Week 12 & 13 updates

After a few gruelling weeks of spreading my work time on three subjects, the stress has dropped a little (which actually isn't a lot) and focus is directed more to the final games projects.
Here's the summary of weeks 12 and 13:

Phoenix - Completed texturing for Alpha, Bravo and Charlie using 128, 256 and 512 resolutions respectively. These models will not be zoomed in on at any time during gameplay. To compare scale, and Alpha on screen is approximately less than thumb size, and having tonnes of detail in the texture probably wouldn't be picked up with the human eye. We're still going for the papercraft art style, the renders display a variety of blue and black biro marks, office paper, staples and cardboard.

Meanwhile, here is Phoenix team member Mic Stuart's animation work on a couple of the enemies, still a work in progress I believe. Kapow!
As well as the rest of the team member's blogs:
Tyson Foster
Grant Davidson
Amjad Alkharsan

Call of Kebabhlu -  Started to knock down more backgrounds, seven down and three to go. The recent ones done are the underground mall, the creek with landed bathysphere and drain tile. Kylie Findlay has been working on the animations for the game, and it's super awesome to see the backgrounds come alive with drains leaking, stars twinkling etc. It's tedious stuff, but it will look great in game ^_^

 Industry: Phantastic Piggy - Gordon had approved all the character designs and required a concept of gameplay, game over screen and title screen for the game, pretty much saying "go forth and make it look epic". And so it was done, by week 13 I had given him all the work from the very first project, to the mech game, and Phantastic Piggy ready to be marked.

Here are the initial concepts...

...And the finals

 These past weeks have been such a shitstorm, so apologies for the lack of postings, but I will continue to put up completed work, and I may have to rant about what's going on later. However I think from now on I will try to add a little advice that I've learnt or been told from friendlies at the bottom of entries.
Hope it all goes to a good cause, I 'spose a little advice is better than none.






So Remember kids! Consider the size of any characters and levels that will be viewed on screen when you're texturing, it can save you a lot of time because you want need to go nuts on the details if, say a character, is only going to be an inch big on the screen. Stick to generic texturing resolutions (don't make them up or you'll piss people off) e.g. 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 etc.

Commence Arm Flailing

Crunch week just hit me in the face.
This week's to do list:

Phoenix:
-Texturing Alpha and Bravo enemies
-Clean up visuals

Call of Kebabhlu:
-Refine 7 more backgrounds

Phantastic Piggy:
-Finalise main character
-Farm animals character design
-UFOBBQ design
-Planets design
-Game over screen
-Cityscape design

BLOGS TO VISIT:
-Tyson
-Amjad
-Nic
-Kylie
-Dan

Phoenix Boss

Call of Kebabhlu Storm drain scene

Call of Kebabhlu bathysfear.

Call of Kebabhlu hallway scene

Week 10 Summary

The coffee's gone cold and tunnel vision sets in, and that light at the end is starting to become pretty bright.

So in the last couple of weeks, I've been busy doing a lot of things for a few teams. Here's the breakdown:

Phoenix:
-Glamour shots for Faffer bot npc, Alpha, Bravo and Charlie enemies:
These were to accompany the turnarounds, whilst finalising the additional details and colour palette for each one before going ahead with texturing.
 
-Designing the level's moving platforms:
As the player explores further into the facility, the environment will change from basic, bright, clean areas to potentially more dark, dirty and ominous spaces, hence three varieties of platforms were created to function differently to each other.

-Designing paper craft-esque prop designs of the standard crate and explosive barrel:
Simple as that. Referenced an origami water bomb ^_^

-Concepts for an end level Boss:
This has, and still is a good challenge. We agreed to it being more like an Alpha bot, but on a much larger scale, and the first concept I did pretty much locked in the scale, but instead of allowing it to have freedom of movement, we're going to integrate it into the part of the level it's located in, much like GLaDOS in Portal.

Check out Tyson's and Amjad's Blog to see final models, rigging demos and animations, among other Phoenix related awesome.

Platforms

Boss concept 01

Crate and Barrel

Faffer bot

Alpha

Bravo

Charlie

Call of Kebablhu:
- Background help:
The guys from C.o.K (hehe) asked me if I could assist them with their point 'n' click adventure game. Due to not having a dedicated artist on the job, they've done a super good job at working with what they have and become a neat team of Jack of all trades. They are going for a 'Beneath a Steel Sky' art style, whilst maintaining a humour only a wierdo would love...and in this industry, we're all wierdos. I've seen the gameplay's script and it's fantastic, all the best for these guys ^_^

The Citadel

Industry Project (Gordon Moyes):
-Briefing room concept: After getting the last bit of feedback from Gordon, I went ahead and completed it with additional high res photos. Gordon approved it and Amjad is keen to model it.

-New character concept: Gordon's got me working on an iPhone game he's got in the works. Something to do with pigs, for the time being I've been told to work on the main character, Fantastic Piggy (or "Phantastic Piggy" for possible added smart arsery). More details probably after this week.

Briefing Room thumbnails

01

02

Final

The First concept that came to my head. Far more to come.

So that's the past couple of weeks.

Stay tuned kids, for there's much more on the way. ^_^

Industry Project: Map Ambiance

Gordon assigned me the task of helping the prop modelers create more of an abandoned atmosphere to the current demo map. So i got Nic Gomez, who created the demo map, to hand me three screen shots of the map that he reckons i could paint over with 'stuff', everything from abandoned mining machines to caves.
It's super rough, and that's kind of all they need at the moment..my main priority is the briefing room (status:in progress).

Thumbnails of various briefing rooms

Despite next week being a uni holiday week, the Phoenix team plan on continuing to charge through sleep and leisurely acts to get this game done. We're all super keen after Morgan Jaffit , Shawn Eustace and Dan (whom which i have forgotten his surname >_>) reviewed our work at the half-way point of our production

Onwards and Upwards!

My arms are being dealt with.

Weapons for mech game

Front views:

 Check out Paul's blog for 3d results of some of the weapons right 'ere.

Metal Faffing

Okay so this past week has been working quite smoothly, despite a couple of jobs that required me to put my super cape on for.
Managed to send off a few more mech turnarounds to the modellers in Industry Project, which will keep 'em busy until the next meeting, as for the Phoenix team, i was requested to help pick up the pace a little with the concepts of enemy 'C', whilst the idea of having a faffer bot (does exactly what it's called) in the game was set in stone last week, and so the concept design job has been dropped onto my lap.
Also did the turnaround for Run 'n' Gun's playable character, since they were quite happy with the other character that was done for them the week before.

Check out Dan, Amjad and Paul's blogs for the 3d models made from the concepts.

Here are the week's works:

In Soviet Russia, robot draw you.

Right, so this week has been a little more hectic, I've had to refine the shit out of Phoenix's second enemy, proving a little difficult to find the right look that Grant, Tyson and myself can agree on, but nevertheless a variety of robots have sprouted, and whatever isn't used in Phoenix is going into another game project, something that Gordon Moyes has dragged out of his back burner (weirdest thing i've said all week). Gordon is the tutor for the industry project, and the fellow that started Curious Bear Productions (primarily an independent iPhone game developer, check out 'Cluck It!' available at the iTunes App store.....way to advertise). Anyways i've been asked to do concepts for his game idea while he waits for a response or some kind of contact from the client the class was working for.

My current to do list by the end of the week:
-Finalize Phoenix enemy 'B'
-Create a range of concepts for Gordon (if only his surname was Freeman...)
-Help team "Run 'n' Gun" with a female agent concept.

And so far:

Finalized Enemy 'A'

I've also discovered bus ride doodling, emptying the think tank in the mornings has proven bloody nice, despite the mini audience i occasionally get during peak hour. ^_^ Irrelevant, but noteworthy (not really)

Enjoy your weekend hombres.