Desolation: The Old World

So I have now for a while been working with concept art and creative development for the game Desolation: The Old World. Since it has been a while since I posted anything here on my blog I’m drop this bomb of my compiled work on the game!

 

This character was supposed to be a sort of merchant that would appear from any odd dark corner and trade with the player. 

Here is a concept art of the enemy faction called “the Gnaarg”This is the fist rendered piece of an environment in the game, just to get a feel for what the game world should entail. It was decided to be a bit too bright. 

3D friendly concepts for the average door in the game. Iteration 3 was decided to fit the game aesthetic most. 

Some concepts for structures and architecture. 

I wanted to try out some more stylized concepts for the game world as well.  

After a long process of traditional sketching I landed upon the design to the far left, I then proceeded to iterate in photoshop until I reached the design on the far right. In the end the visor was made more smooth some of the helmet diods were scrapped. 

For the main character I wanted to give the team a few variations to choose from after the initial concepts were given green light. So I played around a bit with the proportions and silhouette of the character.   

In the end the character landed on a more slender and realistic version that I cleaned up a bit and added some asymmetry to make it more interesting. 

Here is the final piece I did for the game before it was put on ice. My requiem for the game! 

Apart from what I have shown here I have a mountain of sketches done by traditional means that lies dormant in my sketch pads:) All in all it has been really fun to work with the setting of the game and to get the opportunity to really poor my creativity in to creature designs and environment concepts! too bad the game could not go on.

Game Design In Practice

This term I’m doing a course in practical game design! for this course we are going to develop a game, or to be more correct in line with the teachings of the course, a product. This product is then for a passing grade supposed to be released to a guaranteed audience. During development the team needs to use their target audience feedback and needs in order to shape a product that fits their needs and market it according to that demographic.

My individual goals for the course are as follows: 

The three study goals I would set up for myself in order to get where I want to go with the course are; Post a minimum of one blogpost describing my workflow each work day both for the sake of communicating the development and to create a way for myself to trace my own progress. Follow up and take the time to evaluate all feedback that I get from the target audience, in order to capitalize on a working communication. And finally I need to work out a better structure to handle my individual tasks each week. Perhaps take every Sunday night to plan ahead for the week’s activities. That way I can manage the stress of both individual assignments and the work on the project.

To enhance my skill set when it comes to game development I need to learn how to structure the pipeline into many different stages of completion, mainly graphically speaking in my case. Using that structure would provide multiple opportunities for the team to present the concept to an audience. That way the graphical direction of the game can be established and iterated based on concrete input from the end users.

I think that a combination of using structural tools like lean and scrum and evaluating the product through terms of MDA and AARRR will facilitate the goals that I want to achieve during the course. I would like to solidify my understanding of these tools as well.

Perhaps my foremost goal of this course is to be a part of a development that releases a complete game or product to a audience that is not the people going to Gotland Game Conferens and to have that on my resume.

My latest concept art

Halloween Surprise

I am trying out a new theme where trolls meet the modern society. Kind of a modern homage to John Bauer.

Second update of “Big Game Project”

Recap

Since the last post I have still been working a lot with the animations and polish on that area. for example we found out that unreal does not blend very well on it’s own between walk, attacks and idle, so the end of the attack sequences were a bit abrupt, I had falsely assumed that unreal would interpolate nicely between poses. So to get the transition just right I went back to motionbuilder and added transitional key frames to the animations that needed it.

Risks

It has become apparent that animation is potentially the largest time-sink of this project so far, this because of the number of steps that the process involves from start to finish and the fact that issues that requires extra time keep revealing themselves. It is however a process that I enjoy working with, so I have the motivation to push the limit when it comes to both work hours and unexplored areas of the softwares we are using. In light of this re-evaluation of the animations we decided that we are going to pause the production of new characters and instead polish the four that we have created so far, and free up more time for creating environment assets for the levels.

I am fairly optimistic about us completing this game in time for GGC now, due to the fact that we could make the decision to go into polish on the characters at this relatively early stage of production. At the start we were very eager to just push forward and produce as much as possible without over thinking it, and I think that was the right approach to have in the beginning. Because now when we are taking a few steps back to look at what we have done so far we have a lot to go on content-wise, and we can base the direction of the production on something concrete, such as a certain dynamic that is reached when the pine cone character fights the troll and uses a special move etc. As opposed to creating these scenarios in theory from just looking at the design document.

Textures

We have decided to include textures on the characters to avoid the risk of making a game that feels too plain and visually under-stimulating. To begin with we will include simple emmissive and diffuse maps with a level of detail that is easy for the eye to read from the players point of view, in our case that means breaking up the characters into at least two different color variations and to add some sort of individual trait for each type of character. The troll is for example covered in warts and blemishes and the pine cone has an inner glow that shines from its eyes and cracks of the body. We will then need to place the characters in the level to see if we need to add more textures to the environment assets as well. The most important consideration on my part is that we are careful not to go too far towards a realistic style with the textures, so to stay within the bounds of a stylized fantasy expression we will avoid using normal maps and photo textures all together.

The logotype

I have also started working on the first drafts of a logotype for the game, I made it by using the lasso tool in photoshop and blocking out simple letters. I wanted to give a primal feel to the letters, like they had been carved into stone and infused with some sort of magic runes. After receiving some feedback on the design, it seems that people interpret it more like something mechanical and that it fails to convey the setting of the game. So it is going back to the drawing board for improvement. This time I will go more for a fairy tale influence, I will look a lot at covers for old childrens books.

Big Game project! So far so good.

The three characters I have created so far in action poses.

Introduction

During the later half of this semester we are taking the course of “big game project” in which we, the students get to create a game on a larger scale than the previous projects. Only this time with more experience and less production time… I work in a group of four people, two programmers and two artists. The game we are making is called “Glade” and it is a dungeon crawler that takes place in a nordic folklore inspired setting. The main feature of the game is that  the player will be able to play as all characters in this world, “If you can best it you can play it” is our catchphrase for the gameplay. So you would start out playing one character and then unlocking new ones by defeating different bosses or leaders of the different types of creatures.

The temp-level and the base mesh character.

The Team

The first week was focused a lot towards getting everyone on the team up to speed on the game concept, André Åström and I were on the same team while he was constructing the concept in the first place. I had already started working out some of the graphical aspects by creating a basic temp-level and a base mesh character just to get a better perspective on the artistic scope of the project. Based on the time it took to create those assets I drew the conclusion that we could complete this project with just one artist. However I also realized that having two artists would be crucial if there should be any time over for polishing the assets produced. The weekend before easter the course administrators held a whole day of presentations for the different concepts that the class had produced. This was held so that the concepts could receive feedback on the design, and also to recruit team members to join up and make the games. André and I had already teamed up, but we still needed one more of both programmers and artists, and so few days after the pitch we were able to recruit artist Max Nordlund and programmer Georgios Chatzoglakis. Once they were on board with the concept and the task we had ahead of us we could start producing assets for the game.

Production

The character collage at the beginning of the post just about sums up my work on the project the last two weeks. All three characters are almost complete with all their animations. In the beginning there was a lot of iterations I had to do in order to get it right, just figuring out how to structure a suitable pipeline for producing 3D characters with rigging and skinning and then directly have them implemented in blueprinted animation trees where a number of flaws were visible right away. For example I had assumed that Unreal would have a neat way of tweaning between a fully extended attack pose back to an idle pose, however I then realized that the interpolation between those points does not make a very appealing transition. This was something that was discovered in the first imported animation however, so the time loss could be minimized by dealing with the issue in the animations I made after that discovery.

I estimated that the task that would prove to be most time consuming for the artists would be animating the many characters we need for the game core features to be appealing, This estimation was based on both the previous courses work with animations and feedback received from the experienced staff of the university. To deal with this potential time-sink we structured the character development into a set of feasible milestones for the scope of the project. We determined that what we would need for the games core features to work, those consisting of different playable characters and an appealing combat system, we would need a minimum of four characters with their own unique animations for the presentation of the game during the Gotland Game Conference.

Based on this goal we decided that we would start by creating the four characters with the basic animation set of Idle, Walk, Basic attack, Get hit and death. Along with one character which would have a higher priority on being complete with all additional attacks for the programmers to work with in the engine. Once those milestones were reached we would go on to complete the remaining animations for the last three characters. At this point of the production we are almost at the step of completing all four characters and implementing them in-engine.

Passing of knowledge

Title. “Passing of knowledge”

With this work I wanted to further explore the nordic myth and that take on the fantasy genre. I think that a lot of the fantasy that is portrayed in modern games and movies have turned towards a generic expression that has taken away a lot of the soul and sense of mystery that has always been the most intriguing part of the genre as far as I’m concerned. So with my exploration of the Nordic myth I hope to find some sort of core essence of genuine mystery that tells a story that is closer to my heart.

Greedy Buggers – My latest work of concept art

Recap!

So it’s been a while since my last post! school has been insane lately with rounding up the last big assignments for the previous two courses. this semester I studies motion capture for games and second level 3D modelling. Both courses have been extremely time consuming and also intersected with the holiday leave, which proved a wee bit hectic in the end. So to sum up some of my progression in 3D during this course I will show some screenshots of my final assignment presented in Unreal engine 4.

This is my sci-fi generator, presumably for when humans have colonized mars:) this model was made in a two step procedure, by first creating a high poly model with around 2 million polygons and then projecting that topology onto a ca: 5000 poly model and baking out textures from that. baking textures has been a painful and interesting experience and in the end I feel that I have learned a great deal more about working with both 3ds max and unreal engine. I’m really looking forward to having the time to make new models and creating new scenes for my portfolio using the skills provided by this course!

In motion capture I have been working the last couple of days on cleaning up motion data from our final assignment in a software called “Cortex”. Most software used in motion capture seems to be in dire need of improvement! there is such a massive amount of time that is being sunk into manually going through every single frame of a shoot because the software’s algorithms can’t handle a few occluded markers. If I get to work with motion capture in the future I will make sure to not even go forward to the cleaning stage of the production before I’ve made sure that the takes I have are as occlusion-free as possible! this could possibly be avoided through better planning of the takes, perhaps avoiding scenes where the actors are huddled behind covers and being dragged across the floor:) I think that next time I should also inform the actors about the range of motions that are ok to perform without occluding the markers and just give them the basics of motion capture logic to keep in mind. However seeing the quality of lifelike motions that motion capture can provide for animating human characters, I think it makes all the hassle worth while for most game productions. Realistic movement is all in the details, small gestures, twitches and pauses and that is very hard to synthesize for an average animator. Those small details could be the tipping point for making a good game great.

All in all it’s been a very educational third semester! I feel that I’m beginning to really understand the actual process of making more advanced games in a technical sense. I’m looking forward to the next 3D course that starts on tuesday where we’re going to create more advanced characters and get to work with animation! yum:)

sorry for the long post… here’s a potato

The Ent Chef

We were having a drawing/programming night last night, we were given key words to paint from. I got the words “organic”, “cook” and “forest”, so this is what you get! I had a lot of with it, worked a lot with different ways to create textures and experimented with different blending modes.

Visual update on how my baptismal font finally turned out

So this is how I made the new version of the baptismal font. I decided to go all out on the skyrim theme and modified reality, so I painted my own relief on the font using the same style as those on the original font from the museum. I also decided to change the material from the light chalk stone to a darker shade stone, Because I felt that I could make the diffuse map more interesting that way in terms of color shifts.  I wanted the font to look old and well used but not ruined. I have corrected my mistakes from the last model according to the feedback as far as I can see, so hopefully this will land me a passing grade. thank’s for reading!