Sunday 20 March 2016

End Sprint 1 - A Good Guy, Some Bad Guys, And a New Guy

Another fortnight gone, another sprint comes to a close. Mostly with lots of rendering.

Cutting it close to the deadline (within hours), I completed all of the sprint goals and a bit more.

Some Housekeeping


I realised that a fair amount of those who read this blog aren't as savvy with development terms as I am. So to bring everyone up to date:

  • A sprint is a two week work cycle where you set certain goals and work hard on them for the entirety of the sprint. It's a sort of motivating workflow so you can do what you need for your project without spending more time than necessary on them.
  • Base Meshes are low detail 3D models (usually of characters or anything that will be animated) that are used as starting points (so that more can be added to them later if they need more detail) without breaking the workflow.
  • Polys are an easier way of saying polygons. (One-sided 2D planes in a 3D space used to create just about everything in anything 3D).
  • Tris are the triangles that make up polys. (Polys are more often than not rectangular, it's a bit easier for computers to break that up into 2 triangles.)
  • Unity is the game engine that is being used for the new project. 
So with all of that out of the way, let's get to the post.

A Good Guy,



The Templar character was one of the first characters that came to mind when designing; he was also a fun character to make as far as the base mesh is concerned. His equipment (a sword and shield) will likely be a job for next sprint.

Some Bad Guys,



The fun thing about demons is that you can go wild with designs. I wanted to play around with ridiculous proportions and I think it came out really well.


This little anklebiter wasn't in the sprint goals but I managed to make him up in time.

And A New Guy


Alex and I came to the decision that if we were having medieval and historical warriors as player characters, we needed to have a Viking.

Don't mind my footnotes

He will come around in future sprints.

Moving Forward


I'm keeping my sprints fairly simple due to the amount of work I'm doing outside of this project. For Sprint 2, I'm hoping to achieve:

  • Hooking up all current models so they will be ready for animation
  • Concepts of environments 
  • Base meshes of some environment assets (rocks, trees, misc things you would see lying around in the Underworld/Hell)
  • If there is time - Readying models for texturing
That wraps it up for this sprint. I'm feeling pretty confident after seeing what's come from the past fortnight and I'm looking forward to the next sprint.

See you in 2 weeks!
Jason

Sunday 6 March 2016

Late Start to the Year

Starting Up Again...


After a failed project to functionality problems and finally settling into a work routine, I'm going to start posting regular updates every fortnight to document the results of my sprints. With any luck, it'll keep the momentum up for my future projects.

The Project That Got Away


My old TAFE friend (now colleague), Alex and I had an idea for a game that was similar to FTL, but with free movement of your ship in space and more resources to micromanage. The player would need to find their own way around space while trying to make a living without dying. 

The project was scrapped after a month or so after discovering that the functionality we were aiming to put ingame was impossible to achieve in Unity.


A design for the Human Medium sized ship

The New Project


Soon after scrapping the project, we did some brainstorming for something more achievable coming straight from finishing TAFE. Our first thought was to do something simple, yet fun to play and fun to make. 

We settled on making a hack and slash game. They are simple enough to make and lots of fun to play if done well. My approach to this project is to make an art style that is stylised and exaggerated while still being readable.
Concept sketch for a playable Templar character.
Playable Samurai character.
Gorilla like demon enemy
The very basic premise is that the player takes control of a type of warrior from history (Templar knight, Samurai, etc) and somehow finds themselves in Hell. Players then have to either survive until they are overwhelmed, or find a way out to get back to the world of the living.

Moving Forward


This sprint is for developing the art style. I'm aiming to get a basic idea of the style and make the base meshes for one of the playable characters and some enemies. If I complete those, I'll work on environment assets for later down the track.

See you in 2 weeks.
Jason