Sorry!!!

Greetings and salutations! Normally I would not post on Sunday, but I must apologize for the lack of any posts during this last week. It was finals week for this quarter and I meant to post, but got too swamped by all the work that needed to get done. Do not worry however because finals are finally over and I can start blogging again as normal. Next time I'll try to post during finals week. So sorry and I thank everyone for their patience.

Autodesk CG Student Awards

Greetings and salutations! I just learned of this yesterday: Autodesk is sponsoring an international competition called the CG Student Awards 2015. They are accepting work based in six categories. These are Student of the Year, Film of the Year, Game of the Year, People's Choice, Bootcamp Internship, and School of the Year. The main categories of art being judged in these is VFX/Animation, Film, and Game Design. The prizes are awesome but there is one prize that only winners get: an internship at a production studio of their choice available from the list of studios on the CG Student Awards website.

That is a huge deal. That is my goal is to get hired by a studio. This would help me tremendously if I can win. Thus I am entering Prism into the competition. The only problem is that the deadline is May 13th, 2015. That is less than two months away. Before I had six months to get Prism working and in a polished condition for graduation. Now I only have less than two months.

I hate rushing. Whenever I rush, I get the work done but the quality suffers as a result. However, if I can learn to get my work done faster and use good time management, I think I can get it done. I have no choice if I am going to make it in the industry. The biggest thing I think studios are probably looking for is good quality combined with speed. If a person can pump out excellent work consistently and quickly, than they could probably be a highly valued asset to a production team.

So that is the goal. Prism will be my introduction piece into the game industry via the CG Student Awards. It's going to be tough, but I believe I can do it. Making the levels modular as I explained Thursday will help tremendously with production time. It is the individual assets that make up the game that will take the longest to build. So without wasting anymore time, off I go to get Prism done!

Oh, one more thing: if you want more information on the Autodesk CG Student Awards 2015, you can find more information here.

Level Tiles

Greetings and salutations. I apologize for the late post during the week. I didn't have anything to share and I still don't. Well, I can actually talk about how I am approaching level design in Prism.

For the levels in Prism, I am taking a modular approach. What I mean is that each level will be made up of specific rooms that function as the halls and intersections of a particular level. Within those tiles, I will have specific objects randomly spawn in preset locations. These objects could be enemies or they could be treasure. The reason for making the levels modular is because it saves time in the long run without compromising quality. The original Phantasy Star Online does it; Diablo, the game it's based off of, does it; and even Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance does it. All three of those games pull off modular level design quite successfully so I will take the same approach, just hopefully with better graphics.

Now the first level I am working on is a forest level. Not a creepy forest level but a welcoming one, full daylight but under the shadows of ancient trees so the player has a chance to get familiar with the game in a mysterious, but not creepy, environment. Since it is the first level, I don't want many obstacles except for maybe simple enemies. I have already sculpted out the tiles which you can see below:

Tiles for Prism's forest level.

Each tile is fifty meters square, so they are good size. Unfortunately, because they are so large, they also have high polygon counts, each with 100,000 polygons. That is way too many polygons so I need to reduce them by quite a bit. I also need to create basic meshes for the flora and fauna. I have an idea for the lighting which I am thinking will be a yellow tone due to particles in the air like pollen and other stuff. Hence volumetric lighting or the illusion of it may be required. I will also need to see if Unreal Engine 4 supports cucoloris' so I can create the shadows of the trees on the ground. If not I can always bake them into the texture. Actually, it might be a better idea to just bake the shadows to save on render time for the game. Overall, I want the forest to seem old even though there is some technology within.

So this is what I have been working on all week. I will post more about the level in future posts, so stay tuned!

Announcing... Prism!

Greetings and salutations! Today, I am revealing the name of my senior project that I will be working on for the remaining time I will be at The Art Institute... Prism!

An ancient encoding technology called Prism has left many treasures in deep space up for grabs. Those called Prism Hunters hunt for these precious artifacts in hopes of unlocking their dreams. Can you guide your heroine or hero to victory?

Prism will be a third person action-rpg designed for single or multiplayer offline or online game play throughout a variety of environments. Players will control one of four heroes and hunt down Prisms to help make their character grow stronger. At the same time, a common foe also hunts for the Prisms and it is up to the player to collect them before they do. It will be aimed for release on Steam eventually if I can get commercial licenses for some of the programs I use (very expensive unfortunately).

The idea for this game came about for several reasons. If you have read my previous posts, you may be aware of my ranting about Diablo III, Destiny and Phantasy Star Online 2. In addition, I know there is a large market for Phantasy Star Online 2 here in the west that Sega refuses to acknowledge (myself included in that market) so making this game is kind of a direct response to the failure that is Sega and somewhat Destiny as well. From what I heard, Destiny was the most returned game of 2014 (even though several million players still play it so it was still a commercial success). I don't know how true that is but from all the people I have talked to and listened about the game, obviously a lot of players were disappointed in it and were hoping for something more robust.

My main competition I think will be Diablo III so I have been studying game play from several different types of games to ensure that I have an idea of what makes them tick and why people keep coming back for more. One of the things about the original Phantasy Star Online is that its game play and loot system were inspired by the original Diablo. I hear Destiny has awesome game play but from what I can tell, I don't really see it. I've watched people play the game and have studied it but I don't understand why people do play it. It seems more like Borderlands, just not as over the top.

Overall, I am also making the game for myself because, well, I like to make games. The name for Prism itself was actually from an older card game I created over a decade ago but never commercially released. The name Prism helps keep the main focus of the game in mind; for the art direction to the items that can drop in the game. While at school here at The Art Insititute, I have learned how hard it can be to have a focus and single direction in mind when building a game so having a name for the game that constantly reminds me of the theme will help keep my focus in check. In addition, I love working with color and color theory is one of my favorite subjects so I will incorporate everything I know about color theory into some form in Prism. Color is the focus, the be all and end all of the game. The Four Heroes themselves revolve around this them such as Aphrael Red. The next character, Puma Aurelius is named after gold, a type of yellow-green. So color pretty much is the central theme of the game.

I want to have a prototype level and more if possible done by the time of my graduation. I will be posting updates about the game here on my blog so tune in! It will be a grand adventure!

WIP: Aphrael Lo-Res Model 3

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show the completion of the cranium. After that though, I hope all of you don't mind but I am going to try to speed up my production at this point since I have pretty much six months until graduation. I was hoping to have all four characters done by then so I will not be able to post constantly about progress on the project. However, since The Four Heroes will now be part of my final project for school, I will provide updates for them along with updates for the final project.

Anyway, so to complete the cranium, I proceeded to go ahead and expand two edge loops from the "mask" of the face and connect it to the ear as shown below.

Connecting the ear to the rest of the mesh.

It appears hard at first, but it is actually quite simple to keep everything as quads. Next, I extrude edge loops from the top of the skull and use the ear as a guide on how to rotate them along the top of the cranium as shown in the two images below:

Extruding edges out to form the top of the skull.

Completing the skull by rotating around the ear.

Creating the edge loops in this manner helps keep the natural shape of the skull intact. I am still debating though if I want to add more edge loops later just to give a little bit more roundness to the skull. I do need to be careful though because more edge loops means more polygons and I don't want that.

Anyway, the completed head for Aphrael is below:

Aphrael's head is complete!

At this point, I only have just over 800 quads, so not bad at all. If I do add more edge loops, it may push the head to over a thousand, so I may not add any at all. I like keeping the quad count low, especially since I will need to triangulate the mesh by hand later for use in Unreal Engine 4.

Okay so that's it. I hope everyone enjoyed watching the head form. I have an important announcement for my next post so stay tuned!

Important Focus Re-direction

Greetings and salutations! This week has been a very exciting and busy week. With the announcements at GDC regarding Unreal 4, Unity 5, and Source 2 to a re-direction in my senior projects at school to the completion of the assembly of my new desktop, it has been quite crazy. However, the biggest thing though is The Art Institute's new art grant program.

The art grant program is kind of a retention motivator for students. To be eligible, you must have enrolled full time (12 credits or more) and pass those courses. This in turn will then get you several thousand dollars in extra funding from the school to apply to your tuition in the next quarter. I personally had doubts about it because I wasn't for sure if I would be eligible for it. Money for me has been very hard to come by, but after speaking with Financial Aid, I am eligible, but only if I go up to full time. So after going through my financial plan, I decided to do just that. The only problem is that now I will be graduating a quarter ahead of my previously planned schedule (even though this isn't really a problem at all but a blessing)! This means that now I do not have time to finish my currently planned senior project that I was working on. I discussed this with my program coordinator and he agreed to allow me do something different which will be much faster to build and allow me to have a prototype level ready by graduation.

Enter The Four Heroes! I have decided I am going to consolidate my Four Heroes project into my final project instead, using it as the base. This will allow me to get work done much faster because I can fully concentrate working on Aphrael and the others without compromising time used working on the senior project because they now are the senior project! Let me tell all of you what I plan on doing.

You see, my idea first began to take shape after Sega delayed Phantasy Star Online 2 for the west for no apparent reason. I played the original game back on the Dreamcast to death and had eagerly anticipated playing the second game when they announced it for the west. However, they have yet to answer inquiries as to why they have delayed the game after they first announced it two years ago and never made good on their promise to bring it out here in North America. Sega has been slipping as a company for a very long time now and it will not surprise me if they leave the video game industry or collapse permanently in the near future.

Next, I played a little bit of Diablo 3 for a little bit but got quickly bored of it. I didn't like the presentation and I didn't like any of the characters that they presented as playable. I felt that they were too generic with no style or good presentation to them. I felt that Borderlands (which is a game I don't play by the way because I don't like first-person shooters) had far better and more interesting characters you could choose from.

Finally Destiny came out and it was probably the most over hyped game in history to put it mildly. The game is a mere shadow of what it was supposed to have been. However, I loved the presentation, the user interface design, the soundtrack and the lore (even though it is actually not in the game, you have to go online to find information on the lore which is absurd). I just don't play it because it is a first person shooter. If there was one class where you could fight melee like in Phantasy Star Online 2 in third person all the time, I would have played Destiny in a heartbeat because the game does remind me a lot of the original Phantasy Star Online.

With all of these disappointments (and I know I am not the only one who feels this way; forums across the Internet have expressed their disappointment with all three games that I mentioned), I have decided to make a game that takes the best from all three games and refine those into a new game with my own touches and design style to it. This will be my senior project and The Four Heroes will form the base of it. In addition, the planned workflow for this game is far more streamlined and efficient than the one I had going for my previous project so I will be able to significantly get more work done.

So what does all of this mean for the future? Well, instead of just blogging about my workflow for my characters now, this blog will probably turn into some sort of developer's blog as the project begins to solidify. This is an exciting time now and I have two to three different development engines I can choose from, all that are very good. However, the most important thing of all is that I will be working on something that I feel very passionate about. This is going to be fun and I hope all of you will join me on the ride as I attempt to create something magical, something that me and others have been wanting for a long time now: a Phantasy Star Online like game that feeds that need to go out and adventure in a mysterious sci-fi environment, with the ability to solo offline or party with friends to take down the evils of the galaxy all the while collecting loot that matters and getting super excited over those rare drops that can turn the tide of battle. I hope to put my heart and soul into this game and get it right because in game development, it is very rare if ever, to get something to gel together. I hope I am able to do just that.

WIP: Aphrael Lo-res Model 2

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show how I approach the ear and finish the rest of the face. The ear is probably the second hardest part of the head to do, right after the eyes. For me to do the ear correctly, I have to understand the structure of its many individual parts. This is where research and a good understanding of anatomy comes in. Since I've modeled a few ears before, I have developed a way in which I approach modeling the ear.

What I usually do is I envision the ear as different parts and model them in a particular order, depending upon the subject and how many polygons I need for the model. For Aphrael, I started with the outer part of the ear. and then worked my way inward as shown below:

The outer ear.

Working inward.

The ear complete.

I did not go into super detail here with the geometry because I want the normal map to drive that detail. I only modeled the minimum amount necessary for the normal map to play nice with the geometry. With the ear done, I can add it to the current face mesh so I can model the rest of the head with the ear later.

The t-face with ears.

Now for the rest of the face. First I focus on creating the edge flow for the cheek muscles that run from the eyes to the mouth. It is these muscles that control the shape of the mouth during smiling, frowning, and the sort.

The cheeks added.

After that, the bottom half of the mouth edge loops are added and then the main border loop around the face that forms the "mask" is added.

The face completed.

There you have it. The face and ears are now complete at 458 quads and very clean edge loops. Next post for Aphrael will be the completion of the cranium to finish the head so stay tuned!