High-Poly Statues

As previously mentioned in this blog, I worked on creating statues for the gods in the game. When I last wrote a post about this I was almost finished with the low-poly for Anubis. I shortly after that started to work on Horus. To make life easier for everybody we decided to reuse Anubis body and replacing the head. This worked quite well and I only had to make some small alterations to Horus’s body.

When it was time for me to do the high-polys I had to decide what to put in the high-poly and what to put in the textures. Seeing as I was not the one that was going to texture them I had a discussion with the artist that was in charge of the textures. We decided to put as much as possible in the high-poly. I started with Anubis and began with the body. I went for really exaggerated chest muscles but leaving out most of the abs. The reason for this being that 3Ds Max is not that good of a software to work with organic high-polys, so it would take unnecessary time for a result that could be achieved by using a heightmap in the texture. The optimal thing to do would be to use a sculpting software such as Zbrush. I have never worked in Zbrush and we did not have time for me to learn a new software. So that is why we went for a height mapped texture instead. I also did some work on the ears and the belt.

When it was time for Horus I reused Anubis high-poly for the body. I then began to work on the head, and focused a lot on creating eyes for him. When it came to the skirt I had to differ a bit from the concept art. The skirt was supposed to have feathers all over. However, making them would take up a lot of time that we do not have so we decided to skip them completely.

 

Beneath here you can see the entire process from concept to final in game product. The artist behind the textures is Gustav Larsson.

 

Writing a pitch

As the producer one of my responsibilities is to write the pitch for Gotland Game Conference. Each game that is participating in GGC gets five minutes to pitch their game in front of the jurors.

The pitch for Amenti has gone through many iterations, starting off in early December when we first came up with the idea and started to put it through the pitching process to get greenlighted for BGP.
I have reused some of that material, but I have rewritten most of it due to the fact that the game has changed a lot since the original idea. I have also looked in to my pitch for Trust, the game that I was producer for during Theme Park last year. The pitch for Trust was nominated in the Best Pitch category last year, and is therefore something that me and my team are very proud of and something that we want to take as much inspiration from as possible. However, Trust is a very different type of game then Amenti. Trust is a game about hugs. It is two player game where you play as two children whom are lost in the woods. The input are two backpacks with two buttons each. When things get to scary for the children they have to hug and so must the players. That allowed me to build a pitch around a feeling and set the mood with some music that our lead sound composed. There was no need for a trailer in that pitch and that is something that I am very proud of and we attempted to redo it.

However, due to the two games differences, Amenti did not hold up the same way with just music. In Trust, I sold a concept more than a game. But Amenti is a very visual puzzle game and therefore it needs a trailer to do it justice. I also decided to go for a very visual presentation with as few words in the slides as possible. So after many iterations and pitch practices this is the disposition I decided to go with:

Slide 1: Introduction and the backstory for the game world

Slide 2: Backstory for the character

Slide 3: Trailer

Slide 4: Description of gameplay

Slide 5: Inspiration

Slide 6: Target Audience

Slide 7: Future Potential

Slide 8: Questions

The pitch now takes exactly 5 minutes. So I must make sure to talk at the right pace so that I do not go over the time limit.

Here is a preview of some of the slides.

That is it for today!