Submission product - Beta version

Like I mentioned on my previous post, the game is technically finished, the only things I'll be fixing after is probably touching up some sprites and animations, dialogue timing, music enhancement and camera angles. For the submission, I believe I've reached the requirements, which were a playable level with pixel art.
At this point I'm quite pleased with the quality and with the proficiency on which I feel I can use the engine now. Never the less, I am aware that there's a LOT of room for improvement, and certainly will carry on polishing it for the final year show and the Game Republics student showcase in Huddersfield.
If you want to have a go at it, here's the link to the online file:

Sanctuary (beta version) 

[if there's any obvious problems please refresh the browser. If it doesn't fix the problem, let me know. Also it was designed and mainly tested on Google Chrome, but as far as I'm aware, it should work on Firefox and Safari] (give my level some dignity and don't use Internet Explorer...please...) 

Because I realised that not many people might wan't to have a go at it or probably they get lost ... or just want to cross your arms, lay back, watch and judge my work then here's a screen recording of me playing the game (me knowing what to do). There are conversations with the characters outside the main main storyline, just in case people get lost, and also to give a bit of inside to the story and the characters.

Any feedback would be more than appreciated it, as I still have the end of year show and the Game Republic Student Showcase.

Dialogue script

I knew from the beginning that I didn't have the time to achieve some kind of combat inside the level and keep the metroidvania/rpg/exploration at the same time. Keeping my usual tendency for going for flightless games, I opted to make it more narrative driver, or at least this level. If the game was to go further, I would love to add a combat mechanic, magic spells and power upgrades, but mainly because of the time it takes to make animation sprites, this level will be a small narrative quest.

When I was creating the main NPC and the main character I was picturing their voices and the kind of personalities they would have. They all have very unique characteristic and just like the main character, they have they're own unique qualities and defects. 

It's going to be hard tour triad them on a single sprite and on just one level; they're animation will be very basic due to time constrains so reflecting their personalities on a berthing idle-2/3 frame sprite is nearly impossible.

So, knowing that the dialogue would represent a crucial part to portraid a bit of the personalities, I didn't wanted the NPCs to be saying the same frase all the time so I decided to make a little script to have them saying a different conversation depending on where they are in the level. 

Because I couldn't get the text speed control via pressing a button, it will all have to be timed, so whe the player speaks to a character a bit of a mini event will take place and the conversation between Keara and the NPC will start.

I made my script in excel, as I thought I could organise them in cells per speech bubble and depending on the length I could time it more accurately and quickly.

Now I've never done any dialogue script, so I must admit I felt a bit silly by picturing different voices in my head and try to type it down. Hoping to avoid overly cliche frames and awful misspellings, I asked my friend Sarah for some assistance. She has her own manga project so I assumed she would be familiar with script making.

So far her corrections have been pretty helpful, but I can't add the text until I'm happy with the overall mechanics, otherwise testing will take up a lot more time.

Music ideas

Adam Fergler was kind enough to help me once again with the creation do a melody for the background of my game.

I've never been good to choose myself a soundtrack or even sound effects, but I do appreciate the importance of them.

I know Adam is busy with his own projects, therefore I never thought about anything different to a single simple melody looping in the background. 

After the first few days of talking about what kind of mood I was looking for the game, what the story was, the game play and the main characters personality, he started coming up with ideas of what could be done.

Because at this point I barely touched any sound related topics for the engine, I didn't know what restrictions I would encounter. My original IDE was to have a tune per stage of courage and simply fade in and out between them. 

After trying for a bit I couldn't find a way to make a smooth transitions and having sudden changes of music was not a good idea.

After some talking and considerations we came up with more practical ideas to represent Kamea's courage increase that in this level's case it increases 3 times plus the initial state:

A) have a the same melody 4 times with the exact timing, but with more and more instruments on each level. The idea was to have them all runnin at the same time in the background on mute and just turn the volume up after each courage checkpoint was reached. This created a kind of layering and would avoid an abrupt change of music.

B) have smaller melodies that sound good looping but that the ending of one is the beginning of the next one. With this method, we expected to be able to loop one until a courage point was reache, stop the looping and once the song is finish switch to the next one which then would loop until the next courage point is reach, and so on. 

I decided to make quick and rough testing playable levels to see if they would actually work. It turns out that the 'coding' behind it was pretty simple and managed to get both ideas to work.

Here's idea A and idea B

(Note that A doesn't line up properly, but that's because one song starts slightly later than the other, but the concept is there).
(Also! just noticed that you sometimes have to refresh at least once the browser window to get the audio working properly!) 

I think the easies way for Adam was to go for option B. He said he had more than one idea that he was already working on, more like Kamea's theme song! 

Maybe that melody will be used for the titles screen :D 

Really looking forward to hear more of it.

Quick introduction to the characters - initial concept art

The ideas I came up with Sanctuary started just as a way to merge my interest in stylised imagery and fantasy, creating a pleasant looking game. After working on the conceptualisation on the main character and some of the principal NPC, I started to reflect some of the personalities of people around me, and even more I started reflecting some of my own personal problems into the characters. 

Without going too into detail or to literally just make a fantasy version of my friends/family, I started creating some personalities for each character. This initial level that I'll be working on, only compels the escape and intro of the potential game. The NPC's that appear here are not necessarily going to be playable characters, but if the project was to go further, I would certainly want to give them an important role in the story. Pretty much all their personalities clash; each character will posses not only a determined personality, but they will have their own insecurities, concerns, strength and weakness. The main character will be an unusual hero type, as I want her to be the one who experiences the world and her task while dealing with insecurities and anxieties about herself. 

Loneliness is a key concept here; each NPC is the last one of their type, and this is the 'quality' that will unite them as a 'family' later on. 

Once I finish each of the characters final art, I'll go in depth on their personalities, in the mean time, here's some of the initial concept art: 

Kamea: The main character of the story, unicorn.

Alba & Kera: Dawn and dusk nymphs.

Teles: The male nordic siren 

Azmer: The Centaur/Wemic

The dragon (working on name)

This is just quick ideas for the 'bad guys'. I thought of rabbits/hares well dressed, as they're serving a rich and powerful wizard. Also wanted to play with the idea of some of them just not caring about their jobs and not being aggressive... this guys might not be on the final level, as I'm not entirely sure if I'll be able to put a battle system. 

Finished Character

So the day of submission comes and I'm sort of done with the practical. As always there's a lot of room for improvement but here's the over all of the project. 

I'm not entirely happy with the end result; some of the aspects that I would like to work more on is the textures (specially on the hair and eyes), good rig, blend shapes and some animation. 

I did manage to rig the character, but got stuck on the weight painting as I managed to lock the weights and I wouldn't modify it... probably did something wrong buy it was taking me a lot of time to fix it. Blend shapes seemed pointless if the character was in a still position. 

For the textures, it's harder to make them than it looks; on Maya they look one way, Unity3D another and UDK another. The hair look fine on Maya but the eyes didn't and the other way around on UDK. It becomes a bit of a try and error, quite time consuming. Next time I'll be trying the textures only on the final engine that it will be render at. 

Speaking of engines, quite disappointed at Unity at the moment and really looking forward of learning some UDK. The quality of the real time render is far superior on UDK and it pretty much makes everything look pretty. This is the final video for the turn table of Arnold. It was done real time, I just capture the screen video.

The baking of the normals are not perfect, this is the first time I've try Zbrush, topogun and xnormal, so there's a lot to learn, but I'm really happy that I finally got to try them and lose the fear of their interfaces. Next time, I'll work on separate parts of the body and bake separate normals. Also I'll avoid making a single mesh for the entire body, it would probably been easier to keep different polygon count on each part. 

I really like the process and it's fascinating to see how many changes can happen as you go along, depending what works best on paper and what works better on 3D. Looking forward to polish this and make new ones, but faster this time. 

Any feedback would be more than appreciated. 

Hand in time! 

Unreal Engine / UDK - first look

So after trying to get my head around what project to do for the responsive module, I decided to make a game level. Because of the time restrain it was intended to just a small part of it and more likely just a video giving an example of how the game would look.
Having the time at the end, I could potentially try to put in a game engine and have it as a interactive walk-able area.

I was undecided at first whether to make a part of a forest or the starting village. Because I remember the problems I had when I made my very old environment with having too many plants and transparent textures I decided to go for the village.
At the same time as I went into the modelling part I started watching the Digital Tutors beginners lessons for an Introduction to UDK. This is a 16 lessons project that guides you from the point of downloading to installing the software to basic addition of sound, textures, level blocking and gameplay.

Now UDK or Unreal Engine has always caught my attention for the vast use of it in the professional industry. After working with unity 3D for a while I wanted to change a bit and experiment with it to have and extra software in my curriculum. So far in the tutorials I manages to get my head around the interface and it's actually not as difficult as I though; if anything I think it took me more time to manage my way around Unity.
Half way through the lessons I realised I wont be able to have put the environment in the engine itself, but I will definitely finish the lessons and give it a try over the summer.

Ni no Kuni

Another game that inspire me for the process was the upcoming Ni no Kuni for PS3.
I started following this game from the very moment I heard it was made in collaboration of Studio  Ghibli  (to which I'm a massive fan).
You can tell straight away that the mark of Hayao Miyazaki is everywhere in this game; the world and characters are just full of this incredible magic.
The game hasn't come out yet so the game play and other part of the story are something that I can't say I have experienced, but something that I absolutely loved is that Level-5 did a great job on keeping the fidelity of the concept to it's maximum.
The game has some anime openings (which where to be expected) but during the game play the textures are just astonishing, as it keep at all moments and incredible amount of detail and the iconic charm of any Ghibli film. The cell shade works just fine, and even thought the characters could have done with a bit of more expressions, I really can't wait to get my hands on it and give it a go.

Pixel Art

According to Wikipedia:

   Pixel Art is a form of digital art, created though the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. Graphics in most old (or relatively limited) computer and video games, graphing calculator games, and many mobila phone games are mostly pixel art. 

Image filters (such as blurring or alpha-blending) or tools with automatic anti-aliasing are considered not valid tools for pixel art, as suck tools calculate new pixel values automatically, contrasting with the precise manual arrangement of pixel associated with pixel art. 

 Don't know if anyone notice before, but the current logo of my blog is made by pixel art. I'm not very experienced in making it, but I certainly have a big crush on people who know how to work on it. 

Sadly for me, there aren't many people out there that specialise in this form of graphics, and with technology evolving, even in mobile devices, I can see my fandom staying in memories of some of my favourite games like Final Fantasy advance or KH: Chains of memories. 

As a working process I must admit it requires a lot of dedication, as it requires a perfect idea of what you want to do and apply it in detail, pixel level detail. 

Most of this pixel art video games use an isometric view or parallel projection usually working on a 45°/30° ratio meaning that it's not a "true" isometric, but it had to be done like this due to the limitations of raster graphics that 8 and 16 bit games had. Now a days all of this can be corrected by using anti-aliasing. 

A complicated aspect I found when working on this style is that you have to have a extremely clear idea of the size of the final image. Because the work is done on pixels, the chances of stretching the image without getting weird looking or distortions are very low, so it does have a really high level of planing. 

The fact that people are using this style less and less every day doesn't take off the credit of some magnificent recent work some people have done. I hope I can manage to fit a future project where I can work with this technique and demonstrate that even with  an "old fashion" way of working the possibilities are and a good aesthetic of a game/animation can be achieved. 

Bayonetta - Creative and sexy

As a result of going crazy on Ebay I bought the videogame Bayonetta for PS3. Reason for buying it was that I remember a while ago some friends talking about it as a really really good game. After looking for some images for the game I thought they only bought the game for this: 

I thought I gave it a try after reading some good reviews and because it came out a while ago, it was cheap. 

My first impression = fanservice. Bayonetta as the main character is pretty much the attraction itself. Cool and really original fighting system that only makes the witch dance around and end up in provocative positions. By looking at the cinematic I could have sworn that the animators used strippers to capture the sexiness in all her moves. 

But once I manage to get over it, I realise that despite some weird looking camera angles at some points, most part of the game has a good cinematic study as they way they drive the storyline becomes really engaging. 

Another part that I really enjoyed from it was the concept itself. It's nice to see a character being in the evil side fighting against angels which have a really unique concept that breaks stereotypes. 

Here's a video I found from the producers that get to explain a bit more about the concept in general: 

I haven't finished the game, but will definitely will finish it this summer as I'm finding it really original and with a quite addictive game play. 

The Last of Us

First... take a look a this trailer:


... I think...it's awesome!
After I saw this on Tumblr, I couldn't help myself to find EVERYTHING I could about this game and the makers of it.
It turned out to be the latest project from Naughty Dog company called The Last of Us.
Naughty Dog is a game company that officially started in 1994 with the well famous Crash Bandicoot title.
Their latest success is one of the biggest titles for PS3; Uncharted, a title that is universally acclaim and prise for its storytelling, graphics and cinematic quality.
One of the first titles I got with my PS3 was Uncharted 3 (I just got my PS3 recently) and even though I thought it wasn't my type of game, I felt curious to try it because of its graphics quality. After trying it for a bit I realised that it was much more than a linear-shooting game but it had an incredible cinematic direction that merged perfectly with the controls and the story.
That's is why I can't wait for this game to come out. So far from the trailer, I can tell that the story is going to stand out and can't help to feel a lot of personality in the characters.
This is the synopsis that is on the official website:

Abandoned cities reclaimed by nature. A population decimated by a modern plague. Survivors are killing each other for food, weapons; whatever they can get their hands on.
Joel, a brutal survivor, and Ellie, a brave young teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together if they hope to survive their journey across the US. 

Last thing to mention: the concept art is absolutely fantastic!

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. 

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 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.