Catalogue Entries

I'm also currently producing a set of 8 images with accompanying text which showcase my skills for a book of all final year designers at my uni - called a catalogue, strangely.

I've had to do a bit of thinking into exactly what I want to showcase, given my range and variety of strengths, but I've arrived at the followig 8 submissions:
- 3DsMax Mesh Design for 3D game engine export
- 3D game editor level design, with texturing and lighting work
- Flash project workflow, with audio work
- Past Flash project gameplay screenshots
- 3DsMax & Photoshop HUD design for a Flash game
- Flash game workflow, emphasis on coding
- Flash game workflow, emphasis on graphics design
- Video editing

I've finished the first image (click it for full size & quality):

Research Project

My main academic research project at uni is split into two parts: a written research document and a practical research part of the project.

For my written research documet I explored the use of humour and gameplay design in viral games. The document was limited to 4000 words so I wasn't quite able to fully explore the vast area I chose, but I gave it a good go!

I'm now at the beginning of the practical stage of the project, and a formal, finalised plan is due very soon. The specific question I will attempt to answer is along the lines of:

"Which specific uses of humour are best implemented in viral game design towards the fundamental goals of viral advertising?"

(These marketing goals being outlineed by Erik du Presse as 'getting seen, being remembered and changing the viewer's purchasing behaviour').

I'm getting quite into this academic mode of thiking - like a proper final year student! I'm very eager to get my result back from the research document; Having read and re-read the version I handed in, I feel I could have improved at by at least 8% in terms of argument and logical quality.
Oh well, fingers crossed!

A little motivation is sometimes needed

Here's a nice piece of inspirational encouragement I found:







...for when you get into thinking, as I have often, "What's the point?" remember that the ability to provoke emotion (to entertain etc) and deliver information using digital media whilst getting paid to do so is OBVIOUSLY worth the effort!

Platform 1 - Now With Audio!

Yes, I've sorted the online audio problem with Platform 1. Please have a go here:

Any comments you have would be appreciated, thanks!

Low Rev's - All done

Low Rev's has been presented and handed in. I will probably keep polishing it up though as I think it could be improved still, for example in the sound departent, and the analysis at the end of the game needs tweaking.

Have a play with it and tell me what you think:

A Nice Low Revs Milestone

I've solved the issue of the scrolling background and swtching to the next scene.
I'm having 2 images scrolling across the stage (behind the car and HUD), which snap back to the right after they've gone off 'stage-left'. These images' movement are controlled by 2 variables, when it's time to change to the next scene/level, the variables simply change to the next scene's images' instantce name.
Here's what it looks like at the moment:

Quick Update - Low Rev's

I've now got the drive system for the player's car pretty much perfected.

I decided to change the equations of the gears' rev's/speed relationships. I started with... if you imagine straight lines on a graph. The problem I found with these is there was very little 'revs overlap' between the gears and so changing gear could only take place in small speed ranges.
I changed them initially to quadratic equations but found that manipulating a sine function more straight forward.

Here's a graph of the 5 gears' revolution to power relationship. I've added a pretty gradient to illustrate the rev's:



(you can follow you finger up a line making 'niiiiiiiiiiiii' engine noises then changing up, moving left onto the next gear if you like)

The rev's and speed will redline at the top of each dial, the rev's needle shudders slightly added a nice realistic effect.

So now thats the player's unput (acceleration, brake and shift), gear set up and sequential gearbox done, I've also done the stalling function; if revs drop below 500rpm in any gear other than 1st the engine cuts out and you stop quite suddenly (as the gradual stop was taking too long to iron out bugs).

The car artwork is also taking shape but is far too basic to publish here yet!
Sit tight.

Low Revs

Final year work has started (and been going for a couple of weeks now) and I've hardly the time to blog. In this first term I have a simulated client project and a 3000 word written research project to do.

For my simulated client project I've was given 4 public awareness catagories to choose, and devise a games design-related multimedia proposal for. I chose do produce a Flash-based fuel economy driving simulator, to front a climate change advertising campaign.

I think I may have underestimated the complexity of creating a driving simulator from scratch. However I've put some hard early hours in and made some nice progress.
Here are some stills of the artwork side of things:



I've decided to create the HUD elements in 3D and then render out stills, in an attempt to improve the artwork side of my production. Although I was happy with the artwork in 'Platform 1', and I aimed to be in a cartoony style, the obvious 'Flash-drawn' look about it was slighty amateur.

My Work on Display

My first piece of work in the public eye. Very pleased about this, as firstly this FPS level is probably the biggest project I've ever worked on, certainly in terms of time and effort. Here's a snap of 'Play On' on a big screen:



A couple of minor issues though; rollerball mice are bad for playing, let alone showing off first person shooter-levels as most people are used to optical or ball mice. Also, as I helped set up the equipment I thought that to positioning a screen, keyboard and mouse for all audiences is near impossible. Being 6'2" I found the screen was too close to my face, but had to remember that most people would be looking up at the screen, hopefully in awe!

I'll post a video tour of my level here soon too.

Oooh, results!

Our year 2 results have been published online! Excitment!

Despite a very average self-critical essay, my games design coursework brought my average up to a first! Fantastic.

I thought I'd celebrate:



(this was of course, not my only form of celebration at the end of the year)

More Messing About

Well, I'd like to call it 3D practise work, so I will. I've been creating a realistic Amstel beer bottle in 3DsMax. Here are a few close up's of the custom Photoshop detail and a 3DsMax video render of the bottle spinning nd rolling slightly towards camera on a marble bar surface:

Free Time Doodling

I've been doodling in Flash again, just visualising ideas floating around. I came up with this cartoon skull:



After letting my mind wander firther, I decided to make it lip-sync to something. Maybe a quote from a movie or TV show? A sample from some stand up I like? Or make him sing-a-long to a song? Yes. An evil-looking skull singing might look quite amusing, I thought.
After seperating the movable parts into manipulatable layers, exporting about 10 different facial poses, editing them in Premier Pro to match the words of a 90's dance song I had, which has had a bit of a come back in the clubs at the moment (well the ones in Nottingham I've been to anyway), and adding some club, dance-esque light effects, here's the final video. Enjoy!:

Yes!

Finito! Well, almost. After silly hours playing catch-up on my schedule i'm pretty much finished. I added all my cover objects today, pretty much perfected the lighting and inserted all of the weapon, health and shield pickups. All that's left to do is test it with bots and tweak the placement of objects, pickups and possibly lights. The finishing tasks I need to do, like putting the map (and packages?) on CD i'll do tomorrow before the hand-in.

I'll be surprised if I have enough time to do much tweaking tomorrow though, as it's operation essay now before the deadline at 2pm on Wednesday. Oh dear - not much time!

Here's a couple of screenshots of the (pretty much) finished map:

Oh fffffffffffffiddlesticks!

I decided to remind myself about backing up computer-based work today. Remembering I was due for a backup, not having done one for 4 days, I made a note to do it that night. Then, upon saving my working file, Unreal Editor crashed. Imagine my delight when trying to load my saved map, already an hour behind where I should be with my progress, it crashed again, confirming my suspicions that the file was corrupted.

32 hours work lost, including all my lighting, half of the texture placement, scaling and rotation including 4 staircases and 2 rounded staircases, and a few static meshes lost. (well, 32 hours ish, I am unable to type 30 at the moment as it's not a power of 2 and thus my fingers cannot type it)

Oh well, as it's the 2nd time around I've improved on my first effort and done it in a quarter of the time. But now I'm a day down on a solid work schedule with an entire essay to fit in. On with the show!

Here's something nice I found at the end of operation catch-up; textured and lit static meshes vs converted mesh brushes. On the left is my queen chess piece additive brush, created from the static mesh, textured with white marble (the colour which shows up poor detail best). On the right is the static mesh normally inserted. Clearly, there's no need to convert meshes into brushes.

Mood Lighting

I've put a LOT of hours in every day this week, and got a lot done. Too much in fact, to be worth making the effort to blog about it all. So I'll show just a taster.

Quite a lot of my time has been spent lighting, mostly due to the fact that my laptop takes ages to compile a playable test map. I've added some small purple spotlights to the walls of the poker room for some mood lighting. I think it looks great. I then decided to make an actual light static mesh, so the light looks like it's actually emitting from something, rather than out thin air.

Texturing

A nice little discovery:

After a few attempts at texturing and getting the hang of patterns and shadows etc, messing about with the way things look in 2D vs 3D, I've found a nice way of creating a mock-up bump map. If you add a layer of very dark speckeled shapes, relevant to the texture (shadows) and a very light one (highlights), it looks a lot more detailed than just letting Photoshop try to do it for you.

Here on the left is my 1st (lazy) attempt, and on the right is the revised version:

Getting there!

More progress. All the chess pieces are made, and UVW uwrapped in 3DsMax so the black and white marble textures don't look too stretched. I've made the backgammon board in Unreal architexture for simplicity, and a dice in 3DsMax:



I've spent several days starting to texture and light my rooms. I'm getting used to adding detailed textured to surfaces in Photoshop - that's nicely rewarding when put into 3DsMax and Unreal Ed, and actually looks like what it's supposed to, as opposed to just a colour. For the main building's architexture, I wanted to go for a classy, vegas look. So after a quick look around some online casino tours and videos of the Timesplitters 2 level 'Nightclub', which I remembered as having a similar colour scheme I had in mind, I knocked up a few wall tiles. Then made them blue for the poker room:



The poker table felt didn't take too long, having gotten used to textures. The main time expenditure was deciding on the font. Heres the two mostly finished rooms. The lighting is mostly temporary at the moment, and the objects have yet to be strategically placed, but you can get a feel of what they'll look like:

Got it!

After putting quite a few hours in today I think I've cracked the technique of creating a 3DsMax mesh, a Photoshop texture and combining them to make a whole object in Unreal Editor, to a decent standard.

I've created my poker chip mesh and all the coloured textures i need. I tried photographing real chips but the level of detail was far too poor, so I copied the design and created them in Photoshop instead. Here's a couple of piles of chips. The white stack is the size I'm going to use for a 1-jump-high platform:



One problem I did find was that exporting from Photoshop to DDS file, for some reason, lead to several patches of black pixels being placed in very inconvenient places! Fortunatly, as far as I am aware, and that my test runs have shown, Unreal Editor can import BMPs as UVW template textures as well. So that's what I've done. Here's a little example of the PSD looking nice, and the exported DDS, not:



Another issue I've noticed today is that just in the little test room I've made there are no less than 1200 polygons. So unless my level is less than 80 times larger than this tiny space, I'll need to reduce the number of polygona in my poker chip stacks. (my upper limit is 100,000 poly's)

Fantastic

Problem solved!
A little issue I was having with texturing my playing card static mesh. First, convert it into a brush like I did for the chess piece. Secondly, make sure the texture package containing the unwrapped, UVW map, DDS file I've used to texture the card, is SAVED!

Progress

Good stuff.
The decision to not go to the pub has proven to be a good one. Not only have I successfully imported that ellusive static mesh, but converted it into a brush and textured it.



This also highlighted an issue with my knight chess piece 3DMax mesh. I think when I attempted to mirror the horse's ears, I actually mirrored the whole thing and put 2 clones of the mesh on top of each other, but in exactly the same space. Apart from breaking the laws of virtual physics, this has taught me to build things properly, and not be lazy, as it often comes back to cause problems. So keep it simple all the way through, and you'll come out smiling!

Oh good, problems!

The problem:
I've expectedly run into problems exporting from 3DsMax (2008 version) to UnrealEditor (2004 version).

Symptoms:
I've built, in Max, my playing card mesh, the object which will act as a building block to most of my level's obstacles, barriers, walls etc, and built one of the chess pieces.
Having downloaded the 'ActorX' plugin to export these meshes from 3DsMax, inserted my target folder's path and mesh's file name, all I generate is a PSK file. Unreal Editor imports ASE files as static meshes.
I can export as an 'ASE, ASCII scene export' file from Max, not using the ActorX utility, and then import that file into Unreal Ed. This appears as an un-textured mesh. I can then select the texture seperatly by importing the DDS I used in Max, into the texture browser and copying that path into the static mesh browser. (phew) BUT - the texture dissappears at run time.

My Solution:
Ignore it for now and texture the chess piece with a nice bit of wood from my desk, coloured black and white in Photoshop:

Re-Design

Having re-read the brief, I decided to scrap the idea of 5 platforms and try and actually stick to the guidelines this time by fitting my ideas and theme into 5 ROOMS as the brief clearly states.
The pool table still is the main feature, acting as a central hub to draw players into the middle together. The backgammon board is the main feature in the room to the north, poker in the south, chess in the east and ...probably a mixture of all odd games in the western-most room as I can't think of another specific theme yet.



So having sketched out my 5 rooms on a basic plan, built a mockup in Unreal Editor and run around it a few times, it became very clear it was both too flat and too small. The re-sketch, re-design and re-build put the pool table hall and random room on a middle floor with the pool pockets dropping down into a lower floor containing the chess room. The backgammon and poker rooms formed the top floor and at the moment, both overlook the pool table. Although I think this may change as it makes being in the pool room (the room to which I am trying to draw players), a very bad idea:

OK, let's plan

Thats quite enough sketching for now. I have a solid(ish) theme. Now for the level layout. I need 5 seperate places. Here's draft #1:

A free-standing pool table, with balls and cues and a chess board as cover and ramps, is surrounded by 3 bars tools and a poker/general cards table, on which there are chips and cards providing cover. The 5 areas act as platforms; if you fail to use the jump pads well enough to land on them, you fall to your death.

Also, I was thinking about some environmental dangers on the pool table, where either the balls are movable and can crush players, or the cues can pot you into the holes and down into oblivion.

To the Sketch Pad!

I am not a great fan of sketching and being 'arty', but to make a big 3D environment I suppose I have to break out the pen and paper first.

After descovering that this doodling thing isn't so bad, and brainstorming with possible themes and objects I could place in rooms to provide cover, I landed on the idea of scaling everything up, 'Worms' or 'Micro Machines'-style, to make the player feel small. After all, why do a normal map? Everybody does normal, realistic maps.

The theme I'm thinking of consists of 10 foot high board game pieces and playing cards, resting on each other to form bunkers, walls and various FPS architecture and objects to fight around. I thought of building big chess pieces etc, in 3D Studio Max to import as static meshes ino Unreal Editor.

Here are a few of the evolving doodles, sketches of possible object formations and a quick possible 3DsMax knight piece:

New Project!

Right. New term - new project. The (brief) Brief:

"To design, build and refine a simple, playable, Unreal-based level."

We've also got restrictions on the level size, number and size of textures, level of lighting and total polygons.

I'm quite eager to get started on this one, even though I generally prefer the code side of things to the 'arty' side. This, when finished, could look impressive. Also, being able to run around, shooting people inside a piece of your work is a very apealing prospect.

Bring it on.

FINISHED!!!

Phew! Flash game coursework all done (I hope) and handed in. Great.

Reflection:

Hard work! First 'proper' large project in Flash, or anything really since college. At lease, it felt like it was. Most of the hard work was coding; a couple of solid week's work. I'm very happy with the result, however if given the time, I'd probably extend the game somehow to incorporate moving obstacles - a feature I had to leave out of my design due to my solution for the collision fuction - it would have taken an extra few days at least to code in seperate moving objects and then swap them in for 'collision-able' bitmap images AND THEN make them move and stick to the real objects. Doable, but time-consuming, and probably wasn't worth killing myself for to hand in as part of THIS project.

I'm pleased I started to 'properly' work a tad earlier than I traditionaly do on coursework projects - probably from experience; I knew coding somthing this big COULD turn into a nightmare and thigs could go wrong at any time - looks like I'm learning! This early start was also useful as the weekend before the deadline I had commited to a lads weekend away in Blackpool! A decision I would have definatly regretted if I had huge amounts to do; but I planned my time out and stuck to my schedule and only had the write-up to do in the 2 days after the weekend, before the deadline. Result!

Oh, and I again left the naming of my game to the last day or two as I think it's a bit pointless, and again it has a s**te name. I know people think of your game's title first when they think of the game, but I just wasn't feeling particularly creative.


Anyway, click this icon to see the finished article:

10 Days To Go!

Right, 10 days left. Where do we stand?

I have relaxed my regular blog updates a little as coursework is baring down on my free time like a very hungry lion on a nicely plump gazzelle with no legs; for this I apologise.

Since my last post I have created a 'wobble' ability for the man, coded and re-coded (many many times) and perfected (hopefully) the function. I've also created a placeholder HUD wobbleometer and it's evolved bigger brother, the finished guage:

That's all you're getting for now. I have recently discovered I have a lot more work to do than i thought the other day - I have to get on with creating classes for display objects on my game. Lots of hassle, especially considering AS3 is oretty much a new language to me - which is very annoying because coding isn't. I can do this stuff, I know how it works and enjoy solving problems and getting through it.

But these things happen - I'll have to struggle through it. Fingers crossed I get everything I want to done by next Wednesday. I still ahve to; sort out the entire collision physics engine, all the sounds and it looks like I'll have to forget about the 'pickups' I wanted to have, (which may not really add much to the game, so thats ok).

Silly Walk

Another quality seminer on 3D animation! We've done walking and walk cycles before, this time we did walking over obstacles etc. Here's my attempt of a box walking up a wall, across a ceilling and into another wall, rendering it unconscious and falling off onto the floor.



A nice attempt at slapstick.

Coursework - A bit of HUD

Well the coursework update went quite well yesturday, so I thought I'd do a bit more.
After getting the speedometer code working, I swapped in a proper visual version for my crappy little placeholder version:

Placeholder version:

1st Proper version:

I realise that I might change this again because of general theme alterations I might make later, which probably suggests I should leave all artwork to the end. So I think I will.

Coursework Update

A little update on my coursework this term...

I've neglected to share much of my plans, notes, sketches, psudocode, problem solving etc... on here, as of yet. No reason really, just havn't. So this could be quite a big post as I am in a blogging mood.

I found that during the day, (on a courseworking day), when my brain is active, I can cope with a few hours of coding. Then in the laid back evenings, the less important artwork gets done. Here are some early flash-based doodles, some of which I may use on the train platform as 'bump-into-able' objects:


And some early doodling on avatars, heros, charactersand general men from the top, I found that a hat is easier to draw than a head, no matter what haircut you decide on. Hence, my cowboy:


And a couple of floor tiles:
I'm a good few weeks into the time limit, now about 2.5 weeks from the deadline: A crucial point I think in the project. From this point I either continue at this rate and scrape through with an average mark or accelerate into a good to excellent mark (hopefully, and if I have the motivation & will power). I think from today's progress I'm very willing to do the latter. I like the sudden increase of work in courseworks - it feels a nice change to properly get your teeth stuck in and solve problems etc.

And to finish, a couple of 'W' initial/logo doodles/designs and my name in eggs:

Very Fishy Fingers

OK I came back - A lot sooner than expected, and had another little play:



I could go a lot further with this - waste of time? - making it bob in the water and swim forwards and possibly addimg some bubbles and camera blur in AfterEffects... but I wont... yet

Fish Fingers

A very nice little seminar about space warps in 3DsMax...



I like the motion on this. Very simple to do, tweak and polish. If only animating other motions was as easy. Adding a few bends to the body and maybe more waves on the other fins would make this look better still... if I had the time/will to, I would. Buy hey, I might come back to this and have a play later.

Coursework!!

O dear. It's that time again. I've just about got my head around what I've got to do over the next few weeks. It's a LOT.

We were given the brief a couple of weeks ago and things were going well in terms of idea generation. I had about 5 main concepts for my Flash game, 2 of which I felt excited about and could be very strong; one top-down viewed Flash version of British Bulldog and another, again top-down viewed game about a guy (or girl) struggling along a train platform with arms full of suitcases etc.

I had a few weaker ideas including one side-scrolling game featuring medieval, high-speed, helpless maiden-rescuing. In which the user played as a knight on a kind of stretch-stead (like the limo) and lept over dragons, jumped up to burning towers etc, collecting as many wenches on their stead as possible in a certain time limit. As much as this game amused me, I could see a few problems with the gameplay and potential repetitvness of the tasks.