Radart Gun (120 Minutes)

Started on the Neutrino cannon, which I will post sometime in the coming week (150 minutes)

Other background stuff (asset list formation, sketches) (90 minutes)

Wrote this post (75 Minutes)

While this is the first week, so we’re still in the ramp up phase, I plan on spending roughly 15 hours a week working on this project. Of course, Additional spare time could easily be allocated to this project, but I that sets the bar. Next week, I plan on working on the Neutrino Cannon model, UV, and rig. I will also have a finalized asset list set up by then.