Caryn's Blog

nothing new

2010-03-05T00:46:00.003Z

wow. been a while.

nothing new to report.
still unemployed. still on the dole.

really need a new TV. My 14" dvd-combo is no longer cutting it.
Mass Effect 2 is hard enough to play with such a tiny screen. Not to mention their stupidly small subtitles ¬_¬
I can forget about even looking at the Last Remnant. The screen was cluttered on a 32" HD TV! no sodding chance on my little thing.

and i need a PS3. there is now actually more than one game I want for it.

bugger.

3 days...

2009-10-12T23:15:00.002+01:00

until the build has to be sent to our lecturer for GameCity.

I've rigged and animated both the neutral and heavy characters so far.
Their animations will need refining, but they've got animations.

I've just rigged the floaty character. I still need to weight-paint him (and obviously animate him), but as far as I can remember, he really only has 2 animations needed; a 'walk' and a 'run' (as much as a floaty character *can* walk and run). :)

I'll do some proper renders of the animations once I have a texture to put on him. The default grey of Maya really doesn't do them justice.

and he's finished.

2009-09-29T20:43:00.003+01:00

Well the neutral rig is finished. hopefully.
put it this way, i'll be able to animate him lol

there are quite a few screenshots of the rig, so i'll only post a couple here.

The rest can be found on my photobucket here

neutral rig

neutral rig and controls

neutral rig, controls and see-through mesh

neutral rig, controls and solid mesh

well that's surprising O_O

2009-09-27T01:18:00.003+01:00

The first rig I attempted for the re-designed neutral character actually deforms pretty damn nicely even without changing the weight painting.
The ears and arms have issues, but the torso, and legs are pretty good.

Here are some screenshots of the rig test

And here are some images of the character posed. Looks pretty good. Though his face reminds me of something and I can't for the life of me remember what. Some anime or film I watch... kinda reminds me of Noface from Spirited Away a little...

This was just practice until the final model is done and I've received it. Should be sometime Sunday morning. Then.... weight painting X_X

Prepping for GameCity Squared

2009-09-25T23:38:00.004+01:00

At the end of October, the annual GameCity event in Nottingham is due to take place.
As our (now ex) lecturer is an organiser, we've been granted a place to show off our graduate work from our last year at uni.

Now, Rob has been working on Void and from the screenshots he's shown me, it's looking alot different. He's also managed to get a fully orbital camera that doesn't change the direction the character is facing. This of course meant that the small amounts of deformation on the fronts of the characters would have to be fixed.
he also asked if i could redo some of the walk and jump animations.
the very thought of trying to make those characters jump again sent a shiver down my spine; they have no knees, and knees are kinda important for jumping >_<

Rob then brought up something that I had privately been hoping he would (and wouldn't) suggest. He's never been happy with the character designs. And he suggested that he would model the re-designs he had done *if* I was willing to rig, weight paint, and animate all 3 characters from scratch. That's walks/runs/jumps/falls the lot.
Now I'm quite willing to attempt the challenge. The only problem is, we need to give our (ex) lecturer the file by 15th October. That's 3 weeks.
I've rigged, but not seriously weight painted before. And i don't even know where to begin regarding the controls that Cat set up.

I'm hoping that this weekend I can get rigging/weight painting sorted in my mind ready for when the characters are sent to me. I'll bloody well animate bone by bone if i have to but it WILL be done!

he's finally finished

2009-09-11T23:44:00.003+01:00

After procrastinating badly on staring him, my adorable Sackboy is now finished.
He was only my second attempt at knitting (my first being a hat) so i'm really proud of him.

Here he is in parts:

and here he is all finished:

isn't he a sweety ^_^
it's a shame about the gold zip, but it was the only brown 4" trouser zip i could find. And it took me weeks to find buttons for the eyes. most plain black ones don't have shanks, and the one's with shanks had patterns on or were too big/small.

He took me 2 days to knit and one to attach him together. Not bad for a knitting newbie.

Develop in Brighton

2009-07-17T16:18:00.003+01:00

Hey all. Just got back from the Develop Conference in Brighton.
Even though I have NO money after graduating, I felt it was something that I had to go to.

It was an interesting 2 days. As I could only afford the student ticket, those were the only days we were permitted to attend.
There were quite a few interesting talks that I attended, some because of the Q&A session afterwards rather than the talk itself.
I don't have the programme with me at the moment, so I can't list all the people I went to see, but I can tell you some of the more memorable ones.

One of the first talks I attended was by Jenova Chen on Flow and Flower. It was interesting hearing him talk about how when his team made Flow, they failed by 400%. Flower also took 2 years to develop, 1 year of which was spent on deciding on what the game would be. Jenova explained that when he makes a game, he starts with a feeling he wants to express, and then sees where it will go.

There was also a relaxed session where Jenova Chen and Masaya Matsuura played each other's games. Jenova played Parappa the Rappa and Matsuura-san played Flower. Each had the opportunity to ask the other any questions they may have and it was very informative hearing the two of them discuss the different ways their studios work and how the teams had been in similar situations when both games were made.

There was a talk by Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights on Games as the 8th Artform. Which while the talk itself wasn't particularly impressive, the questions it inspired afterwards and the way he dealt with them was infinitely more interesting.

Ernest Adams spoke about challenges in games, and how as a player that 'sucks', he feels that games should have an easy option that is actually easy and doesn't guilt the player for choosing it. The main aim of his talk was to question whether games actually *need* challenges. One of his examples was of Far Cry. He looked at the luscious world and wanted to just explore it, but was prevented from doing so by the enemies trying to kill him. He then asked why there isn't a game that is effectively like an old style nature camp where you can go rock climbing, diving, surfing, caving, abseiling, bike riding etc; just somewhere where you can go explore and see what the world has to offer you.

I'll upload some pictures when i've fished out my camera and the programme so I can tell you exactly who I saw and what their talk was on :)

As for Brighton itself, it appears to be the chinese buffet restaurant capital <3
There was also a lovely japanese restaurant where i had some chicken katsu udon, which was delicious. We had chinese meals for lunch on both wednesday and thursday (the thursday meal being the Women in Games social meal) but as we'd had a lot of asian food we wanted something different for the last night. We found a north african restaurant so we decided to treat ourselves. All 4 of us had pigeon pie for starters, which was absolutely delicious! For the main I had roast chicken with mushrooms and a lovely gravy.

After being surrounded with the option of having sushi for the past 3 days (both paddington and victoria stations have a yo!sushi), i've arrived home and have now realised that it will be a long time before i'm anywhere near another sushi restaurant :(

It's All Over

2009-06-06T14:07:00.004+01:00

Well we've got our grades now. I've graduated with a 2:1, which is pretty respectable.
The majority of our class did really well :)
It still hasn't sunk in that it's over. When Void is finally finished, maybe then I'll realise that it's an end to one era and the beginning of another. Or maybe I'll be left in a daze for a couple of weeks.

On to CV writing and portfolio expanding.
Ironically enough, I have no motivation to work on portfolio stuff. I think "I should plan out another animation", but I just sit there and nothing comes to me. Maybe I need to take a break, at least until Void is over. Then I might have the motivation to work on something else. At least I hope so...

VOID Lighting Tests

2009-05-11T03:14:00.003+01:00

Here are some light tests I did for the first level Anemone Sea.
The level itself is not the final build, and many assets are arranged solely to see how light will behave on them at various angles, most notably the orange pads.

These screenshots are taken from Unreal's InEditor Game. The Editor's game mode doesn't access the scripting files that allow our character to be used, so that is why it's first-person.

These screenshots are taken from the game itself, hence why our character is now there.

This is a lighting/material problem we found as a result of the light testing. It has since been rectified.

These are screenshots of the Emerald Cavern. The lighting wasn't my job for this level, so these are only examples of fog testing.

update to an old post

2009-05-03T16:57:00.004+01:00

well, I've finaly gotten off my ass and figured out how to get the old flash files working in blogger.

I've updated the flash post and embedded one of the flash files so now you can play it without having to download.

old post is here :)

heavy state animations

2009-04-30T22:58:00.005+01:00

here are the the animations for the heavy state.

some notes:

The heavy state doesn't have a jump function, but because it bounces off of the starfish bounce-pads, it needs a land animation. The brief wiggle before the land is used by the unreal engine for the 'air-time' between jumping and landing. that's why it doesn't flow smoothly like it should.

As with the neutral state, there is no option to change the backwards speed compared to the forwards speed in Unreal Engine; both must be the same. Hence why are character is running backwards (a feat that is awkward for any biped).

Void Characters

2009-04-29T23:46:00.004+01:00

here are some 360 views of the textured characters nabbed from Rob to tide you over until I have the other animations rendered out.

neutral character

heavy character

Void, Heavy Character from rob on Vimeo

floaty character

Void: Floating Character from rob on Vimeo

Off Topic
I'm going to see D'espairsRay in London on the 18th July!! I'm so happy ^_^
I'm also going to see Bill Bailey for my brother's birthday in August, so double the happy! XD

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

2009-04-26T16:31:00.004+01:00

There's an update on our game blog regarding the character changes.

Cat has created a video showing our characters in the Emerald Cavern level with character switching and our own custom animations. Many thanks to Rachel again for sending us new code that worked :)

I'll post the video here, but do go and check our website too :)

I have also been given the starfish mesh, but I can't start working on it until I have the stacks they'll be lying against. There's well over 10 unique idles needed for some starfish and 1 set of animations that can be assigned to all starfish on tall pillars. So lots to do, but I've played with the starfish and it's loads of fun to work with :)

I've been rendering off the heavy/floaty animations so expect videos of them sometime soon :)

Fun in the Sun

2009-04-21T20:21:00.004+01:00

It's been a while.
Had a wonderful Easter in uncharacteristically sunny weather.
Washed the car, weeded the garden, potted plants, went to a motorbike show, generally had a lovely time back home.

Void news:

We've got our custom character and animations to be controllable. When I say we, I mean our lovely programmer lady Rachel in USA sent us some code and Cat in our group managed to get it to work. Cat has been whiteboxing the Emerald Cavern and Shimmering Towers levels, making sure all the triggers work/jump pad trajectories are right etc

Rob has been working his butt off modelling assets for the 3 levels including the wall dressings that will shape our world. He's also been texturing the whole lot as well. While also modelling/texturing the characters. He's been a busy boy :)

Andy has been wrestling with Unreal and custom collision meshes. Unreal is so picky about how it wants them to work and even then it has a tendency to just do what the hell it likes with them regardless of what you want. He's primarily been concentrating on the Anemone Sea level.

I've animated both the heavy character and the floaty character, but have not had time to render them out, so there is no animation yet to post up. That I'll try to get done this week.
They each have a walk forward, walk backward and idle animation. The neutral character has a jump control which the others don't, and the heavy character has a belly bump movement. The floating character has a movement for when it's shot up a level by the air vents in the pillars.
We've been having headaches about the strafing movement in Unreal and trying to lock it off so our characters don't do it. It's also awkward when you need to turn because the engine automatically tilts the character model and it makes it look like he's skating on ice.
We also can't seem to get shadows to appear in the levels so it looks even more like our character is floating above the ground.

I'll post up the animations when they're rendered.

He ain't heavy, he's my brother

2009-04-06T22:25:00.003+01:00

Well, I now have the rigged Heavy character.
It's alot more fiddly to animate. I think it might be to do with the mesh and the sacrifices Catherine had to make when weight-painting it.
There's no face controller on this character because for some reason it wouldn't work. And we couldn't get any up/down translation working on the stomach, so there's only a rotation control. Which kinda makes his stomach behave like Rufus' from Street Fighter 4.
Not that it really matters. You're only going to be able to see the character from the back anyway. We just don't have the time to create a custom camera to let us rotate around the character :(

The heavy character doesn't have a jump function. Instead he has a belly bump to knock over pillars. Imagine Po from Kung Fu Panda.
He has a walk/waddle and a slightly faster waddle. no run.
There will be the idle pose as well. and the turn animations. and walking backwards.

The Floaty character is being rigged at the moment. That one doesn't have a walk cycle per se. it more kind of... floats/bobs along. not sure how some of the animations are going to work for that one. It'll depend on what animations we'll need.

I'll post up some videos of the Heavy animations once some of them are done.

Progress

2009-04-03T05:03:00.002+01:00

Well, since my last post, our project has come on in leaps and bounds.
We have a wonderful programmer in America that is helping us to get custom characters into engine and to change the Unreal Engine defaults.
She's written some custom code for us and has pretty much single-handedly saved our project from a possible redesign. Thank you Rachel :)

We have now implemented faster running, higher jumps, slower walking, locking off the jump completely, and altering gravity. All these are done via mutators, because directly altering the .ini file is against the EULA. Catherine has also figured out how to get our character rig into the engine using the Maya ActorX plug-in. Most tutorials we saw and people on forums that we asked said that only the 3DSMax version of ActorX could do it. We owe so much to Catherine and her endless trawling of forums and PMing modders for help <3
We're now able to play our levels in the actual game, not just the editor. Catherine and Andy have been tirelessly building white-boxed levels.
Our next task on the agenda is to get our character selectable in the actual game so we can use him.

The final animations also aren't as final as first thought.
I couldn't help but tweak them here and there and now they look much better. So once I've rendered them out, I'll replace the ones on Youtube with the final "honestly I swear" versions.
I've also added some animations, namely walking backwards, and two others to stop the character looking like a pirouetting fairy (like the default Unreal guy) when turning the camera.

Until the character is completely controllable in engine, we won't know exactly how many animations we're going to need.
Catherine has almost finished weight-painting the Heavy character, so over the Easter holidays I'll be creating a set of animations for him.

The deadline is the 5th May. Where has the time flown?.....

Final Neutral Animations

2009-03-29T08:47:00.008+01:00

And here are the final neutral animations.
well, unless they need to be changed at a later date of course.

animations in engine

2009-03-15T03:22:00.001Z

here's videos of the animations in engine.

now if only we could make it controllable...

neutral character animations

2009-03-11T17:33:00.005Z

Here are a few of the test animations for the neutral character.
There is a walk, a run and an idle at the moment. Still need to do a jump/land.
They're only the first draft, they will be tweaked later, but i want to get a basic animation down for each action first.
I'm using a placement texture as the final texture isn't finished yet.
The idle pose has a problem with the ears. for some reason, they are no longer obeying the rig that Catherine set up and are not following the face control like they should. Hence why they stay pointing in the same direction when the head turns.
We're going to have to see if we can fix it.

and this is a mock up test of how the character's idle might look as if viewed in game using some of the pre-production artwork.

once i have more time, i'll video what it looks like in engine with camstudio and post it up, but i need to get my dissertation finished first.

OMG hentai!!1!

2009-02-28T02:09:00.007Z

.... not really.
i've been animating different variations of anemeone tentacle movements.
there's 5 at the moment. but i need to do some that appear to be affected by the moving platforms. and for that i need the platform mesh. which i don't have.
The first anemone test has been changed but i haven't exported the avi yet so i'll update that as and when I can.

i've uploaded quick previews of the animations to youtube.
They all work in Unreal engine with no problems. I wish I could say the same for our character though. we tried importing the rigged character with some animation controls on it and it went haywire. the mesh was stretching and twisting around itself and it kept turning 180 degrees. t'was very weird. the plain rigged model worked. but to animate without the controls will take 3 times longer than planned. hopefully we can help catherine with trying to figure out what's causing it.

Offtopic

i think i'm in love with Die from Dir en Grey <3
he makes my insides all squiffy XD
not to mention he's a damn fine guitar player ^_^

update - marks and stuff

2009-02-04T21:07:00.002Z

nothing really interesting has happened since the last post.

we've spent the last 2 weeks without scheduled lectures to allow our tutors to mark the work that was handed in before/after christmas.
we've been mainly looking at finishing our dissertations; or at least trying to finish them...

we got our results back for our pre-production work for the Void project.
we got a A14 as a group, which is brilliant. we're all pretty happy with it and looking forward to actually making the game.

the deadline for our dissertations is the 20th March and the deadline for Void is the 5th of May, so we don't have all that much time left.
i can't believe how quickly this year has gone so far. i'm truly dreading the end of this course and having to go out and find a job, hopefully in the games industry.

i suppose there's not much point dwelling on it too much. we've got a little time yet.

Void intro sequence animatic

2009-01-12T05:22:00.002Z

here's the finished intro animatic.
i've been reminded of how much i'm no good at 2D animation >_<
I'm pretty pleased with it though. Especially the start where the camera rotates around the spore pod. it took 3/4 of the total time to work out how to draw that bit; i'm useless with perspective and foreshortening from memory.

anyway, here it is :)

storyboards and animatics

2009-01-11T03:36:00.002Z

the inked storyboards are done and can be found here

animatics are also done.

youtube videos are here
.mov files are on humyo here

all that is left is the intro storyboard, which i'll do today.
and printing. which will also be done today, when I have everyone's psd files :)

Update and David Bowie's magic pouch.

2009-01-08T19:43:00.004Z

basically an brief update to say that the pencil storyboards for the rooms are done and i'm now inking them for scanning into after effects.

they can be found here

i've also uploaded some of the work done by rob, catherine and andy to my photobucket.

levels are here

characters are here

in other news, courtesy of my friend Suzy, i spent yesterday imagining David Bowie/Jareth's magic pouch. So much so, i actually had to watch Labyrinth to get it out of my system. God Jennifer Connelly was young O_O

work work work (and squee)

2009-01-06T13:22:00.002Z

Had a meeting yesterday to go over what was left to do for the deadline.
My laptop crashed while i was working on some of the animatics over christmas and it corrupted the files, so i'm having to start them again.

In short, my jobs this week are storyboarding the opening intro movie, writing the sound list and making animatics for the 3 different rooms.
At the last count, that's 8/9 animatics I need to have done for Monday 12th January.
I think it's do-able. Well... it's do-able if everything goes right first time. I'm hoping I don't get stumped for any of it. I'm more worried about the intro sequence.
I know what's happening, i'm just not sure about the cinematics of it; what camera shots/angles the group is looking for etc

in other news:
Dir en Grey are supporting Mindless Self Indulgence on the Kerrang Relentless tour and they're playing at Cardiff Student Union on the 17th January. It's a perfect birthday present for me :)

and yet another year comes around

2009-01-02T00:03:00.003Z

merry christmas, happy new year and all the rest of that bollocks.

no news is good news.
we've got a private forum for our void project now so we can all see what everyone else is doing and talk about it etc etc.

hearing in the news that big names like Sony and EA are cutting jobs and closing studios is not filling me with joy and optimism for when we leave.

bring on 2009.
what's the worse that could happen?

a small update

2008-12-15T01:58:00.005Z

nothing much has been happening recently on the group project front. at least nothing to write about. we've been concentrating on our dissertation drafts for the past couple of weeks.
now that the drafts have been handed in, we can concentrate fully on Void again.

to start off, here's an image i did based on what one of the corridors might be like. the colour scheme is almost certainly not correct (the final look is still being refined) but i'm quite happy with it anyway. I've never really been much of a painter, neither traditionally nor digitally, but i think it gets a mood across, which is what counts.
this is the corridor leading to the float-themed room. the green pod-plant in the bottom left is a checkpoint and there should be one in each corridor between rooms, unless we deem it more appropriate to have less.

here's the list of jobs for over christmas

Design Document with synopsis: - Rob and cat
Concept Document: - Rob and Cat
Character Boards: - Rob
Environment Concept Boards: - Rob and Andy (Rob's are finished)
Gameplay animatics: - Caryn
2D Animation tests: - Caryn
Gameplay design/ exploded diagrams: - Andy and Cat
Technical specifications document (incl what we would need for exhibition): - ?
Typography: - All
Summary hand out/ presentation hand out: - Rob and Cat
Mock up game screen: - Andy (background) and Rob (character)
Opening screens/ HUD's: - All
Sound design treatment: - Caryn
- Character
- Mechanical/ Changeable
- Level
- Dress
Production Journal: - All (need to sort out what happened when between us)
Asset List: - Various
- Character - Rob
- Mechanical/ changeable - Andy
- Level - Andy
- Dress - Cat

in other news, my sleeping pattern has not improved.

to do plan

2008-11-22T16:50:00.002Z

This is the plan we've made for things we need to finish.

Post 6 Week Review Plan.

Elements already completed:
• 2 out of 3 character states designed.
• Mood boards for running room, heavy room, floating room.
• Gameplay animatics for heavy room and floating room.
• Individual assets: Heavy room platforms
Checkpoint final design
Floating room pillars
Running room platforms
Starting ejection pod
Walls
Running room anemone
Flooring for general spaces
Progression sheet for heavy room (needs bounce pad change).
• Logo
• Storyboard
Elements still needing to be designed: (All done by Dec 19th)
• Character colours, textures and floating state – Rob
• Character orthographics - Rob
• Ejection room mood board - Andy
• Connecting checkpoint areas mood-board - Rob
• Running room animatic - Caryn
• Floating room + Running room progression boards – Andy (+ team on running room)
• Accumulated room progression board - Catherine
• Bounce pad re-design – Andy (Fat starfish)
• Final state change asset designs - Andy
• Secondary assets to fill a space - Catherine
• Project font choice - Caryn
• Particle effects design – Caryn
• Final design doc – Rob
• Finalised PowerPoint presentation - Team

Presentation design:

• Layout template

A little rearranging

2008-11-20T00:59:00.005Z

I've decided, with some advice from my lecturer, that I need to separate my portfolio/finished work away from this very open and chatty style blog.
So, i'll be using this place to post like I have been, but I have also set up another blog to be used for purely professional work.

I'm currently in the process of customising the new blog. As yet there are no posts, it's a default theme, and it's 1am so I won't be fixing that today.
Bear with me while I set it up.

it can be found here at wordpress.com

Tomorrow i'll post up the list we made today of what still needs to be done for our Void project.

And now, to celebrate the newly established unofficiality of this blog I present to you my first "i am official blogger" post:

1 - I have had 7 hours sleep in the past 48 hours. It's getting ridiculous and I think I may have to resort to sleeping tablets.

2 - We've been going through the Jeeves and Wooster boxset recently and i've forgotten how young Steven Fry was. But Hugh Laurie hasn't changed a bit XD

3 - The NXE... I like the avatars; I knew they'd be "similar" to the Miis but I had no idea how much of the 'create-a-avatar' MS was actually going to half-inch from Nintendo. I find the navigation of the new menu system busy and fiddly. Especially seeing who of your friends are online. I like that they've kept a mini version of the blades when you press the XBox button; it makes some of the navigation easier.

4 - For the past couple of months I have been utterly obsessed with D'espairsRay. I can't get enough of them. Especially the Coll:Set EP and their Mirror album.
I can listen to Angeldust on repeat for hours; I just love Hizumi's voice <3. It helps that he's pretty too lol
My one true wish is to see D'espairsRay live. After Dir en Grey and Miyavi made it over here recently, and D'espairsRay playing on the Taste of Chaos tour this year, i'm hoping they'll pop over here sometime.

and to finish off, here's a video of d'espairsray performing Angeldust live.

blah.

Nothing to report

2008-11-19T01:02:00.002Z

Since we had our mid-semester crit on our project, our lecturer has suggested we use the next couple of weeks to work on our dissertations. There's no point in having an amazing final project if our dissertation lets us down. As such, there has been little of note to update. I've managed to write about 1800 words so far of the 1st chapter. Once that's done I'll have the first and last chapters written, with only the second chapter and intro/conclusion to write. And if I can make a good plan and stick to it, I think I shall be finished well in time for the March deadline.

Today we had another tech lesson on Unreal 3 Editor. This week was concentrating on lighting, fog and sky domes. I quite like working with Unreal, though the navigation of the workspace is appalling. I'm looking forward to trying to get our world created in engine.

more research and another animatic

2008-11-10T21:52:00.009Z

So i've added more images to my research folder on photobucket.
this update includes images of emeralds for the heavy space platforms, abalone (inside of shells/mother of pearl) for the walls of the structure, and images scanned from a book called 'Heaven and Earth'.

Some of the abalone images are really pretty, especially the abalone pearls. They are so completely like the checkpoints we've designed that it's kind of creepy. But they're going to make brilliant reference material for colour choices for the checkpoint.

The 'Heaven and Earth' book contains pictures of various parts of natural things that we'd never see with the naked eye.
There are some interesting pictures there, especially as reference for shapes and textures. Some things look so beautiful, then you read what it actually is and it seems sort of weird.

the link is here
Just click on the albums on the left to see the different research areas.

Here is the next animatic, the floaty space.

And here is a photo of the speedy and heavy character states. The floaty state is still being finalised.

we're in week 7 now.
week 1: talking with group about ideas from over the summer.
week 2: was ill with stomach cramps and fever. no work done.
week 3: scanning and finding research images of coral. Researching into walkcycles.
week 4: researching into walkcycles. completed test walkcycle using gnomon tutorial model
week 5: completed test 90 degree turn with gnomon tutorial model. drew some basic storyboards to assist in creating the gameplay animatics.
week 6: completed the heavy animatic.
week 7: completed the floaty animatic. researched emeralds and abalone for environment textures and colours.

'heavy' room animatic

2008-11-07T15:03:00.001Z

here's a rough animatic for the 'heavy' space.

test walkcycle

2008-11-05T20:30:00.003Z

here's the test walkcycle that i've finally managed to render off and edit together.
it's not a character from the game (obviously), it's purely a practice attempt at a walkcycle (as i've not seriously tried one before).

i think it went rather well.

there's a turning animation that i did as well. it's not really a part of the game, it was a project from a tutorial class with our animation tech.
i'll upload that when i have time to render and edit it.

Our mid point presentation is next tuesday. hopefully, we'll be at a stage that our lecturer will be happy with.
I've also spoken with our dissertation lecturer Barry and he's suggested i get another of my chapters written in about 10 days and send it to him to read.
on top of the void project, i really don't want to write my dissertation :(

Back from Game City

2008-11-03T14:28:00.002Z

Well Game City was an interesting weekend.
We saw many interesting talks from a number of speakers.
And we broke the zombie world record. yay.
1200+ zombies dancing simultaneously to thriller is an awe-inspiring sight.

I'm without a wheel mouse currently so working in Maya is not going to happen at the moment. I had hoped to be in a room at university with a mouse i could borrow, but the CGD base room was being used by 3rd year animators and our other room was in use by 1st year animators.
It's unbelievably hard to find a quiet room to work in where we can discuss ideas, argue and give input to each other's work.

we have the internet at home now, so i should be able to upload videos of some animations soon.

Update on Void

2008-10-29T11:24:00.003Z

We're really getting a solid, coherent idea of what the game will look like.
I'm not an artist in the sense that my drawing skills are of the quality and skill needed to design most of the artwork.
My skill lies in being able to bounce ideas around, and give input into the design, even if i don't have the art to show it.
It's going to be interesting trying to show the research i've done into animation and the animations themselves on paper.
I'm worried that it's going to have a detrimental effect on my paperwork.

I may just have to screenshot each key marker in the animations...

not important enough to name

2008-10-27T03:10:00.002Z

well, i tried animating some walkcycles last week.
i'm marginally happy with the standard basic walk. but that's not what our character's about.
i tried a heavy walkcycle and it was disastrous.
maybe i just wasn't in the right mindset for it. who knows?

i've gone home this week to drop the car off and pick up my old laptop.
even though the place i sent it off too didn't fix it and said i needed to factory restore it *sigh*
gonna give that a try before i head back to newport when i get up.

oh. and i'm gonna have to ring virgin media again. been 2 weeks without internet.
unless something miraculous happened over the weekend while i was gone.
god i hate ringing call centres. if they tell me it's my internet setting on my laptop one more time i'll break down and cry. surely it's not possible that 1 laptop, 3 PCs and 10 consoles of varying kinds *all* have they're settings wrong? no. didn't think so.

the only good thing to happen so far this year is the game city trip. but the way things are going. i *know* that's gonna get shat on by whoever hates me up there ¬_¬

hello again.

2008-10-22T17:52:00.002+01:00

right.
i'm going to upload some of the research work we've been doing.

Here is a link to some of the coral/aquatic pictures i've found as a reference for colours and shapes.

I've also looked up some animation walkcycle tutorials to aid me in getting it right.
It's quite hard to find videos of precisely the thing you're looking for. For example, I can think of specific character's that walk in a certain way, but it's really hard to find a decent animation of them that I can study.

When I've animated and rendered some walkcycles that I'm happy with, (and when I have an internet connection) i'll upload some videos of them.

i don't know what to do...

2008-10-22T12:43:00.002+01:00

well that's made everything more complicated.
one person in our house can connect to the internet with his laptop via ethernet cable.
but his PC won't connect via the same cable. neither will my laptop. neither will the XBox360. and nothing will connect wirelessly.

what the hell is going on?
it can't be virgin, otherwise he wouldn't get any internet connection.
and it's highly unlikely that while turned off my laptop managed to change it's settings. and how likely is it that 1 laptop, 2 PCs and 3 gaming consoles all managed to change their settings and screw up?

I don't know who to call or ask...

On topic, i'm at university at the moment making the most of the internet.
I'm researching all the stuff I needed to do over the past 2 weeks and working on walkcycle tests. First i'm going to do the online research. it's more important from a project point of view because it's needed for the deadline. and without the internet at home (and no light at the end of the tunnel in that regard) i'd better get it done now.

i'll update whenever i can find an internet connection...

personal projects and internet failure (again)

2008-10-21T17:00:00.005+01:00

we haven't had internet since last tuesday.
Virgin have been decidedly unhelpful, so we're going to ring them again tomorrow.

so a quick update while i'm at university.

first point. i've been reminded that the deadlines for oue dissertation draft and pre-production on our personal projects are the same day. I'm not happy.

the main news though is that so far, every production meeting we've had with Dave has changed our group's design for our project.
We have 2 weeks until the 6-week-crit and with all the changes, we don't have anything really solid. i say we don't have anything, that's not completely true. we know the overall aesthetic, and what gameplay we want, but things like the character and level/environment designs have been changed 3 times so far.
we had a tutorial/tech class on character walkcycles which has meant that i've now got a rig to play with different emotions and walkcycles for the various characters.

which reminds me, i haven't had the opportunity to explain our idea.
it's a action-platformer.
it's called Void.
it's set in an environment that looks like it's been carved and built out of coral. We're not setting it underwater though.
the actual details surrounding the level design are still up in the air, but an idea thrown around today was that touching or coming into contact with a certain species of coral/whatever is inside the environment changes the physical attributes of the player character. we're unsure how far we might take that idea, but it's sounds an interesting proposition.
until the net is back at home, i won't have any images or anything to upload. and that could take any length of time... :(

why is technology so crap?

make it stop....

2008-10-08T15:19:00.002+01:00

well isn't that just brilliant.
i get home on the friday, i'm all happy about my laptop, and then BAM!

i've got a fever, stomach cramps and other pleasant things for almost a week.
the fever broke on sunday, but the cramps, while lessened, are still there.
i wasn't able to eat for 3 days and now i'm having to train my stomach to accept solid food again.
Thankfully this has happened now, before work on our project gets too strenuous, but it's still frustrating.

and i'm still bitter about the balls up with Fable 2 LE.
great. just great ¬_¬

Ahhhh. Much better.

2008-10-03T16:40:00.004+01:00

And everything works out in the end.

I rang the tech guys up and have booked my laptop in for a repair on Monday.
But I've also bought a new laptop as well XD
It's another Toshiba and it's lovely and red lol
It's got 4GB RAM, 350GB hard drive, a 2.4Ghz dual core processor and a shiny Nvidia Geforce 9700 graphics card.

.... it's also got flames on the lid XD

pimp my laptop ftw

In other news, I've got my tattoo!
The guy that did it is amazing. There's no redness or soreness, it's lovely and healthy and looks brilliant.
yay for Skin Sensation in Cwmbran, Wales

Damn it all to hell!!

2008-09-28T17:08:00.002+01:00

And my laptop has decided to die again.
This time it's the sound and the internet.

we're scanning it for virus', then we're going to defrag it. If that doesn't fix it, it means either the sound card is fried or one of the processors has gone. The sound crackles and judders at varying degrees depending on the processor power in use.
With nothing but WMP or iTunes going, the sound is almost bearable. The moment the processor hits 40% usage, the sound is beyond recognition.

It means anything other than generic internet usage or word processing is useless.
I can't listen to music, I can't watch films and I can't play any games.

On top of that, my internet is now so slow is almost going backwards. It's not the internet connection, because everyone else's internet is fine.

I don't need this right now. Uni is about to start and I need my laptop. I'm going to ring up the guys i've got the cover plan with to get them to take it away again. Hopefully they can fix it. If not, I'm going to have to get a new one.

Bugger.

it's been a while...

2008-09-23T23:26:00.003+01:00

Well, summer is over and uni starts again.
We enrolled on Monday and got our timetable today.
we're in from 10am to 5pm on tuesdays for lectures with tutorials on monday afternoon and possibly fridays as well.

this year the focus is on our final year projects and our dissertations.
for the project i'm working in a group with Rob, Catherine and Winnie.
I think it'll be really good and i'm really psyched to get started on it.
Each of us knows we can work with each other and we all have our areas of strength that we can draw on.

We're going to be using the Unreal 3 engine, mainly due to it's reputation for being fairly user-friendly.
We don't have programmers to work with this year so we're relying on being able to do it ourselves. between us, i think it'll be doable.

We were told by our lecturer Dave that he's organised a deal with Game City in Nottingham that every year, the 3rd year finished games would be shown there.
This will be incredibly helpful, especially for exposure to the industry.
this october will be the recently-graduated 3rd years. Our work will be shown next year. hopefully. if we finish it to a standard we find acceptable.

Dave has said he's looking for a everyone in class to keep a blog as a way of documenting the year. that means i shall be updating this blog slightly more regularly than i have been as of late.

It's All Over....

2008-05-01T15:38:00.004+01:00

And the joint project draws to a close.
It's hard to believe we've been working on this project for 10 weeks...

As from now, we're technically done with the game. All that's left is the presentation (which counts for 20% of our grade).
Our lecturer has said he can no longer force us to work on the level, but if any of us and the programmers want to continue to fix bugs so that we have the best possible build to show at the presentation, that would be a good idea.

We're *so* close to finishing, that leaving it seems a waste. We've worked this far on it, and luckily, most of us want to see this thing through to the end. I for one really want to see the characters in engine.

This project has really been an experience.
I've learned the importance of finalising file types, export settings and the like as soon as possible. I've also learned to research the engine you want to use and see if what you want to do is possible i.e. that models built in a particular modelling programme are able to be imported with the minimum of fuss.

Another lesson learned is that no matter how much a project matters (pass/fail in this case), there are still those that will choose not to turn up to meetings, do work set for them or keep in contact with the rest of the group. Our group had one member that turned up for the 1st week and never again. Another was sporadic in attendance and was often paired up for tasks to alleviate the impact this would have on the production pipeline.
I think overall, our combination of designers and programmers worked well. We had our differences and problems like any group will, but we've come closest to having a complete level in the 4 years this project has been run and I think that says something about our determination.

It will be weird not having the weekly production meetings after everything is over.
I'm just hoping that in the time we have left before the presentation, we're able to implement all the things still left to do in our game.

In other news, today was the deadline for our 2000 word "chapter" of our dissertation and tomorrow is the deadline for the group project work.
I'm sitting here debating about the best way to write a 1500 word postmortem on the project. I'm think splitting it into 3 sections, 500 words each with 5 main points in each section at 100 words each. It sounds more manageable >_<

tiles, doors and buttons oh my!

2008-04-28T19:38:00.004+01:00

Guernsey was beautiful :)
white sand, blue sea, not a cloud in the sky... I'll upload some pictures eventually.
The concerts went really well as well. We made over £200 from 2 concerts. Completely unexpectedly. It was definitely the best trip we've ever been on.

My job this week was to create textures for the doors and activation buttons for the aforementioned doors.
Also, the programmers needed tileable textures for the floor/walls/ceiling in the storage room area so as no one else seemed to be doing it, and the minutes weren't uploaded so I couldn't check, I decided to do it quickly.
I used some royalty-free textures in the tiles to make sure they got to the programmers quickly enough.

here are the tileable textures:

And these are the doors and the button.
The doors are for the mess hall entrance, the control room, the security door in the control room and a plain door respectively:

7 hours...

2008-04-13T19:35:00.005+01:00

... until I'm on a coach heading to Weymouth to catch a catamaran to Guernsey.

In light of the fact that I won't be at the Tuesday meeting, I've done the work I was set and have passed it on to Rob to show at the meeting.

Here is the puzzle GUI. Subject to change if the rest of the group feels the need to:

Well, I'd better finish packing...

3 Weeks Left - ARRRGGGHHH

2008-04-08T19:07:00.005+01:00

Well, we have only 3 weeks left until the end of this Bunker project.
Here are some screenshots of the texture on the control room:

They not fantastic. In fact, I'm not really happy with them. The console panel I can live with, though the walls are too plain and bare.
To save myself repeating what I wrote in the minutes for this weeks meeting, I'll copy and paste some of the main points that were brought up:

Handing off issues, artists need to hand off all work to programmers ASAP and programmers need to give feedback and advice on problems as well.

Importing texture problem is a priority and needs to be sorted ASAP

Models need to be checked for problems, reversed normals/holes etc

As for the work that was completed:

Bill's animations for the main character were on the whole okay, and from the back worked fine. The run cycle was wrong; the point of contact on the feet and the 'camel marching' being the main problems.

The alien model that John was rigging and animating was rigged but the weighting for the bones was causing problems; you move the foot and the head goes etc. Because of this, there were no animations for the alien.

The texturing for the control room that was assigned to me, Chris and Rob was done. I hadn't heard from Chris for the week before Easter that we were to work on this and Rob was cleaning up some of the models and finishing textures for them, while also inputting on the control room texture.

I'm not happy with the texture. I'm not a texture artist. I did the best with what I could do. I wasn't really sure what colours and materials would be needed, and no one else really knew what would be best suited to the room. The mess hall has been easier; leave the walls/floor quite pale and let the furniture add the colour. This wasn't possible for the control room however.

The programmers mainly have the task of figuring out why importing textures isn't working. That's the one frustration that has plagued us since about week 3; we can get models in, but they're pure white with no textures.
Their next task is to get an animated model into engine now that the main character is done.
One of the (many) problems is that we don't know if it's the engine being difficult, the importing process going wrong somewhere, or whether our models are being exported wrongly.

Easter = badly timed ¬_¬

2008-04-06T17:00:00.005+01:00

And i'm back after Easter holidays.
I had no internet over Easter so all has been quiet.
This has also kind of screwed the AI people over because many of us were unable to update and pass on models over the holiday. I know that both John and I had no internet over Easter, I don't know about the others.
I cannot begin to describe the guilt I'm feeling over not being able to make their job easier.

My job over easter was to finish texturing the two room levels with Rob. This is done, but the normals on the model are still messed up. Even if they had the model, it wouldn't have worked in engine and they don't have maya to fix the normals and we don't have the quake engine to test the model :(
The texture is done though.

I *did* give Rob a copy of the control room model and it's texture file before I left for Easter because I knew that he'd have internet and he's also got the means to convert the files to the type we need.

And what makes it worse, is that next week, from the 14th to the 18th, i'm going to be on a music tour in Guernsey, so i will have to miss that weeks meeting so close to the deadline.
It's not my fault though. The music group i'm touring with consists mainly of people at school and college, so for them it *will* be their Easter holiday. Plus it has been planned for about 2 years so it's not a recent decision.

This project started off so well...
What the hell happened?!

And I'm Back

2008-03-11T19:58:00.004Z

And after a week without internet because Virgin Media are useless, I'm back.

Last week my task was to model the control room, which I did.
Unfortunately, the normals in some places are completely messed up and when put into engine, the walls are see-through.

Here are the screenshots of the model.

After the production meeting today, me and Rob have been given the task of finalising textures and trying to get them in engine.
Our main unresolved problem is that of getting textures into engine; our models go in, but none of the textures.

It's Easter next week, and after that there isn't long left until the deadline.
If we can get the textures into engine, and get a rigged character with animations to work, we'll be laughing.

If only it was as easy as it sounds....

Dots! Too many dots!!!

2008-03-03T02:46:00.005Z

Here are the UVs and the texture map for the level.
It didn't take as long as i thought it might, though the model I had was only the walls and floor; all the inner pillars and architecture were missing.
I think Rob may have been texturing them along with the other miscellaneous items, but his sleeping patterns are funky so I haven't seen him all week to ask.

****************

In other news, our new housemate is WICKED!
She's so friendly, as is her boyfriend, which is nice :)
We spent the evening watching Highlander 2 in the living room. It's nice to have new people to watch films with ^_^
I think we're going to get along brilliantly.

ARRGGHHHH!!!!

2008-02-28T02:33:00.006Z

I've got to UV Map and texture the entire mess hall level in a week.
And I'm not 100% confident on my capabilities at UV-ing. It'd take me a day or two to figure out how to do it properly and then heaven knows how long to do the actual model. Not to mention the actual texturing.
1 week is not enough.
And I'm not the only one with this problem. Others have characters to UV Map and texture, one has to do my furniture models. It took him 2 hours to map one of my chairs. It's not even textured. And he knows how to UV Map >_<

I foresee dark times ahead.........

On the up side, we've managed to successfully import our mess hall level into engine.
It shows up, we can walk around in it, the AI guys have worked their magic well :)
On the down side, the textures still don't load up...

Done And Dusted

2008-02-26T03:25:00.003Z

Well I've modelled the things that the group said I needed to.
I can't help but think that there's an awful lot missing though...
Also, we're not sure if the other 2 rooms will actually be built. We're running out of time, and no one has been assigned to model them yet...
Therefore, I wasn't sure if I needed to model the items for those rooms.
As it stands, I've modelled all the items that the mess hall level needs. Or at least all the things the level's designer said it needed.

On Friday of last week, we and the AI guys met up and tried to figure out a way to get our models into engine.
As it turns out, the OBJ we export from Maya won't work, so we're having to export from Maya as an OBJ, import the file into 3DSMax and re-export as an OBJ.
It's a ridiculous long way round, but it's apparently what the actual developers of Quake did *shrug*

We still haven't quite solved getting textures into engine though.
All the models we've tried have failed to import textures too.
So that's something else we're going to have to look at.

We also had a large scare when Rob's laptop had a "NTLDR is missing" error and wouldn't load Windows.
Thankfully, it's a common problem and there was even an entire website dedicated to the problem and how to fix it.
His laptop is working again now. He lost an hours work, but it could have been worse.
He could have lost the 30+ hours he's put into it this week...

It's late.
Really late in fact...
I'll upload the renders of my objects tomorrow. Or maybe wednesday. I've got life drawing tomorrow and won't be back til late.

**************

In other news...
Even though the leak from the shower base and the leak from the bath tap have been fixed, we've found another. The shower handle of all things. It wasn't sealed properly. The plumber came round today and sealed it. We're to check it tomorrow and ring him if it still leaks. Also the hole in our ceiling is now even bigger.

On the plus side, my sore throat is gone. Now I'm just snotting all over the place.
Brilliant.

And This Week I Will Be....

2008-02-22T01:49:00.007Z

... modelling the furnishings; chairs, tables, control panels, vending machine, lights, monitors etc
That's a lot of stuff I have to design as well as model because the group member assigned that task last week has been AWOL for about 3 weeks.
Hopefully, tomorrow I'll get all the items designed, even if they're not orthographics. Then I can start speed modelling.

My design from last week was pretty much ok'd.
There was some critique on the fact it wasn't very detailed or different in design, but as a character that would be quick to model and easy to animate it was fine.

Tomorrow (well, actually later today) we're meeting up with the programmers at university to try to solve the problem of getting our Maya models into the Quake 4 engine. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it'll be as simple as exporting from Maya and importing into Quake.
Hopefully that'll be sorted out tomorrow, otherwise we could have a problem...

**************

In other news, our ceiling has fallen through in our living room and I have a raging sore throat.

Joy.

Colours Colours Pretty Colours

2008-02-19T02:17:00.002Z

Here's the coloured orthographic and dynamics.
John drew the dynamics because he's faster (and better) at them than me.

Take Me To Your Leader The Finale

2008-02-18T22:20:00.002Z

And here is the re-tweak of the alien.

At the suggestion of Rob in our group I've been looking at Viewtiful Joe for colour schemes and swatches as the style very much fits my character.

Take Me To Your Leader part 2

2008-02-18T04:06:00.008Z

And here is the orthographic.
The coloured design will follow later.

God I hope it's ok.......

And here are a couple of the other designs I came up with.
I *told* you I'm not a character designer >_<

Take Me To Your Leader

2008-02-17T15:22:00.003Z

Well since the last post I have been sitting with my sketch pad and pencils trying to design aliens and I have come to the realisation that character design is not my strong point.

I have a design that I quite like, but I'm not sure if the others will agree; it's completely different in style to the previous alien design.
As soon as I've finished it I'm going to upload it to the forum and ask what the rest of the guys think. Though if they want anything changed I don't know how I'll do it.
I was dreading being given an important design role like this. I'm not as confident in situations like this as I'd like to be; I'd happily model and animate anything, but being given something as important as a character to design...
I guess I'm just going to have to grin and bear it until next week. Maybe it won't be as bad as I think it will be...

When I've scanned the little blighter in, I'll post it here.

**********

In other news, Devil May Cry 2 bites the dust.
Fighting style = awesome
Rest of the game = bollocks
Where'd the story go? Why was I fighting all those demons? What was the point?
Now I see why many say DMC 2 is the odd one out.

Hoo Boy...

2008-02-13T14:11:00.007Z

Well, the production meeting yesterday didn't go as badly (or as well) as I thought it might. If that makes sense...

The levels that were designed weren't as finalised as our production manager wanted them to be. They had a basic top down plan, but no orthographics and there were no assets included in the drawings. Things like tables/chairs/mugs/plant pots; all the little knick knacks that you find in occupied places.
The assignment of finalising the levels has been rotated away from the original designer; they're re-designing each others.
It was brought up at the meeting that the levels weren't as unique and interesting as they could be; it was felt the designers were relying too much on what had been done before. I see the point being made, and I believe the designers would have willingly made the levels more complex and interesting, but it was the general consensus within our group that we wanted to get a working model of our game rather than be forced to add placeholders for assets not finished because we were too ambitious; had we been given more than 10 weeks, then the designs would have been greatly different.

The character designer was MIA all week so we didn't see the final character designs until the production meeting. I have to admit they weren't what we had envisioned.
The design of the character, mostly around the neck area, was done in such a way as to make it impossible to model. The design was more a test of shape and colour than of a working orthographic.
There were also only front and side views of the character. The game is third-person therefore most of the time playing is spent looking at the character's back. Without a back design, modelling the character would have very difficult; the modeller would have had to make it up.
I believe we tried every way we knew how to get in contact with him, but (as we found out at the meeting) he has no internet in his house and his phone was dead. Short of turning up randomly at his house, I don't know what else we could have done. Because of this problem, we've decided that everyone needs to check the Bunker forum daily, or at the very least every other day. It's a good place to ask questions, post up designs, ask opinions; it should be used.

This week Bill has been assigned the task of re-designing the human avatar of the player and my job is to re-design the alien.
For Tuesday 19th February I have to design an alien character and produce full orthographics for it. They have to be good enough that if I should keel over and die, anyone could take my design and model it.

The programmers have a real sense of what they need to test out and research. I believe that, in the end, they may have a harder job than we do. We add the candy coating to the Smartie but they have to make the inner chocolate *work*. They definitely seem to have their heads screwed on and know what they need to do, which is a great relief to all.

I'm more interested in what I have to do next week.
I have a rehearsal with my guitar group for our trip to Guernsey on Sunday 24th, and my mother's birthday is on the 25th. I'd normally return home on the Friday but if I'm given character modelling, or something else equally as time consuming, I don't know when I'll be able to go home. I CANNOT afford to be away from my computer for 4 days. Not when we have our dissertation to consider as well.
Oh well. I'll cross that bridge when it comes to it.

On a completely unrelated note, I've FINALLY completed Devil May Cry. Yes. The first one... And when I say 'I', I mean I did everything apart from the final battle which my housemate did...
What can I say? I'm not made for hack 'n' slash :(
On to Devil May Cry 2 and 3 and hopefully 4. If we buy it. Or should I say *when* we buy it lol

Done and Dusted

2008-02-11T20:26:00.001Z

Well I've printed out the images for the mood boards.
I think my images will only take up one board so the other can be saved for characters designs and dynamics. Whenever they are done. The character designer has gone MIA so we're going to have to send a search party for him.

I haven't been able to get any definitive answer from the group on what colours/textures etc out of the ones I've researched we're going to use, so the mood board is filled with my guess at what the group will need... I hope I'm right :S

FLASH!! Ahh ahhhhhh! (autoloading sound)

2008-02-11T03:23:00.002Z

I've found a place that can store the flash projects that I have done.
Because both have autoloading sound, I will only embed one of the two flash files. The other you can download if you wish.

First there's the Postcard From... project.
The brief was to create a 'postcard' from a place of our choosing/construction.
My job in this project was animator, programmer and sound editor.
The flash programming is extremely basic in this. I was going on my limited knowledge of building simple flash webpages; mainly on_release gotoandplay etc as we had no flash lecturer to aid us.
All you have to do is click on the current element on screen.
The 'place' me and my partner Debbie Stephens chose was Wonderland. How many Alice In Wonderland references you can spot?

Download 'Postcard From...' here

Next is the 'Storyspace' project.
The task was to create an 'interactive non-linear narrative' using 3 themes from a list of tasks.
I always wonder why lecturers don't just word things in basic English...
The controls for this are the left and right keys to move, the up key to jump and the space bar to 'plant' a seed. You can then click on the grown flower to wither it.
As you can probably tell from the advancement in flash programming that I was not responsible for it. My task was, as always, animating. Debbie Stephens was in charge of artwork, Duncan Jones was in charge of coding.

Download 'Storyspace' here

Colours Colours Everywhere

2008-02-10T16:43:00.002Z

So today I took some colour swatches from some of the Jetsons images using Photoshop.

I never realised how much they used dingy yellows and oranges...
I hope these'll be handy for the group. At the very least to inspire our own colour choices and combinations.

I think I'll take a break now. There's not much more I can do until the group meets up again. We still need to discuss the mood boards (at least the CGD students do).

I wonder what job I'll have next week...

Work What I Done Part 2

2008-02-10T02:01:00.000Z

And here's the latest finished project.
It was a also a pair project to create an animation in Maya but the task was to create a 30 second vignette with a poly limit of 10,000.
We were also allowed to use After Effects I we so wished and that's what me and my partner elected to use.

He was in charge of the artistic development (for obvious reasons as you shall see) and I was in charge of animating.
I find myself more at ease animating, especially if there is better artistic talent around than myself.

So without further ado, here is my pair's Pixel Art Limited Brief.

Work What I Done

2008-02-10T01:39:00.000Z

Now that I have this blog, I have somewhere to place a record of my previous projects created while in education.

The first is a project from my CGD 1st year.
In the brief we were instructed to create a short animation using Maya, but with a limit of only 500 polys allowed on screen at a time.

This was a pair project but 3 pairs decided to join up and each create an animation that referenced each of the others; the beginnings and endings of the animations would be the same but the journey in between would be up to the individual pair.

Ours was based on a race between 3 shapes with varying characteristics; a sphere, a cube and a torus. We tried to give each shape a personality to aid in distinguishing the 3 animations from each other; the sphere was happy-go-lucky and excitable, the cube slow, pondering and reluctant and the torus cocky, impulsive and reckless.

The track was designed heavily with old style Mario in mind. Also, Littlebigplanet had just been announced so we referenced the handmade-ness and cardboard cut-out style from it.

This is the animatic.

And this is the final animation.
I apologise in advance for the ending, one member of a group was determined to have this particular theme. 10 points to anyone that can name the tune, version number and all.

Bunker Week 1

2008-02-09T19:20:00.002Z

My task for this week has been to look for textures, colours, lighting and moods for the "Bunker" project.

I've found some images from The Jetsons showing some interior design and I'll be creating colour swatches from the images using photoshop tomorrow.

The idea of an underground facility reminded me of Syndrome's underground lair in The Incredibles, so I searched for some images. It's amazingly hard to find any images of it. I found one of Mr. Incredible and Mirage entering a lift, and of the Incredible family running down a corridor but that was about it. I was hoping for a few images of the lava room :(
Though admittedly, the underground lair is mainly, you guessed it, grey concrete.

I had a look on the stock photo website stock.xchng for textures and interiors.
I managed to find a few interesting buildings and some textures which may come in handy. They're concrete, but not grey concrete.

I still have to find examples of lighting. For this I think I'm going to have to consult the rest of the group. I need to know what feel we're going for; is it going to be harsh artificial light, or a more homely feel? After all, the scientists *live* down there.

I've uploaded the images I found to my photobucket account here and posted a link on the "Bunker" forum for the others in the group to access.

I hope I'm looking at the right kind of things. I'm hoping the others will let me know if I need to go in a different direction.

Caryn out.

The Beginning of the End

2008-02-09T18:07:00.001Z

As of 5th February 2008, the joint games design project between the Newport Computer Games Design course and the AI Programming course has gotten underway.

I have been assigned to Group A, and the design doc we have been given is codenamed "Bunker".

You are a research assistant that has been genetically altered by the invading aliens that have taken over the underground research facility you work in. Your task is to progress through the game, "saving" trapped co-workers and avoiding capture. But the longer you take through the game, the more advanced your mutation into one of the aliens will be, thus making it harder to pass by other humans safely; they will not recognise you and attack on sight.

It is perhaps the more generic and cliché of the 3 chosen design docs, but I believe this will give us a chance to jazz up the done-to-death genre of the FPS.

For starters, we've gotten rid of the first-person; it's now 3rd person to take advantage of the artistic style we've chosen. And there are no guns. So there's no shooting. And hopefully it'll stay that way.

You could say it's a FPS without the FP or S.

And, at the suggestion (almost threat) of our design lecturer, we are to avoid grey concrete and shiny "apple mac" design choices.

We've decided on a retro-futuristic feel, very reminiscent of The Jetsons; we want to give it the feel of what someone in the 50s would have imagined the future being like.

This should help to alleviate the stereotypical baggage that comes with "alien invasion" plots in games.

I think it's kind of mix between Metal Gear Solid, Abe's Odyssey, and Bioshock; there's sections of avoidance, rescuing captured friends and the idea of the future through the past's eyes.

We only have 10 weeks to produce, at best a working level of the game, at worst an environment with placeholders. Because of this we were determined to avoid super-realistic characters and models. We just don't have the time to produce those kinds of graphics as well as get everything into engine and working.

As our lecturers have told us, this is an exercise in working with the programmers; giving us a chance to experience the trials of communicating with others in a safe environment.

So here's to a relatively smooth ride and something to show for our work at the end.