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!

Week three and four

Hi again!

Since my last post, I have done several things. It was Easter during the third week so we took Friday off to spend time with our families. However, we still managed to do a lot of work. I did some placeholder, modular assets. For example, I made a pillar consisting of six parts, that can be exchanged and moved around to create several different pillars. I also did some arches that can be resized and reused throughout the game.

I also did two non-modular 3D assets, a rat and an Anubis statue. The rat is to be used as the object that the player sucks the life-force from in order to give life to statues.  The Anubis statue will be placed inside the hall of statues and it will have one animation for when the player masters the Anubis rooms. And finally, I observed when two of our graphical artists created our animations for the main character with Motion Capture. Both of them has studied Mo-Cap earlier this year and I plan to do the same next year, so I wanted to get a head start.

 

The fourth week has been quite inefficient due to some technical difficulties and meetings that took away hours that could have been placed on work tasks. I was supposed to build the first two levels with our placeholders in Unreal, but since we could not get the server working on my computer until Friday afternoon, I unfortunately could not do any of this. I have however watched tutorials on how to make complex collision boxes in 3Ds Max and importing them in Unreal. I also checked if some of the placeholders’ size were appropriate in-engine.

During the fourth week I finished the Rat, by making some minor topology changes, as well as rigging and skinning it. The reason I chose to do that this early in production is because our programmers has finished coding the behavior for the rats and needed a skeleton mesh for it to work. As of now the rat does not have any animations yet. I will fix that pre-beta. It was harder than I fought to rig and skin a rat. Up until now I have only rigged and skinned human/humanoid characters and this was a bit different from that. For starters max does not have a specific skeleton for rats, so I had to use one for Lizards and adjust how many bones and segments it should have in order to fit into a low-poly rat. When I started skinning I had some issues figuring out how to best affect the legs, seeing as rats have two knees per leg. Another issue I had was that I could not mirror the skinning information from one side to the other. This led to the skinning taking twice as long as planned.

 
Here you can see the development from start to finished low-poly mesh and rig.

The Anubis statue will be placed in the hall of statues and lead the players eye towards the Anubis Rooms. I was initially done with the low-poly for the statue during the third week but the art team decide to make some changes to create a more interesting silhouette.

Both the Anubis statue and the rat will have high-poly meshes, in which I will ad more details.

That is it for now!

Big Game Project Week 1 & 2

Hi!

The first two weeks of Big Game Project (BGP) has flown by faster than I expected. For this course, me and my team of 7 are developing a game called Amenti.
Amenti is a first person dark, puzzle game where you will bend the elements of the gods to your benefit.  Placed deep inside an Egyptian pyramid in the late 1800s. You play as Sofia Thompson, a young archeologist that’s trapped in the pyramid. She went down there to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance. However, her curiosity caused her to pick up a cursed ring that turned her left hand into “the hand of death”. Now she must venture down through the pyramid to reach the death realm and find the Ankh, the only thing that can cure her.

My role in this production is first and foremost being the Producer, and second a graphical artist. In my role as Producer it is my responsibility to supervise all the administrative work, hold presentations and meetings, as well as solving conflicts within the group. I have been the Producer in every group since I started this education and I am fairly certain that I want to work with project management once I have finished my education.

So, for the first week of BGP we focused solely on pre-production work. For me this meant writing a pitch with a PowerPoint to present in front of the class and staff. After the pitch, I started to work on our Scrum document and our project plan.  I also supervised the writing of our design document.

The pitch was the easiest part of these two weeks. Before this course, we were given the opportunity to participate in Road to GGC, where we got feedback on our game idea on three separate occasions during the course of four months. I had already written three different presentations for these occasions so I used them as a template.

The really tricky part has been putting together the Scrum document and the project plan. For those of you who are not familiar with Scrum, it is an agile workflow consisting of several steps. See picture above. You start of by writing a product backlog, in which you write down all the different assets in the game and what they need. Once the backlog is finished you start your sprints. I have scheduled my group so that every Monday we have a sprint plan where we decide what needs to be done that week by each person and plan how much time they will need for each task. We also discuss how large of a risk that task will have. This is mostly based on the person’s knowledge of the task.  We also decide who will be in charge of the quality assurance for each task. Tuesday-Friday we have daily standups where we talk about what we are going to do that day and what we might need help with. Finally, we have our Sprint Review where we follow up on that week’s tasks. We write down how long it took to do each task, if we did any additional tasks, the actual risk, if it is implemented in the engine, if it meets expectations and if it’s completely done.

The reason I struggled with the Scrum document was the backlog. It takes a lot of time to write down all the assets, and seeing as I have no experience with programming I cannot write down the code parts. On top of that, one cannot write down assets before they are properly planned. The entire team was eager to go in to production as soon as possible and skip all the boring parts of pre-production. So, I had to convince them to prioritize this and the design document, which was easier said than done and unfortunately delayed the pre-production. Now however, after a slow start, we are up and running in production.

Once all of the documentation was done I  to spent my Friday morning working on some placeholders.

They are all very low-poly and in their first state. For now we use them to measure size in the world and as tools to white-box out all levels to test the puzzles.

That is all for today, stay tuned!