o yeah ... they are so soft and round............... and covered in fur :D. Now that your mind has been dragged through the gutter I have a new arrival this week. She is the new mascot dog of BBG Lexie the Lab. Hey if top gear got a dog why not us. But more then Lexie another arrival hit our studio this week... or should I say half the studio as i am still downloading it as I write this up. Metal Gear Solid 5 and boy I am dying to play it with only 5 hours left on the clock to get it i am itching to dive right into that box and just sit still for hours. But enough of personal updates its time for business stuff. I have been busy over the last few days finishing off the boss scene for the fire temple. I have a few more meshes and stuff to add in but the overall design is in and fine. All the textures are done and really all that's left is to do is lighting and as I said add the few extra decoration meshes that will be made when I am finishing off level's in the Fire Temple.
Me and Dan also worked on the white boxing off the next temple which now needs one or 2 more level's just to add some more combat driven area's in as the next temple so far is very puzzle and movement based so a few combat breaks will never harm the game play experience. So onto what I am doing right now today. Well I have spent the last while concepting up a lot of new variants for the GUI and see how we can improve its looks and stuff and I think we have hit a nice new ground to call home. We are going for more of a sectioned health bar(solid 1 hit chunks) rather then a health bar that drains depending on a number. This simplifies a lot of our game with damage. No more guessing how many hits a certain enemy might kill you in when you know an enemy takes off one block and u have 2 left you will be left with one. Much cleaner and better system if you ask me. This will also be used for the mana bar as well. I have more to tell but you will have to come back Sunday and read my musings. Until Then!!! Have A Great Day ! I had to put that video up with my title. So this has been a busy week for me as I am not moving into the fire temple again to finish it off before I make the move to the next connection between temples. I have concepted out the boss battle scene with the Fire Guardian. I have designed it so that the battle will take place with the old city in the back ground that is slowly sinking into the molten core of the fire temple. We may even animate that a building collapses into the lava mid way through the battle. This battle will require the player to learn how to get over the giant fire guardian that will rush towards you. But I wont spoil how for people who will be playing the game. I have started modelling out the area and its all coming together quickly and should be finished by the end of the week. Me and Dan also finished off the Air temple last night by setting up the last 2 levels in it . So next thing for us to white box is the fall from the temple and then into the next one (Water). Yes we are having a water temple hopefully it wont be as infamous as some water temples...... am i right ocarina of time -_- I also created a rolling lava log type thing that will be a new way to traverse pools of lava but that will be revealed at the end of the week. Cant spoil all the good stuff already now can I?
Until then my blogarino's Have Fun! Wow things are busy. I have been jumping from job to job in the last few weeks as we are finishing off the first section of the game. So I have a lot of modelling, unwrapping, texturing, lighting and building the levels before sending them to Dan so he can make them work. Cause you know ...... levels actually functioning need to be a thing :D. I also upgraded to the new unity over the weekend, this did not go too well for me as I was hit with warning about .dll files missing and all the fun bugs that no one else was hit with even after another fresh install it stood the same. I did manage to fix the biggest bug by just opening and closing a few times and ignoring all warnings as I am a man who likes to live on the edge. But with one level left to model and texture we are well on way for having this section complete and ready for play testing. I have also been in contact with our sound guy and wow even from the "rough" tracks we are blown away and cannot wait to hear it all in game. Hopefully by the end of this week we will have a special announcement so stick around guys !!! Until Sunday musings have fun! and sorry about the short blog today but lots to do!! Hey guys! Bit of a rushed blog from me today as I have tons to do. This week is the week where I am building out the white boxed levels and finalizing the designs and textures for the forest. So far I am up to level 2 going onto 3 later today with a total of 6 I should be finished this week and onto decorations. The game is looking like its coming together pretty well with sprawling hill/mountain going into the back ground. The lava needs to be textured and then onto some grass and the trees and this scene will be nearing completion.
I am also going to do some effects for the demon's later on today to make them look more smokey/gooey. I have also got to model out a tiny tiny tiny air temple for an upcoming vista view. That should only take about an hour to do and will add a dramatic feel of scale to the game as players advance. Any way if I am going to stay on track for time I better wrap this up! Sorry about the short blog today but hey trust me guys it will be worth it in about 2/3 weeks when we can show more and more finished work. I will tell you all how i got on with this Sunday! Until then Have Fun!
Hey guys! Welcome to another mid week musings with me. Today I will be talking about the basics of animation and the power of having good solid reference material to work from. Not only from an movement point of view but also a timing point of view. Don't worry I wont make it boring.
So as many of our loyal followers will know I have been re creating our lead character to match up with my increased skills and to give the game a bigger graphical boost. This I had to recreate the rig and animations from scratch. Which is fine as the main character was literally a place holder up until now. After creating the mesh and the new shaders it was time to animate. I looked up many references for natural movement using videos from youtube and other game characters.
The above video is a video I used to help guide me on timing and movement of the walk cycle. This was uploaded by EndlessReference. They have alot of really useful reference for animators.
Looking at their stuff on run animation was not pushed enough for what I was looking for. Of course I could just use a normal run and push the effect my self but to make sure it would look good before I did it I went looking for other game characters that have a run animation that I was looking for.
And this guys run animation was waaay more of what i was looking for. Watching videos of his animations taught me enough of how to push the run enough to make Evelyn look and feel a little bit lighter on her feet.
The next issue was timing I personally like to do walk and run animations in 24 frame chunks. This rounds it up to a nice cycle per second and allows for clean flexibility, for things like a speed boost or a slow down time effect.
Above is a selection of key frames from the run animation. By pushing her to this extreme(even though its not super extreme) makes the character look like she is propelling herself in the air. As giving her pure Air time where nothing touches the ground makes her fell and look lighter as a heavier character running at the same speed would not be as bouncy.
Now if we decide at a later time we want to push this a bit more I may include a tiny bit of squash and stretch on certain frames or give her a few extra frames of hang time in the air. But for now this run animation is in the game and looking fine. So far the animation count that is complete on the main character alone is over 30 with another 20 or more to come in the next few weeks. Apart from that I have been working on new characters this week. These are demons that will be the main staple of enemies in the game out side temples. More animal shaped enemies will be inside the temple to stick with the game's Lore.
So far we have 3 varieties with the Grabber Flamer and Sprinter. No prizes to guess whats what given the body shape. Next for them today is to be textured effects added to them and rigged. This is a busy busy week and hopefully will have these 3 bad boys ready for in game by the end of the week.
That being said this is not the only things I have been creating this week I have also created an effect for the ground pound.
Its a complex enough effect with 3 particle systems running in tandom. Hopefully with the screen shake and other effects this will look like a big impact on the world.
I am back in the seat for Sunday musings so come back and have another read then. Have Fun!
Hey guys! The changes are still going along nicely and I have Evelyn all ready to move and groove to the beats of a battle! She now has a new shader and all Unity 5 FTW!
Evelyn was so excited she did a selfie shot. But now I have moved along onto re-doing some of the effects. The effects we had originally were particle effects with tons of sprites happening at once this could cause some problems for lower spec Pc's and laptops. This is a concern as we want alot off people with varying machines be capable of playing the game at the same frame rate as higher spec beast machines.
So to do this I am creating my own effects shaders one I worked on yesterday was an effect for the ground slide.
It took longer then I want to admit to get the fade on the back of the mesh working with the shader. Colour and texture can be swapped out depending on what surface the player does it on.
I am going to make 2 more effects to go along with this that will make it look and feel more satisfying. Such as some debris from the ground as we slide and maybe a bit of a dust effect using the same method as above to also save on Runtime. I am also going to start testing vert painters in unity so we can paint the world in game so we can use the same mesh but texture them all differently to give a better feel of uniqueness in the game. Well until Sunday that's all I really can say :D Have fun guys Time has come to start polishing the early levels or Reprieve! and I am on a quest to make the game look as good as possible. Things are going to start moving fast with texturing modelling rigging and animating but I think I am up for it. This week II have been finishing off the rig on Evelyn by making custom controller shapes and limiter's that limit the amount of rotation that some bone can do. A good example of this is the jaw bone. Cause lets face it it should only rotate a certain amount to open the mouth I have also been starting to texture some of the early scenes. Everything will be hand painted in such a manner to match the sword pack. So things will look as good as possible. We have been looking into vertex painters for unity as we think this will be the best option for painting the world in more unique detail.
More info on all this on Sunday's blog. Be sure to come and have read! Yes that's right we are finally back into game development. It feels good to be back making games. We have had a great week so far getting back into the saddle for us both. I have been trying a new work time method. It is a simple enough method you work your hours based on a 1 hour long chunk this can be done any time during the day as long as you do all chunks. Anything work related counts including righting this blog :D. Using this method i have do alot of coding for our second pack's scene. This pack is a celebration pack ( lets face it we all have reasons to celebrate even small victories count). It is a particle pack containing many different confetti effects all hand animated. It will be either a free or really cheap pack on the asset store. I then went to Photoshop and started concepting our first mini battle stage which will be our Screen Shot Saturday so sadly i cannot show it here.....but .... I will show you the initial idea we had when just roughing out the battle!! Lets just say things look very much different and so so so much more epic then 3 trees XD.
You may also have noticed the font change on the site, this is from a request from on of our twitter followers who found it hard to read white on black and suggested a grey. Have to say I am loving the grey. Well that's it from me I will be back on Sunday with more news!!!!
Good day people! Early blog from me today as I am up since 8 waiting on the plumber...... and he is not a 4 foot tall Italian plumber with a red and blue motif, who has an undying passion for fungus!
So since the last time I did my blog a lot has happened we Are on the final 2 weeks of the Darts app just fixing a few issues and Dan is busy putting in a lot of features this week that I will cover in the Sunday Musings.
I have been very busy on another project, something that we hope will sell a bit and bring in a small bit of revenue. I have been busy creating weapons to be placed in Reprieve and we thought why not share the love so we are putting all the weapons that will show up in Reprieve onto the assets store! I am sure the loyal patrons will know off the weapon pack as it has been running along side of the Reprieve development for the last while. But this is probably the finale WIP I will post about the pack as of today it is officially finished and ready for submission. I am back in the coder seat this week as I had to set up the Demo scene (with help from Dan of course). This scene lets us cycle through the types of weapons brings up a contextual GUI that appears and disappears depending if a mesh is selected. I also put on a depth of field sensor that triggers upon selecting a mesh and brings it and only it into focus. The whole coding experience was great and pushed my self far more then what type of code I use to do at the start of this blog.
I have put controls in that you can spin the meshes using the keys A and D to rotate in both directions. I don't know what is wrong with our embedding today but its cutting off the right hand side of the action. So you all will have to wait until Saturday to give it a go for your self :D. But for now here is the final shield that was put in last night.
I also was busy fixing the check out table and creating the app icon. The final design was approved and features Brendan Dolan on the cover of the icon.
That's about it from me now. not feeling the best but hey whats the best way to deal with dizzy head and flu like symptoms..... That's right a plumber hammering away in the room behind me.
Any way people come back again for Sunday Musings where I will go more indepth and have more news and maybe a review of "The Field" which I am going to Saturday. Have Fun!
As the title said its time for me to start project jumping. I have completed all I can visually for the dart application all that is left for me to do is the App Icon, which I have to wait until the last week of development to do as we need a few other things in concrete first. This week I started off with animating the trophies the player can unlock as he/she can unlock.
I guess I will fill you in on a bit about what is going on in the animation. We could of went with a static trophy appears and just spins but that in itself is very lackluster and would not be visually appealing and could be done through code.
So I firstly set up that it scales in from nothing as the confetti starts to fall off screen so that when the confetti is visible that trophy will be on screen in all its glory. I looked at it just scaling in and thought it had no weight or presence on how it appears so I angled the trophy as it was scaling to give an appearance of motion for the trophy. This motion would of course need a reaction for the speed it would be moving so I gave it a slight over shoot and then a settle back into the right place to make it feel that it was thrown forward and the trophy is correcting its stance(as it were). The spin is just a basic spin.......what can i say............................................ any who then came the problem of we cant just have ti fade out or just vanish when its done its little turn on the cat walk. So lets get fun with it. By planning out that the trophy would leave the screen via the top I did a very rough and basic animation of it literally stop spinning and going up. Then breaking it down by adding weight to the animation by slightly pulling its position down before it rises up off screen. All well and good but it spins I hear you say so yes i grabbed the last key frame and cranked up the spin counter until it was a flaming puddle of awesomeness. But alas this is not enough on its own it seemed rigid and lifeless. So lets go back to the basic principles of animation!
The image on the left shows how static shapes do not work in animation. They just seem fake when in motion. Strange as it seems pushing the shape of shape(in this case a trophy) makes it look like it has force behind its movement and even a bit of sentient ............ the trophies may be able to think.... that's a strange thought. But I am getting side tracked, what I was meant to be saying is that I used these basic principles on the trophy leaving the screen giving it a feel of weight and propulsion.
More projects!
That's right with my part on hold for the darts app i am back in the world of weapon packs and this will be released asap as now I am finishing off the remaining few parts of the pack. This was a great learning experience in the art of low poly modelling and using a WoW style paint job on the weapons.
I also got the bring the weapons I have already finished into unity 5.Drools. But I think I may have over done it with the camera effects.... but I will let you guys decide.
Might as well finish off this section with a sneak peak of the texture I am mid way though already.
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Adrian's SpaceThis will be the place for the cool kids. I will be posting up the things i am doing in the games we make. Maybe a few tutorials if you lovelies would like some. Archives
February 2016
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