NUUUURBS

OK so i did a bit of experimentation as to how I could construct hair on the model. I spent a lot of time working with nurbs to construct my first design. Mid way through its development I realised too late that unity3d DOES NOT accept nurbs into the engine. Instead it will only take polygons. Great. Once again I am held back because I quite simply do not know the capabilities of the game engine OR maya.

BTW, i am aware this hair style makes the character look like the medieval village idiot  hahaha

More modelling

Ok so today I made a lot of progress working from home because the group was doing other things. I have been racking my brains as to why I keep encountering problems and I think its because I am trying to make things way too realistic. Our game is not all about the graphics nor is going to be immensly details and close up on the character, hence why I have decided to just freestyle model and try something entirely new.

A few of these attempts were a giant waste of time, but in saying that with every model I make I learn something new which I apply to the next model. Here's a botched concept I was working on earlier today.

And through all the chaos with no reference here's what I came up with today. I am quite pleased with it because it looks like a small child but at the same time there's just SOMETHING creepy about it and I just cant quite put my finger on it which is very fitting to our nightmarish game.

I also attached the head onto the body to see exactly how it all fit together. Overall I am very proud for producing this base mesh, all that is left is to add details such as hair, clothes etc and I'll be ready to rig and animate this character.

The Crit

After our crit I realised that we have been focusing more on creating a game than actually focusing on our concept of exploring story telling through games. I feel as though we need to once again go back to the drawing board and rethink exactly what we are trying to do with our project.

I think that we can rectify the situation by expanding our world to tell the same story in multiple ways. For instance, when someone is playing a game they always assume themselves to be the 'do gooder.' However perhaps we can have another character within the game that is playable so that players can experience playing the game through the villain's point of view.

I found our crit very rewarding as it has set us on the right track again.

DAVID CAGE

David cage heavy rain - investigate this person

GREAT IDEA?

I was just thinking to myself while watching some tutorials online about how to model woody from toy story in Maya. I thought to myself that we could mould our current story about a boy waking up in limbo with a story about a boy who falls asleep and wakes up in a fantasy land where he himself and the environment around him has been transformed into a world of toys and plastic. I was thinking that this would drastically reduce the amount of detail needed in models and make generating things like buildings and structures very easy as it wouldn't require a whole look of minute details to immerse the player. Because at the moment we are looking at a details environment with a not to details model. Which is a bit contradicting. If we were to use toys I I could for example replicate models such as Lego men and apply different textures to the lego men to greatly cut the amount of work needed. Just a thought. I know everyone will hate me for bringing up another concept in the works and mucking things up but regardless it cant help to suggest new things especially when we are stuck in a rut.

I have also been working on my edge flow within my 3d models as I intend to be animating the character. This is imperative because if the edge flow is terrible it means that the characters movements will look very jagged and nasty. I am in the midst of creating a male human character which could "potentially" be our main character. Although we are talking about using a child as the main character. This could come in handy at some stage no doubt. I have been working in very low poly so that the character wont slow our game engine down a whole lot. I have also investigated Z brush and become familiar with is however it is mainly used for fine details and bump maps which I don't think we will be needing for our character.

Most of the work I have been doing has been aimed at learning 3d software like Maya. I have become quite good at it however I have run into many problems with the software. For example, i made a few models and at the end of making them realized that the vertexes were doubling up on each other because a certain setting had be unchecked. Hence all my work went to waste and it meant I was not able to rig up anything earlier. However i think i had addressed the issue and am now working on a character model that is almost complete. I have set up several meetings with Karin and have some very nice tutorials to go off. I feel as this stage fairly confident that I will be able to have a rigged model ready for Tim to add into the game.

New World

We decided to go along with the story style of something similar to Limbo where the player is dropped into the world without a clue of what has happened to them or why they are there. They are in search of reason and explanation of why they are in the position they are in and how to escape it.
I came up with an idea of using a shadowy figure to guide the player through the game. They player could interact with items and other objects to reveal his past and piece together what happened to him. In a way we are using the platform of a game to turn the pages of a book in a way, allowing the players to generate and interpret what happened with their own understanding.

I also feel as though the roles are cris-crossing a lot within our group. I thought we have designated a someone to focus on story, programming, modeling, etc. But we always seem to be questioning each other in regards to the story. I think we are always confusing each other by having so much participation in the story itself.

We really need to go back to square one and define the world, then the story, then the game aspects. We always seem to be running around in circles and heading dead ends because we are focusing far too much on the fine details before the overall picture has been concreted into our minds and visualized.

The story

In the winter wasteland story we came up with the idea to use fire as the symbol of life. The world became so cold an baron after  the winter god and the fire god clashed in an epic struggle of dominance over the world. With the fire gods last breath he cast down his essence onto the world in. It is the players job to find these essences and restore life to the world once again.

I liked this idea at first but I feel as though with our capabilities in programming and 3d modelling, we couldn't really make something great out of it. The aspect of fire I feel is far too limiting for the story and corners us into a very tight spot.

The Winter Wasteland

Winter Wasteland

Here snow blankets the land and the trees are all black with death—strangled by the frost. Here the sun doesn’t smile. The night is eternal. The moon is nothing but an empty shell and the stars don’t sparkle like ours. They’re dull and faint, like stale bread crumbs scattered across the sky.

Fire is a rare gift, but make sure to panic if you see that friendly, warm, yellow light; the dwarves have resorted to cannibalism and they’re not the only ones. Everybody wants to live.

It’s so cold that you can’t even feel your hands. Oh, that’s right. You don’t have hands any more. You had to get mechanical ones because yours froze and broke off years ago.

This is just a concept we came up for within the world. We realized that we needed to define a world before a story which is why we were running around in circles about game mechanics and story line. However in this world, being the 3d modeller, I can imagine a LOT of work that would be needed in order to complete the game. For example with many different factions of characters I would have to model and rig everything which in a semester on my own would be hell.

I drew up a quick piece of concept art in 2 hours to represent how I saw the world.

Meet half way?

I think before we think about the environments we need to have concrete idea of how the game mechanics work. For example, perhaps we could use a different medium than a mouse and keyboard to communicate with the game, or use the mouse and keyboard to communicate in a different way. I know James wants us to push things to be more than a game. If we were to do a 2/3d game, the mouse and keyboard could simply represent a method of "turning the page of the story." I say this because just like We could for example have a character run across the screen in a particular environment with a narrative/text of writing. When he crosses the line to the next environment (by exiting the right of the screen) it will generate a new environment for the character to interact with. In a sense it combines reading a book with a game. Pages could be unlocked and joined together to complete the book bringing a sense of drive to keep playing and unlocking pages. More so leaning towards the story rather than actualy gameplay. The animations and interactions don't have to be extremely complex. They will just be used to help the player visualise the story. I love the style of machinarium, and this is kinda the style I intrigued by. We could use the snow environment easily here, (i would imagine digital painting a lot of scenes in snow would be much easier than darker shades). I think focusing on the environment and imagery within the game would really benificial rather than spending heaps of time on the character because it would help viewers visualise the environment and world to which the story is based.

We can still incorporate 3d modelling in this concept also for houses, chacaters etc etc even though it is rather 2d. 

Where to start?

So we have decided on a game, but the question remains as to how we are going to create it. We orginally wanted to use unity however I thought it would be best to explore other avenues before deciding so I did a bit of research on other game engines such as ex2D, DarkBasic, Blitz3d, GameStudio, Ogre, and CrystalSpace. But first things first, we needed to decide if we were going to design a 2d game or a 3d game. A 2d game would be a lot simpler however this simplicity might take away from the story that we wanted to tell. Most 2d games in todays world have a very simple objective such as 'save the queen.' We wanted to do something more complex and outside the box than that.

Although we wanted to do a 2d game at first, we decided to do a 3d game instead for a few reasons: 1) Tim had experience with 3d within unity.
2) We knew the programming language to an extent.
3) Unity is not great for 2d games and 2d animations which is what we originally going to use.
4) Players would be more immersed in a 3d environment rather than a cartoonist world

 We LOVED the art style of Limbo and Botanicula in the way the 2d environment was transformed into something almost 3d through the use of background blurs and layers of texture which gave the game depth. The story of Botanicula wasn't all that impressive, on the other hand Limbo was extremely interesting to us. I had a very atmospheric world and art style of actually being stuck in limbo, the story itself was not dictated to the player, instead the player was left to interpret the story in their own way. Just like great books such as The Great Gatsby, the viewer is left to interpret their own meanings from the story. At the end of Limbo you actually are left wondering, "was I bad? or was i good?" This ambiguity is something that we really want to incorporate in our own game as it is an aspect of story telling that is not commonly used in a game format.

The Game

In the starting weeks we dedicated ourselves roles to generating the game and having a solid workflow. I was specialising in the 3d modelling aspect of the game mainly the character and its animations. I personally have always been very interested in this which is why i jumped at the opportunity to design a game. In the first week we mainly spent most of our time researching game such as bastion, Journey, Botanicula and many others. We were intrigued by these games because not only were they fun to play but they told a story in a different way to most games. Journey for example is a very open ended game full of exploration and virtually no dialogue. The story itself is derived from the players curiosity to travel and progress. Bastian is the complete polar opposite of this due to the fact that the story is dictated in a very narrow way via a narrator telling the story over the top of the game as you reach key points.

From a gaming most of my life I have realized that every game has repetition, however what makes a good story and a good game is the way the creators hide this repetition from the player. I am scared that our skills may not be developed enough by the end of the semester in order to hide the the games flaws. We only have a small amount of time to actually create a game from start to finish which is worrying, however I am all too willing to give it a try and take the risk.