Final Product

Final web product :)
The music by the altar was made by my good friend Manuel. It was awesome finally working with him in a project.
I hope you can give me some feedback, and just remember that is just meant to be an environment, so don't expect much of it.  FEEDBACK PLEASE!!!

Unity Web Player | Quetzalcoatl_WEB

« created with Unity »

Some progress VI

Almost there!
Just wanted to add some concept art, sketches and the floor plans and elevations for the environment :)

Some progress V

Woking on my plants for the scene, I ended up spending too much time on details for some of them. 

At first I tried to do all hand painted, because I wanted to get this dull scene to look all full of colour, but then time was running low and had to start working on other assets. 

After putting everything on Unity, I noticed that the normal maps I did for every plant where useless, as the shaders that accept back face culling dont accept any kind of bump mapping. 

Also, never thought of combining the meshes in maya to avoid having too many objects in the scene. 

Once I put all the plants in place the scene began to get a little bit laggy. The only thing I could have done at this point was going back to maya and combine them into one mesh, but because of the time limit (and illness) I'll leave it like this for now, as the important part at this point is more composition rather than efficiency. 

Morals

When I was quite young my dad took me to a game shop to get a new game for my Nintendo 64 (you can guess it was ages ago) and from all the covers that where familiar from all the mainstream series available, a particular one caught my attention:

Yes. Harvest Moon. I think I picked it because the box was pretty. Started playing it, and doing my best to keep up with my limited english at the time as there was a lot of dialogue. The game was completely charming and different from all the other games I had. It was peaceful, fun and challenging in its own way. I was happy growing my own farm until a friend came over and started judging the game of being boring because you didn't get to kill anyone. 

I guess he was right; the most dramatic part of the game was when one of your cows died of age. The level of violence wasn't enough for him and many other kids. 

I have played and loved all kind of games, and understanding that it's a matter of taste to choose a genre of game in specific, but I personally thing there's a limit for everything. 

Having the game industry evolving quickly in every sense, the responsibility of a game maker becomes stronger. I didnt noticed this as an issue before, as I know I go for the kind of games that usually touch more the fantasy side of stories, but looking backwards, I have played some pretty sick games before and some of those probably wouldnt have been appropriate for my age. I took it well, just as a game, but thinking of the many possibles scenarios in which kids from all over the world could digest the experience in a different way due to cultural aspects, life style and other personal experiences makes me think that probably a there was no need for the amount of violence to enjoy the game. 

Certainly I've heard more than once my parents' generation saying to me "your generation is twisted!" or "how can you like that?". Why was murder and body parts was so normal for me and not for older generations? Did games like Doom, Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct thought me that? 

Perhaps.

I think most people agree that when you start growing up you see younger generations and think how messed up they are. And probably they are, but it's certainly not their fault, and so far is not so bad, but until when is this going to stop. There is an obvious increment of violence and along with the semi realistic graphics this will definitely not lead to something good. Specially as next generation consoles are approaching to new and more complex game experiences that can cause some sort of damage to the wrong audience. 

I've always found this overly done violence a little bit unattractive for my ideas of games or animations, but watching the documentary of Moral Kombat did made me more conscience about the general picture and the big influence a game can be to younger minds and how much responsibility the new generation of game makers have. 

Eternal Sonata

As part of the result of my compulsive eBay-biding face I got my hands on Eternal Sonata by Namco Bandai for the PS3. 

As a single-player RPG that I usually go for, this one has a strong anime style which I think goes really nice with the cel-shading graphics and despite the weird plot that spins around the story of the pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin and a fantasy dream that happens just before his death, the graphics of the game is what capture my attention. 

After I started playing it I discovered that the amount of detailed they put on the scene was absolutely fantastic for its style. It's good to see some games stepping aside from the dark realistic graphics once in a while, and this one features an incredible well use of colour the whole time. 

The game itself is based around musical features, so the sound design is well appreciated for someone with some musical background, although I naming the characters after music styles is a bit too much (I mean, come on! Polka, Salsa, Allegreto...really?) 

I heard bad reviews about this game, but to be fair I haven't found anything wrong with it, and in fact I think it has a decent level of difficulty and I really hope it carries on like this. (I haven't finished it yet) 

Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I certainly helped me to carry one with my scene and inspired me to work more on my detail levels. 

Journey

If anyone asked me to describe the latest game developed by the famed-indie studio thatgamecompany, Journey I would say: Deep.

Ever since I saw the trailer for it I became curious about this title, reasons being the fact that it's only a 3 hour game, no status bars, no "bad guys" or monsters and narrative based on images (no text through the game or voice at all).
After downloading it from the PS Network I started the game and there you are; in the middle of the dessert with no one to tell you what to do or where to go, on the distance a mountain with a bright light on the top.
Regardless of this, and with out spoiling anything important, the game posses a very clear plot, but it is something else that captivate me all the way until the end.
I believe that Journey is a tale of devotion, persevarance that shows you the power of determination and the cyclical continuity of life.
With a fantastic online feature, as long as you have internet access, the games automatically puts another player along your side (randomly) so the feeling of not being the only one in the whole world seems to be shared between two, but saying this, the only way of communication is a single-note whistle. Might not sound like much, but I couldn't believe how "attach" you can become to a complete stranger that follows you along side your journey.
Deep...

Graphically speaking, and despite the minimalistic style of the game, the whole scenario and levels of the games are an orgasmic feast for the eyes (seriously). The feeling of a boundary-less vast world rarely changes and you get straight away the idea of being in a unique post apocalyptic world that yet is gorgeous.

Sound wise... I'll just say that I'm eagerly waiting for the soundtrack to come out; already pre ordered...that's how good it is.

Certainly Journey quickly became one of my favourite games of all times. I hasnt come out of my head and I'm eagerly talking about it to everyone, yet no matter how many time I try to explain it, it just doesn't sound nowhere near as how good the game actually is.
It might be just me who got obsess with it, with the concept, with the music, with the playability and re-playability, and it might be just me who gets really attached to games that go deeper into the user's emotions, but I'm sure that everyone can fit the game to more than one episode of their lives and therefore make of this 3-hour experience into a unique journey.


(It even inspired me to do some fan art lol ... still working on it) 

Some progress IV...or not...

After trying my best on drawing the textures for the altar, I realised that all my effort for getting a nice looking UV map was pointless. because of the size of the object and the amount of detail needed it was too hard to draw on the edges and make the texture look smooth and fluent.
This was my previous uv map:

At the end, and because of lack of time, I had to use an automatic UV map just to use the separate feature. I feel guilty for having to turn to this option, but time is running out, and got a lot more to texture...
This is the final UV map :(    not looking good, but its being a lot more easy to texture.

Some progress III

The sacrifice altar wasn't difficult to model at all. Having a basic structure and thanks to some good planning I manage to do it in no time.... ....

ok, that was a lie. 

I did struggled at the point where I had to do the diagonal stairs. Because of my intentions of trying to make everything look huge I had to do the staircase relatively close to a normal stair size, meaning that I had to LOADS of stairs and that diagonal shape on the ends did not help to make it any easier.

the fun part for it was also the UV mapping, because, as usual, didn't put it in consideration when building it so, after detaching a few pieces I manage to come up with something easy to work with. 

For the snake pillars I struggled less since I had a better plan for it. Using some references I place some planes that made my modelling more precise. 

 So now pretty much the main structure is there.
Because some work what I've been doing with some flowers (I'll post about that later) I decided to all the textures by myself, so wish me good luck texturing all this.

Some progress II

After loads of attempts of trying to get Mudbox running on my laptop and nothing good, I decided to give it a try to Zbrush. My plan was to make the stalactites and stalagmites in high poly and then capture the details on a normal map. The product was quite good looking, but I think I spent so much time trying to get this level just for one piece and thinking of the amount of pieces that I needed to make it look decent. 

At the end, and after spending so much time looking at tutorial after tutorial, I decided to just edit one big mesh and make it look as good as possible with a tileable texture. much more easier as Zbrush does the complicated UV mapping for you and it's really easy to export back to Maya once you set it up. After running a decimation to avoid killing Maya on the attempt to export an object with over 1 billion polygons, I got quite surprise that it changed from quads to triangles... never worked with them and my previous 3D professors where completely against working with them. 

Didn't care...

So manage to get the normals working and to get it all fit and scale with the rest of the scene. So far is the object that's spending most of my poly-budget, but hopefully will be worth it. 

I still want to play more with Zbrush, since it's a really different software, that quite took me a while to get my head around, but seems like one of those in which I can see myself getting lost for hours just trying and trying all the tools. 

After duplicating the half of the cenote (cave) on which I worked on, and merging them together I saved and closed Maya, but is until now that I noticed that by doing that I completely destroyed the UV map and it was turned into a square, so now I either work with an automatic UV proyection or start working on a uv mapping of an object that has over 67,000 polys and loads and loads of organic bumps. God save my soul if I chose the second option. (which I probably will) 

A Pulse of inspiration

While thinking for some inspiration for the style of my game environment, I certainly look at many kind of games just to give me an idea of the level of details.
Even though I know that Unity can export games to many platforms, I decided to look at PS3 references (since I can always "experience" it for myself.

While playing the game, Final Fantasy XIII became a strong influence in the process, and more because of the pretty cinematic, it's because of the detailed and beautiful work Square Enix has done with most of the scenarios. More than looking at the high-tech ones, I focused on a part of the game called Pulse (Just got there, took me ages!)   

This image above is the concept art for it. Full of details and breath taking I would say. Knowing the company they could make part of the cinematic in this kind of scene and make it look surreal, but is it going to look just as nice inside the game?

For me...I think it does. I spend some time (while levelling up... this is a good harvesting area) looking at the flowers, rocks and cliffs, plants and little details that normally I wouldn't notice for the urge to go and kill the next monster. This made me realize that for game engines, you cant just expect to spend ages modelling everything perfectly, but spending time on the textures, that's what makes the difference.

I started looking more and more at the concept art and other screenshots of other parts of the game, and pretty much it game me an incentive of populating my scene with low-poly details. Hope this helps to get my scene to look decent.

Some progress I

After a long time of thinking what would fit better for my environment and making sketch after sketch about some of the more important aspects (aka the snake) I decided to go for the public opinion to help me decide on which concept to go for. I posted some polls on facebook and tumblr just to get a general idea of which design is more "liked". 

At the end most people liked number 4, but more than heading me towards choosing one, I got some really good feedback. 

I manage to start modelling it from scratch and tried starting with different primitives (cylinders and cubes mainly) and ended up working with only half of a cylinder and mirroring it at the end. I'm still going to work on it. Add some more details and the feathers, but mainly I wanted to get this as a "low poly" model and work on zbrush (for some reason just can't install mudbox) and work on a high poly model to get some normal and detail maps for the low poly model. 

Doing the UV map for it was quite complicated specially for the head part, but I think that I manage to get something decent at the end. It is quite complicated to model organic stuff, but hopefully I get better at this soon. 

Jabberwocky - Game Cinematic

This was a game cinematic for the game Jabberwocky by Blur Studio. I found it by coincidence when I was looking for the famous Lewis Carroll's poem that appeared on trhough the Looking-Glass, and what Alice found there  (turns out the game was relate to it).

The animation seems stylised in a cartoonish way, and the colours are my main inspiration for my game scene.
I tend to find non realistic, but well made styles like this one really attractive since it gives you the freedom to be more creative in a fantasy world.

The design was made by Todd Harris and the animation supervisor, layout artist and animator for some scenes, Leo Santos. Unfortunately his is an unreleased game, which is a shame because I could see a lot of potential with this quality of work.

Kara

I found this video of a concept that Quantic Dream Studio (creators of Heavy Rain)  made just to test the idea, but it's not currently a developing project.
It's really sad, because the mechanics that they used where made on a really good quality basis for any PS3 game. The graphics and sound are stonishin astonishing, but it's the plot that really captivate me. In such a short clip you get a really good gesture of the hard work on emotion that this studio has, just like I appreciate in the few hours that I played from Heavy Rain.

Some ideas

At the moment I've done some ideas for the scene of my game. continuing with the Mayan idea, I came up with this concepts:
At first, you arrive to an altar with a massive feathered serpent that's dripping water from its mouth. Around it, there will be walls fallen pillars with inscriptions and decorations.

Once you step into the main part of the altar, a secret realm will activate and everything will change. The idea is somehow similar to Zelda's twilight realm or silent realm, where everything is basically the same but the textures will be changed and the snake will be alive. 

It took me a while to decide to make it indoors or outdoors, but at the end I came up with the idea of placing the altar into a secret location, somewhere that makes a special conecction between the character that is the only one to find it and the spirit of the serpent-god. So everything will be based in a Cenote (like an underground lake) where the character is going to fall into.

I'm still working in more ideas, specially cus I'm planning to spend most of my polygon count on modeling a decent snake, so if anyone has any ideas for a cool snake-god-type then I would appreciate it. 

Quetzalcoatl

Right so after a massive mental/art block, I manage to settle down my ideas into something more concrete.
Since it's 2012 and the mayans say that we're all going to die, why not basing my game scenario on it! (oh yea...also cus I'm mexican...arriba! )
So from all the legends I know from ancient Hispanic cultures Quetzalcoatl is my favourite one and it's also because a serpent with feathers is cool.
I've been looking at the patterns and details from several ruins and I'll try to reflect some of the aspects from this amazing culture.
Here are the mood boards with pictures that inspired me:

Any how, I'm not going to make a historical recreation, instead I'll adapt some of this concepts to a fairytale-like environment. It's a really huge concept and there are loads of details and ideas I would have to work on, I just hope it's not too ambitious.

Xilia World

Tales of Xilia for PS3 is a game about to come out in Japan from Namco studio.
I've been crossing fingers for it to someday come out in Europe, but meanwhile I've been following some updates and trailers.

Asides of me being a stupid fan of the series, This time is the environment that caught my attention since I liked the feeling they put to the scenarios below.
The concept of the harmony between water, trees and a city landscape is really attracting. Also the play with light and dark in this case seems to be a concept that needs to be carefully played, but the dark silhouettes that you get give you an amazing feeling of magic and mystery.