Mad Castle Games Week 10

Post alpha

I feel really good about how our presentation went. Lucid shift seemed to have the densest game play out of all the games presented (I may be somewhat biased). Unfortunately we had that cache issue with unreal so some of our art assets weren't brought into the build presented. On the other hand our game had a grand total of 0 crashes, we were able to play through to the end, and the bugs were not game breaking. I'm pretty proud of what we presented.


What I am currently working on:

• Finishing and polishing UI and menu screens
• All 2D marketing materials
• Some texture fixes
• Preparing for fruity drinks

Mad Castle Games Week 9  

The week before Alpha. Oh joy. Bring on the coffee.






What I did this week:

• Textured the soda fountain
• I actually struggled UVing this model. I have never had to texture a multi-piece object before. It took me some trial and error. In the end I re-did the UV's of the entire mesh 4 times.
• 
  

• Made a wrapping paper texture for Kyle

• Textured the antagonist character...again. The antagonist model had to be UV'd for a second time to fix and issue with the original mesh so my previous work had to be scrapped. 

•  Created an animated material for the antagonist character to make it appear as if his body is made of smoke.
• This is achieved using a smokey texture on the opacity node with two lerped panners for variability. To keep the texture from  just being the swirling smoke and losing definition I placed a black version of the antagonist texture on the emission node. This keeps the structure of the mesh and the texture visible through the swirling opacity smoke. 
• in game the antagonist is supposed to have a smoky particle effect emitting form the skeleton as well. 
  

• Sadly some decals I made to be placed around the levels during this week were scrapped because of an issue with our shader. The shader was washing out the decals colors to almost grey scale in every case. 

• Adding a normal map to the decals did seem to help but even with that they were too light to be noticed or used especially in our darker levels.
• Here are some of the graffiti decals for example. 
• Not shown are environmental textures like rust, and water damage

•  Made adjustments so some textures throughout the week. Handled small issues and also re-did our button so that it looks less like a land mine (my bad)
  

What I did at 2 am Sunday morning:

 Some how a logo for the game, menu screen ,and UI buttons slipped through the cracks of our design schedule. . .  I received a message over slack some time around 1am from our art lead asking me if I could try to come up with something by 5 am (just in time for our final alpha build). Through the power of music and instant coffee I got this much done in time.

Logo, menu, menu screen, and UI will be updated for our RTM build.

Mad Castle Games Week 8

  I made the group aware that I had a family event scheduled for this week early on into the project. While I would like to say I was still productive during this time, if I am being honest my work flow dried up faster than water in the desert. During this time I was still in contact with my group, and did submit some textures and texture fixes. During the flights to and from Nevada I did get some vector work done for our burger joint assets.

Most notably the logo:

Mad Castle Games Week 7

Note I will be leaving on Thursday of week 7 and returning Friday of week 8 for a family event.


This week I:

• Worked on vector assets to be used throughout the Burger joint level

• Modeled and UV'd a soda fountain for burger level(textured on week 9)
• Textured Restroom sign for burger level 
• Textured money for burger level 
• Textured a coin for burger level
• Modeled UV'd and textured corner joint for menu sign

Mad Castle Games Week 6

Note I will be leaving on Thursday of week 7 and returning Friday of week 8 for a family event.

This week I:

• Took a day or two to recoup from vertical slice
• Modeled and UV'd Restroom sign for burger level 
• Modeled and UV'd money for burger level 
• Modeled and UV'd a coin for burger level
• Made some metal textures for the kitchen area

Mad Castle Games Week 5

This week I:

•  Modeled, UV'd, and textured the buttons for our gravity objects
• Modeled, UV'd, and textured our 2 stage lever
• Modeled, UV'd, and textured  factory dumpster
• Modeled, UV'd, and textured factory claw hammer
• Modeled, UV'd, and textured factory doors
• Modeled, UV'd, and textured factory exit sign
• Textured the antagonist character
• There was an issue with the mesh of the antagonist that broke its uv's. This caused the texture to be displayed in strange ways and so we had to scrap the texture and just paint the mesh a solid color.

on a side note I also modeled a toilet and sink. The were already assigned to others but because of a communication error I thought they were assigned to me. They were not used in game.

Mad Castle Games Week 4

Still kind of in the fuzzy front end as far as art goes. Still trying to nail down how far down the stylized rabbit hole we want to go.


This week I:

 Created the concept art for the factory level of Lucid Shift.

 I also created the color pallet and some concept art for the objects that would populate the level.

Made some tile-able textures for our factory level (here are a couple of them):

Mad Castle Games Week 3

  We still seem to be stuck in the fuzzy front end of things. Aesthetics wise we know we want to go with a cell shaded stylized look. A visual style similar to The Witness is our projected goal but with a dash of melancholy to it. We have a level list and the programmers are hard at work trying to get our gravity manipulation working.

We are having some friction with Unreal and perforce. I managed to get my assets in after watching Kevin's tutorial (Thank you Kevin): https://youtu.be/CZ458TrIs7U



This week I:

• Created the following assets in this image
• Tile-able carpet texture
• Tile-able popcorn ceiling texture
• Tile-able hard wood flooring texture
• Tile-able wall texture 
• Tile-able wall texture with crown molding
• Modeled and textured the orange waste paper bin 
• I textured our soda can objects 

•  And finally I helped assemble our Art Gallery for presentation the following week

Mad Castle Games Week 2

  We've settled on a concept for our game this week and are hashing out the specifics for our concept document. I now have a much better understanding of what a mire the fuzzy front end of game design is. Its been a slog trying to settle on the key features and ideas we want to present in the game. We've made it a democratic process so far but I am now questioning its ability to get things done in a timely manner. It seems for every idea we agree should go into our game there are 5 different ideas for how it should be implemented. Democracy may not be our ally here.

  Our decision to use Unreal, an engine 90% of us have never used before, also leaves me a bit skeptical as to whether or not we can achieve the gravity manipulation mechanic that was presented in my pitch.

That aside, this week I:

• Installed PV4- we are using Perforce as our source control for this game. 
• https://www.perforce.com/
•  Installed Unreal Engine 4.11-2- This will be the version we are using for our final game. 
• Created a hacknplan account for our project
• This is where we will post and keep track of assigned tasks
•  http://hacknplan.com/ 
• Created a Slack account  
• Slack will be our main communication hub. Its web and phone app, ease of access, feature set, and tools make it ideal for our groups communication needs. I am especially fond of how simple file sharing is on this platform.
• https://slack.com/
• Began a regiment of Unreal Engine tutorials.
• Learning the user interface, navigation, object manipulation, working with the content browser
• Learning the material editor- I am falling in love with Unreal's blue prints and materials. It seems much more intuitive than hard coding in Unity yet it still has the option to use your own code.
• Worked on concept document