Reflection on group work

Being a small manageable group, all has gone well.
Managing my own time has been a little rocky and difficult recently, it's been the hardest part of this group work - which is a seriously good thing! Working in this tight group has been effortless and very enjoyable. We all have a say and are heard; shaping the project as a functioning group, and not a dictatorship.

Simone has been absolutely at the forefront of research, and has really excelled. She's fantastic at doing broad, specific and niche research, adding to the project directly (not just ticking boxes for projects).
She's also created some wonderful concepts that have really shaped the feel and scale of the setting. Something Simone has also taken up was the backstory - really fleshing out the character development and pushing for details that can feed designs. I'm really impressed with this, and after sitting with her and going through the whole plot - typing it up and making substantial adjustments we now have something concrete that we're both very happy with. I have absolutely no qualms with Simone and I think we're going to make a great duo going forward.

Mathias has worked with us well - researching the technical aspects we will later run into within the cut scenes. He's also added a lot of effort in shaping the puzzles and interaction with me (over beers).
I'm sorry to see him go, as I think we could've accomplished much more detail and technical prowess in this project with him on-board.

We were like Charlie's angels, but are now Cagney and Lacey :/
Still awesome, but one man down.

Simone's Research and Stuff

Simone's concept research:

Concept art = Research on the job:

Concept art is the first step in the creation of a game. This stage is where the ideas and designs for the game are created in a visual form. We design and create worlds and the objects for a client to their vision, as well as creating content from basic description if the client isn’t sure what they want. Concept art are there to create new designs to make that game stand out from the rest. This will include; creating environments, props (weapons, furniture, jewellery, etc…), characters, vehicles, and so on. The artwork for the artist crosses over a lot of different areas such as marketing art, but their main job is to create work that can be used through out the pipeline in other departments. The artwork does not have to be an illustration, but detailed enough to convey the designs to the team.

There are many different artists that I look up to and also some that are up coming who’s art is still improving. My top three artists that inspire me are: Feng Zhu (http://www.artbyfeng.com/), Kekai kotaki (http://www.kekaiart.com/) and *Sandara (*deviant art name: http://sandara.deviantart.com/). Their work is very impressive to me and I aspire to be able to create work just as impressive in my future.

Feng Zhu has helped me so much in improving my concept art work, as he has been creating free online videos tutorials about different ways that he creates work and what he thinks about other subjects in this field. He explains different ways to create designs and techniques to render these designs to a more presentable level. He also goes over things like portfolios, how to create a better visual library and the difference between illustration and industrial design.

Listening to Feng Zhu, a highly regarded in the field and noted for his designs in Star Wars, Transformers and Dead Space (to name a few) makes the information that he is giving you even more valuable.

My role in this project:

My role within this project is to create designs for different game elements that will be within the game. I will be designing the environment of the level that will be played as well as creating characters and props that will be shown. These designs will be created through paintings (Photoshop) and sketches(Photoshop and hand drawn). At the later stages of this project, there maybe some time to create marketing art for this project, but that will be decided later on.  

I have created a backstory for our game (not the finished story, just my own idea of it) which can be seen within my own blog. 

So far this term, I have created designs for the entrance to the tunnel/mine and designs for the tunnels themselves. Below are the images of these designs.

Tunnel/mine Entrance

Tunnel Designs

Research into mines and tunnels

The game demo that we are planning to make is set within a mountain base for one of the factions that will be a main part of the game's story. The feel for the game is based within the science fiction genre which made it slightly more difficult than creating a game around modern day where I could reference the technology that created them and how they have been constructed.

I found many different images for mines as well as their entrances, but I was looking for something that could show similar lighting to what we were thinking for the actual game. We are looking for something dim, but lit enough for the player to see the environment around them. The main light will be coming from small lights spread in small intervals along the tunnels' lengths lighting the way to the different locations throughout the demo.

The images that I have collected all have a similar arch shape to their tunnels. This is something that I have taken into consideration when designing the tunnels for the demo. Some tunnels also have a straight cut ceiling which gives a more hardened man-made look to the tunnel compared to the arching shape, this may be due to that fact that many of the arch shaped tunnels have a jagged surface to them, breaking up the man-made look for a slightly more organic style.

The floor of the mine tunnels are mostly exposed rock with a set of rails running along them, though some do not have the rails but instead have a smooth surface or one that is covered with some kind of flooring. There is an image of a mine from the game ‘Dead Space’ which has been broken apart on one side and has a panelled floor.  This image gave me a good idea of different aspects that a dark sci-fi game could look like and elements that could be included while designing the tunnel/mine for our game.  

Parachute test:

For the end of the demo we talked about having a cut scene where our character jumps off a cliff and releases a parachute. After we talked about this I started to look at parachutes in games and tried to find some rigs on the Internet. To my amazement I had problems finding any parachute rigs, and I didn't find any game rigs. I ended up focusing on the parachute in Just Cause 2 since it plays a big part of the game and you can use it whenever you want.
Looking at this I was thinking about using the method I used on my auto swim rig for the swimming motion. It's basically a sin wave. So my plan was to use this to add random noise to the different parts of the parachute. When I actually started trying to make the rig I had gotten another idea. To use nCloth in Maya and bake the simulation to joints. This worked surprisingly well and only took me a couple of minutes to set up and have it working perfectly. After baking the simulation to the joints I also animated them to make it look like it's opening up. Here is a quick demo of the test and how it is rigged in Maya. I've done another test where I put more turbulence into the nCloth and again this worked perfect.

Destruction test:

For another cut scene we planned to have a cave in if the player doesn't respond to the warnings he's given and get out. So I started looking into doing destruction in game. At first I played with the idea of real time physics, but quickly realised that it was unnecessary and would require more work to look good. Since it's a cut scene we have full control over the sequence and we want to have control over the falling pieces as well. Because of this we're going to do simulation and then baking out the simulation to the objects. If this is going to the objects themselves or skin the objects to joints that have the simulation I'm not sure. I will have to do more test on this and see what the difference in speed and efficiency is. When I've looked at presentations of how other big game companies have done destruction they have simulated and used joints, so there must be a reason for this. Here is the test I did. The workflow so far is this: Use a plug-in called SOuP to shatter the objects -> Use the Bullet plug-in to simulate the rigid body -> Bake the simulation to the translate and rotate of the objects -> Export to Unity. I recently discovered that the GDC Vault has a lot of free presentations where I've found a lot of great techniques that I am eager to try out. I've mostly looked at FX in games and this is something I really want to focus on in the future, in addition to rigging. These are some of the most interesting and useful slides I've found so far (And yes, I do love Naughty Dog):

• Creating Flood Effects in Uncharted 3
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015453/Creating-the-Flood-Effects-in
• Pushing for Large Scale Destruction FX
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015886/Tackling-Large-Scale-Destruction-FX
• The Tricks Up Our Sleeves
  • http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015898/The-Tricks-Up-Our-Sleeves