lucasbjornblog

Since it’s the last week and we are 99% done with all art most of the time is spent polishing all the existing assets.

We are balling around the idea of trying to add some sort off powerps to the game. powerups would be aquired from getting diffrent companies to sponsor your team.

So i made some quick logos for diffrent companies that would give the players car diffrent stat boosts.

So the game is nearing completion. all the the envirmonet is done and all teh cars are implemented but it’s missing some flair.

We have started add sound and it helps alot with seeling the game, making the cars seem faster and mor powerfull. But it still feels a bit empty.

So i’ve spent the day making particle effects. i actually started way earlier making frame animations but had issuess with implementing them in unitys particle sytem, it wasn’t until today that i figured out how to use it. Currently we have dust cloud and dust spray for when the cars starts and the wheels starts spinning, a spark effect for when the cars hit eachother so that they fell like more of an impact and not just bumper cars and a trail for the cars tail lights.

the tail light trail is suposed to also help disticnt the front and back of the player car since we had some complaints that it was hard to tell wich was the front and what was the back.

 

So having no prior knowledge on how to design a racing track i asked our resident racing fanatic on what made a racing track good, i got a very broad answer which didn’t really help me.

So i started reachercing a bit in the hopes that i could find a tutorial or something. And while i did find some usefull information they all boiled down to the same broad answer i got in the begining “make a track with a mix of difficult and fun curves and long straights”.

This just kind off tells me what existis in some trck and not what the particular track challenges the player to do. but after contiuing looking at tracks and profesionals describing them it seemed like the way to go. The driver wants a track with a lot diffrent challenges not just one.

I decided to find an already existing track and use that as a template for our track and then just kind off make my own thing off it. ading more challenges for the driver but still trying to make the track flow.

i might have made it a bit too long but that just adds to the challenge.

 

since i’ve been really bad about updating this blog under this project i’m going to recap the first weeks of production. Mostly for my self as a reminder but also to anyone who reads this blog.

So i kindoff stumbled in to being the level designer of this game by being the one who had to learn how to make a race track.

In the tart we figured we would make a tile system for track and enviroments, this seemed like a pretty solid idea since non off us knew how to make an actual track and the game was going to be isometric so we didn’t need any height diffrence.

After doing some rescearch i found out that making a track is pretty easy as soon as you figure out how 3dsmax spline tool really works (it works 50% of the time). So now that we knew we could do the whole track as one asset it was only a matter of deisgning a fun track.

thats were the real work comes in.

There hasn’t been much development since the last post. we did have a alpha test for some teachers and got pretty good feedback, it was mostly stuff we already knew were problems but that we have had a hard time fixing.

As for my own work i learned and made some partical effects for the cars, it was pretty fun i’ll se if i can make more and fit them in to the game at some point.

if think we got the layout of were all our assets go on the track but we have to look at it more closley since the camera moves difrently from place to place.

 

I should started this sooner than five weeks in to the project but it’s easy to get caught up in the workflow and start forgeting things. anway better late than never i supposed.

So background on this project bfore i go in on what i have been doing. the “Big game proeject” for secondyears is our final assigment. it’s a chance where we get to make any game we want, the only restriction being our own capabilities.

The project i’m woking on is called “Fast gear” and it’s a story driven racing game. The art style of them game is very 80’s manga meets miami vice and it’s what got me intrested in the projcet.

i’m one of three grapica arist on the project and have been mainly working with enviroments and level design. i’m don’t think i’m particualry good at any off them but it has been great practice. second week i manged to create a simple track that we could use.

we are working with a very simple style so i have managed to produce a lot of asset in a very short time. it’s motly been diffrent houses at this point. ltley production has slowed down abit since i’m trying to learn how to use unity and shaderforge, since unity’s own shader is pretty shit.

going to try and have an update at the nd of the week to see if i managed to get the hang of this whole shader buissnes.

 

This will be the last blog update for the space shooter project, tomorrow we will present our final project and there will be no further work. I suspect that we still have to update this blog so even though it’s the end of the project it will continue.
So what does an artist do the last day of a project when all of the actual work lies on the programmers? The answer, mostly random small additions that might not even make it to the final project, like maybe background visuals that mostly just looks pretty. So let’s write about something that will probably make it in to the final game, like a checkpoint marker.
See we estimated that we wouldn’t have enough time to design multiple levels, so the solution was to make one giant level instead. But the game is pretty hard since you die in one hit so having to replay on long level just as you reach the end would keep people from trying to beat the game. So we added checkpoints, because we’re nice like that.
So there needed to be some visual representation of were these checkpoints are located, so I give to you “the five space bears”.

The current in game explanation for these bears are that they are other attempts of experimenting on earth animals. The aliens needed something durable to direct space traffic so they mutated bears so that they could withstand the pressures of space, since bears have such thick and warm fur they became the ideal candidate for the experiment. The real life explanation is that we really needed something as checkpoints and I thought that space bears would be fun and cute. It fits with the theme of the game in some nonsensical way it makes as much sense as a giraffe in space.
On the technical side of things, I wanted the bears too look simple yet noticeable so they can’t be distracting but they still have to convey what they represent. The bear itself is more grey brown so it doesn’t stick out but it has some green details similar to the giraffe so that it looks alien and experimented on. What had to be noticeable is the sign it’s holding, especially the text. It was hard finding bright colours that were still pastel, but I think the little more brighter orange and the green text still fits with the other colours. There was some debate on it being the wrong choice but we are in the last hours and we can’t really change it now. Still the bears look cute, weird and serve their purpose so I guess that’s a success.
This project has been fun although stressful and I see it more as a learning experience than anything else. If the game doesn’t turn out as expected it won’t really matter in the end, fail faster as they say. I will take everything I have learnt from this project and take it to the next to make a better game.

With only one week left to gold there is only polishing left to do. It’s mostly small stuff like adding background visuals, fixing all the menus and cleaning up animations.
This week’s polish will be of the giraffes attack animation. Funny thing is the first one hasn’t yet been implemented in to the game, so it’s not really replacing anything at this point nevertheless it had to be changed at some point.
So the giraffe shots balls of lightning from its horns making them some sort of teslacoils, which is a pretty cool idea. So how would that look? Maybe something like a lightning passing between the horns creating the ball, well the sprite is in 2D so it hard to make out if something would pass between them. Still showing the ball being created between the horns would work.
So I did just that, a small ball forming that then later creates a shockwave when it is launched, add some lightning effects and you have a very basic attack animation for a mutated space giraffe. The first animation was thrown together pretty quick, just something that we could use early on. But since we never used it I guess all of this doesn’t matter.

Now for the updated version, even though it hadn’t been implemented yet i knew that it wouldn’t cut it. See even though the animation is fine there is one major flaw, its way too small, not only in size but in impact. It has a pretty muted colour pallet so it’s hard to see that added with it not being bigger than the giraffe’s eye makes it hard to see or notice. So the first thing was to make it bigger, have it be the size of the avatars head. Then just make it brighter more electric blue than the grey blue that was on the last one, adding some with in the middle really helps with the glow feeling proven best by the light sabers from star wars. Then for some extra flash add a reflecting light on the glass bowl helmet add you have an updated version of a rather lackluster animation.

I probably should have just done this animation from the start and save me the trouble of remaking it in the first place, but then I might not have had anything to write about this week. there is still more things to be polished and the deadline is closing quick so I’ll probably have enough to write about.

The Beta version off the game is here and that means that we are no longer allowed to add any more assets, which means even less for the graphics team to do these coming weeks.
So for this week I’m currently working on (since of this time of writing it is not yet finished) something that might not make it in to the game, that would be an opening cut scene. Well if it won’t make it in to the game we might use it as some sort of trailer instead. It’s not going going to be a cell animation since that would take allot more time than necessary and would be way out of my skill range. Instead if it ever gets animated it would be more like a parallax animation, at least that’s what I think it’s called.

This is the first draft of what it would look like. I started out making it just in gray scales to get a feel of the silhouettes, shades and lighting; it also helps set the general mood of the scene and makes choosing colour for the scene a bit easier, for me at least.
Now the story for the game is very simple, giraffe and family get’s kidnapped by aliens, giraffe get’s experimented on and gets turnt in to a mutant cyborg, giraffe escapes and goes on a quest to save said family. So getting the rough story out wasn’t that hard, I did skip some scenes early on but I wanted to get the feeling down first more than anything else.
So now that all that was done it was time to start getting the basic colours for the different setting down (this is the thing I’m not done with yet and that is why I’m only showing the first scene with colour). I wanted warm colours in the beginning to evoke a pleasant feeling. Luckily for me the African sunrise looks exactly like that with very strong reds and oranges that create strong silhouettes. Next comes the alien kidnapping, the aliens main source of light is green throughout the game so something sickly and poisonous to get a sense of danger and disgust. I did think about having a blue light for the abduction similar to classic abduction scenes but it didn’t fit with the designs we had and might end up cliché.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten with this so far but, I’l probably get it done soon and hopefully it will be used in someway.

 

This week I’ve been working with redesigning the three basic enemy types in the game. I was never really happy with the first designs, they were something I threw together fast so that we could have something to work on at least. It started with remaking the second enemy type, nicknamed “shotgun minion” .

Problem was that the design was way too simple, even for our game, and a bit boring to look at. It didn’t leave much to create fun animations with either. So that’s’ were my thought process started, “how could I animate this in the most interesting way”? What if it looked like an actual shotgun, with pump action and everything? I still wanted to keep the original design in there somewhere so it wouldn’t be a complete overhaul of it. So it would keep the same colours and keep somewhat of the same silhouette, with the larger front and the sleeker back, it should be similar yet different.

I tried to make the ship more riffle looking in its shape with the back looking more like a shotgun stock then the car design of the original design. I also added a revolver cylinder to emphasize the gun feel of the ship a bit more.
I am considerably happier with this design than the first one. It not only works better but it looks more interesting and was way more fun to do and animate than previous ones. I think I still managed to keep the simple style we wanted to have while style making the enemies look a bit more lethal and dangerous. Although I haven’t talked about them in this blog post I did redesign them with the same though process as this one, and I’m happy with the outcome of those too. Even with the still lingering problem of “not enough things to give the artists something to do” it’s been a rather productive week, I hope for more of those.