Playtesting and Props

We had our first playtest of Echoes on Friday, after plenty of hard work getting it into a playable state. I am impressed with how well everyone did and couldn't be much happier with how it went. We managed to get a working game out , with a few bugs, and had more people than I expected turn up to play it. So overall it was a great success and we got some good feedback in the end, and found a few things we'd missed while playing.

As well as the game looking promising I have managed to get a few more props done, time is getting tight now but if I pull my finger out I'm sure I can do it.

Here is an updated of the church ruins:

Only basic textured on at the moment, I need to sort out some of the finer detail and scuff them up a bit, but it's a nice start. It only has a diffuse at the moment, and a quick opacity for the windows.

Here is the staff which I've just started to texture:

There's not much to say about this, the texture is pretty basic, I want to add a few more details to it but it should be a surprisingly quick one to texture. I'm quite pleased with how all the maps have come together to make the crystal.

Specialist Animation 2

It's been a while since I have posted because the project I've been working on is not the most visual project. We were doing an assignment in Unity in which we had to get certain game elements working. This was good as one of our biggest concerns for our major project game was that we do not have a programmer to create gameplay elements.

I'm pleased to see that the project went much better than expected, not just for me but for our entire team. We have gotten much more done than we expected to and it has allowed us to widen our scope and hopefully add even more to the game. We managed to get a lot of the puzzles done, as well as some we were not sure we had time to do and we managed to get certain elements like the camera and the AI working to a decent standard.

In the project I made a camera with 3 levels of zoom and a special fixed camera position for the boss fight, it's also possible to look around using the mouse. I created a door in which you need to pick up 2 keys, walk over to an object and press the F key to open a gate and I created some 'dragons' which attack you by breathing fire, this does damage and has a 1 in 4 chance of causing burn damage over time. The final thing I created was a box which you can go to, press F and it heals you to full health and stops the burn damage.

Here's a quick gameplay video:

There are a few problems such as the boss camera has a weird flick to it when it transitions between views but for a couple of weeks work in a subject I don't normally dabble in I was quite pleased. There's plenty more to do but between the members of our group using Unity we should have it under control.

We have also been using Playmaker, an add-on for Unity which you can get from the Unity Store which allows for scripting in a more visual sense, similar to Kismet in UDK.

We have now got until we go back to uni in January to finish the pre-production for this game so the pressure is on but I can't wait to get started on the production.

Here is a WIP of the Centaur:

I still need to do more work on the head, hair ect but I'm pretty pleased with it so far as drawing is not exactly my strong point, but I can see the improvement over last years major project work so that's always motivating.

I also found a digital painting I did over summer which I never got round to finishing because I ran out of time so I might as well post that here too. I attempted to recreate someone else's art work as I saw it as a good way of working outside of my comfort zone and to see how other people have done things.

This is my drawing:

Here is the original made by justaman78 over on DeviantArt. It was produced for the game HAVEN.

Mine is clearly better... what?.. fine their image is much better, but then learning from people better than you is a great way to improve.

I enjoyed learning some new styles during this drawing and I think it has helped prepare me for pre-production and even helped with the above centaur picture, so time well spent I think.

2nd Year grades

This post doesn't have any work unfortunately, been busy getting ready for the move back home and spending time with friends after an awesome year.

I got my grades back for the major project (the UDK game I have been waffling on about for the past few months) and it was good news! I managed to get score 72 giving me a 1st! Adding that to the 63 I got for pre production it averages out at about 69.75 by my calculations which will hopefully be rounded up to a 1st and then overall I should come out with about 65 or 66 which is a nice solid 2:1 which I can fall back on next year if anything goes wrong which is handy.

My critical studies and visual forms grades let me down, getting a 60 and a 57 respectively, but my minor project came out as a 65, so about my average and my major project and my advanced tech project came out as 70 and 71. So overall it worked out pretty well, just need to work on the side projects a bit more, especially seeing as the dissertation next year counts for a big chunk of the marks.

But overall it is looking good, the Major 3rd year project will be very similar to my 2nd year major project in that we will be making a game in a game engine (Unity this time) and I'll be producing art and working in the game engine. This year though we have a much bigger team and will be able to do much much more and I wont have to spread my work thinly to try and get everything done as I did this year, so I'll hopefully score even higher (fingers crossed).

I'm really going to try for a 1st next year, I know most people, if not all, will be thinking exactly the same but I have definitely proven I can do it when I really put my mind to it and as long as I pull up the marks in my dissertation I believe I can do it. If I can leave uni with a 1st and recommendations from tutors it would help so much trying to find a job in such a difficult market. And who knows, we might even get a Glammies nomination next year and catch the eyes of some industry people... but thats some time away yet.

So get ready 3rd year! I'm coming for you!