My time at insomnia 62 – Day Two

It has now been two days since I came back from Insomnia and have finally materialised the events spanning over the weekend.

Still feeling the gaming vibe!

On the first day we got there at around 12PM, drained from travelling but looking forward to seeing the others at the next gen booth. When we turned into the booth, it was hectic; filled to the rim with people of all ages and backgrounds. Kids playing student made games, also coming to be taught about how to make these games and adults come to be taught about the more technical side of games design alongside how the course itself develops you as a person and as a professional.

Before I continue, I will say that besides all of the cool things that took place in the festival. It was by far the best experience of my life sharing it with some of the best lads in my company

Ryan, Max, Robert, Nick + Alex Thursby. Couldn’t ask for any group better, better yet we all learnt from each other considering we all had different skill sets and obviously with our enthusiasm for our work. We would do ourselves and the course justice.

Over the duration of each day, we came to the sudden realisation that it was not just the course and ourselves getting public attention but a game called ‘Coob Jools’?

If I’m pronouncing that name right?

It was a basic 2D platform shoot em up game with a party including 2-4 players. You’re dropped into a small arena with other player in order to survive, the simplicity of the game was enough to kill a few hours for those who needed away from the hustle and bustle of the expo and this sky rocketed into the limelight and the funny thing is. Us in the Next-Gen group also fell into the addiction of the game not just the people we were talking to.

What now? The long road to making cool things.

Now I have finished college , I ask myself “what to do?” new projects maybe, trying to expand onto other fields such as programming in C#, Java or even c++ given the recent trend in those other languages popularities.

So after the recent synoptic project, it has come to my attention that now I have some free time on my hands; it also presents the best opportunity to dive deep into the programming world and I have a few recourses I can choose from such as the Unity Q&A Forums, Brackeys (YouTube) and also GamesplusJames (Also YouTube). With all that together, I can create some cool effects and also learn the basics of programming during now till September when I hope to go to University. That been said I do have other things going on in my life … I can’t be stuck behind a keyboard for ever I’ll go mad.

Finishing year blog.

And here we are… Finished. Done. Cheerio.

And now is my time to show what I have learned or even taken from this course over the course (no pun intended) of 2 years.

Lets start with the beginning, coming into next-gen; happy, confident and enthusiastic to get my hands on what scrap of knowledge I could. I have done things from be part of a nationwide competition for 3D modelling, made things that I didn’t think I could do … ever and by this I mean create menus and creating VFX for games; motion graphics and making human faces and the odd body.

 

So yeah.

From the beginning of the year, I have found that my interests have shifted from doing games design to more of a film based environment… yes it’s late but never too late to find something new.

And there are two reason for this. One being that the placement from January to May really opened my eyes in what I can do in regards to moving from one field of creativity to another. Another reason is the intro animation of my portfolio (Link will be somewhere in here) the time it took to complete the whole sequence I pretty much learned both the shortcut keys and the many different effects to thus make my workflow faster. Now I barely even look at the keyboard for shortcuts.

 

 

So over after all that good stuff with the placement, I came back to finish with the synoptic project and that was also an eye opener but seeing that we had our imagined worlds prior to that in 2017, there were some familiarity to what we had to do such as the pre-production, theory, planning, documentation… all that fine exciting stuff.

Then we came to actually make the game and as per usual there were some both major and minor bumps along the way such as team members changing roles from time to time. Changing ideas, throwing away, making new methods etc.

but we grind ed throughout the majority of our problems and came out with a solid start, middle and ending to our game alongside some special stuff which I kinda wanted to include myself. That basically is stating I made the entirety of the finishing screen and personally I love it but there could be some things to improve upon in terms of animation… and that’s another thing I have to cover. Animation.

 

 

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I love Maya and 3D modeling as much as my peers on the course but I can only do animation on a node based system A.k.a “I can only animate on unity”.

I’ts because I understand the majority of the workflow used for Maya animations, I just can’t seem to get around both paint weights and IK handles (Still don’t know what they are) that being said I want to dedicate some time into both animation and programming before I hopefully set sail to university come September.

I would finally like to write this paragraph as an overall statement to thank the staff of next gen, Three Motion UK ‘Including the dogs’ and my friends who I have spent 3 years with doing this course as without them I wouldn’t be here now doing what I do now. It’s just a question of where I will be in the next 5 years and we will have to find out.

Synoptic Progress.

We are coming to the end game of our projects and its safe to say that there is a more visual ending in sight.

By this I simply mean that its safe to say that there will be something by the end of the project and MVP can be shown by deadline. I have struggled a lot since the beginning trying to prioritize my coursework, placement & other personal projects all ready for the end of year.

Now I’m going to try and push myself to learn programming to thus understand not just how it works but also how to structure code in the future.

Visual the game is coming together a more assets are pushed through, I have also contributed into making other graphics and fixing some, there have been instances where some of the maps were not working, thus I went onto Photoshop and added the characteristics needed such as extra lighting on brighter colors or the need to add more white to an alpha map.

Speaking of which, this also was shown to be really handy when it came to creating emission maps although this time I used after effects to give the glow a more revealing effect then adding a drawn over effect so therefore the player can realize that the effect is active and working as it should be.

This was then taken into account, so I then moved onto using the emission maps in programming, So firstly with the help of one of my tutors. There was two scripts created; one for the door and one for each button so therefore the player can open the door via a key-code.

Speaking of which, the key-code would be shown on a tablet placed on the far back corner of the room which would have to be traversed by the player, read, and then the player would follow the code shown in chronological order.

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Synoptic Project: Something visually new for gameplay.

I have tried to make gameplay easier for a player to follow; To do this I could do many things environmentally.

Light leading, sound, linear design, breadcrumb method (I’ll get to that later) etc.

But instead I wanted to try something new and introduce myself to the world of video effects in unity. So I went about researching how to play videos in unity as maybe a transparent floating icon to help the player understand the mechanics visually.

So I went about creating the icons first and foremost, it came in many different forms but I settled mostly around this design with a few tweaks.

Synoptic: Filling out the tutorial room.

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It’s coming to the end of week 5 and we’re now in full control of our slippery slide from last week. With the burn down chart completed and updated, development can now go into full swing; lets start with Unity and all of its bits and bob’s.

Firstly, we now have a working mechanic that opens the door when the button comes on collision with another object such as a ball (that was actually set specifically). This was used by the animator window which I’m yet to understand as I needed some assistance coming into this entirely new tool.

It works by having an animation made to a specific object then, placing it within the animator depending on when you want said animation to occur or what you want it to be played in connection with or have connections for that matter.

Animator showing open and closed states

I then proceeded to start the code with the help of the tutor as I had no idea how to link the animator and a C# script together. And this was the final outcome…

Pressure activated door.

Synoptic Project: TEMPLE RAID – Week 3

Week 3 is in full swing and furthermore Pre-production is coming to an end thus making the next couple of weeks more hopeful in terms of actual development, also I have been practicing more of the controller mapping for the player and will now be focusing a little on the UI for maybe a pause menu or a simple starting menu.

Additionally, I have expanded the block out world according to the maps that have been provided by Project Lead. Furthermore, I have went of the plans to make sure how it will be visually presented in 3D space.

Blocked game world screenshot

Whats my opinion: An Artist Masterpiece.

I’m here to explain about concept art, a very important process as it is the beginning of any idea. It strongly implies that the idea is visually possible to imagine and create just as characters are visually imagined by J.K Rowling.

My choice of concept art is from Bioware’s art director for dragon age inquisition Matthew Goldman, his work in my opinion shows immediate structure of his art and in addition; How he tells the story in his pieces.

Bioware’s Art Director ‘Matt Goldman’

 

 

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Lighting in video games (Unity)

This is partially linked in with the project that I’m working on in college, and its to do with the lighting.

Now other than, animations, textures, sfx etc. It’s nice to take into consideration lighting because it can drive the mood equivalently to other branches of aesthetics. I have some examples of what I mean and some technical how to’s, so let’s get started.

Lighting in my opinion can be done at the beginning of development during the blocking process to get a feel of how the game will look with lighting and as a positional placeholder in case you may want to edit lighting further or later into development.

Or leave lighting till later in the midst of development therefore you may get a sense of how it may affect textures or the idea of getting other assets out-of-the-way first such as environmental assets, scripting A.k.a ‘making the game work first’.

You choose…

Keeping players comfortable & Wrapping up Pre-Production

Firstly, I would like to start this blog by saying

‘This is not easy to explain, yet again what is…’

Here is some back story, since I’m tech lead A.k.a programming and all the complicated stuff. I’m required to research game flows and how to implement that into the project.

That also means finding a way to make sure that the player feels comfortable playing the game hence keeping all of the main building blocks of gameplay in mind, take Mario for example. When Nintendo make Mario, doesn’t matter how late the player is in joining the franchise they’re always eased into the game with a series of tutorial levels that just seem to be either subtle reminders or testing the waters lets say.