May Update, Greyboxing, Particle effects, UI Elements, Polishing Code.

I've been working and programming and modelling and animating and god only know what else.

I've built my game and started to make it come to life with particle effects so I can shoot some projectiles and interact with my models that I'm building. As well as adding box collides on models to start bringing in that physics engine.

Die skeleton.

You can see that my fireball reacts to surfaces and adds physics the fireball assets isn't created by myself, I don't really have any interest in making particles so I bought some to give me a little life to the game. 

Testing the colliders 

I've fixed the GUI so that when I cast a spell it consumes Mana, Health goes up and down according to if the player is hit or not. And the enemy health bar goes up and down according to the enemy's health.

Skeleton model not finished but I just wanted to something to shot at

Greyboxing

I've been learning about Greyboxing and I've bought this to the front of my game, as I know that this is going to be a big part of what I need to do. I've started researching city landscapes, road paths and styles. I've found a style that I'm hoping to achieve in Croatia streets. 

I

The idea of having a centre piece of church. Is something that makes sense. "It says oohhh gotta go there"

I very much like the style of tight streets and overhanging buildings. Also the lights gave me a fantastic idea of how to light my scenes. 

Importing UI Into the game

I've been struggling a little lately with my game development. Just a lot of little bugs that I didn't count for but finally got something to show!!

I've been working with the new GUI in Unity 5 and importing my health bar and mana bar in so that my character can take damage and spend mana.

I sourced a really good document and broke it down so that I could understand how UI elements work in relation to what the player can see here.
It helped a lot. I used a little of what the author did but changed a little bit to make it my own.

First we start with the graphic of the object we want in this case I wanted globes like my beloved Diablo game

Then we need some simple textures for what is going to be inside the object. I've chosen the classic mana blue and health red for my game. Later on I most likely will have energy and stamina as well. 

A simple Mask to hold the texture to the shape and translate it to how we want it to look in game.

And magic we have UI elements!!! 

Hopefully next blog entry I have my character up and running around. 

Character Update

Another week, another little step for progression on my own project.

I've committed to sinking my time solely into my own project, and getting a lot of passion about it and a great deal of fire. I'm planning that by this weekend that I'll have my character in my own game and ready to move around and animate. So exciting times. 

I think once I get my character into my game and I can physically see what's going on and what needs work. I'll be really happy and can easily start putting pieces together and start adding things that would make my game look a lot better.

Texturing once again eating a lot of my time. I keep having to remind myself that it's just a prototype at the start. So with the mesh and character it's all just part of developing it. I figure it's very important to get the feel and and look. Then later on come back to it and fix it up. Polish it off. 

There is always going to be two sides two how it should be done. Someone that is clear and I guess a little more talented could do it all in one sitting but I'm finding that the image in my head and my skill is a little different, So the best way to do it is to make base colours and build it up slowly.

Anyway enough ramble here's how the Evil Potato looks like. So this is the character that I did earlier in a concept art.

I've rigged my character and given him a base layer of colour.

As you can see I need to skin the weights on my model to make not collapse on its self.

Reference image in case you've forgotten what he looks like 

Modelling and Progression in Development of Game

Been just over a week since I've made a post. I had a huge productive week during Study Break.
Holy shit.. Study break and actually studied what is this nonsense :D

So to summarize what I did during my study break I first worked on alot of Halloween assets, to get ready for my development of my level. To make it look all scary and Halloween like, but more importantly to give me a feel of what I need to do and give it a bit of a story and direction

Halloween Assets

Then I worked on the random Generation of my Game. I wanted to make it like Diablo II one of my favorite games as a child. Random Generation has always interested me. I think it's something to do with the fact you can play a game and due to the generation it can feel different.

Random Generation in Unity

Layout

As you can see there is a huge difference between the two pictures above.

I've only got 6 tiles atm, and the outer edges are always mountain terrains to keep the player boxed in for the most part. Later on I will add an exit so that the player can progress.

I added a new camera script to my character place holder as well as converted all the settings the player makes on the generation screen so that comes into the game aswell.

I then also worked on my Evil Potato that you may have seen some concept art for a week or so ago. Making him in Maya. And then i'll rig him and skin the weights so that he's ready to animate. 

Obviously you can tell that with alot of my stuff it's un-textured. At some point i'll get on to it but atm I'm really trying to get a prototype level, So that I can get the general feel and flow to the game.

C# and AI in my Game

I've been busy this week, burning the candles at both end going over my programming a little bit more. Just practicing and getting down some simple code for my game that I'm hoping to present at the end of the year expo.

So I've designed a simple AI at the moment, it doesn't have any awake or detect function, so the cubes only attack dealing damage and are target table by my placeholder character. Took a little bit to get it down and make it work but sorted it out pretty fast.

The cube's are place holder enemies at the moment. Red is my current target, blue is previous target and white is targeted enemy. By hitting Tab my character scrolls through the enemies closest to him in a list like manner. 

Above you can see in the game i've designed some more assets such as a some fences and church like building. Aswell as the tree is finally in my game and looking nice after I had a little bit of problems with the UV maps not exporting from Zbrush. 

1 of the many pages of code I've written

Above is the character creation screen I've made. The code is all finished and done I just need to design some buttons and find a nice looking font to replace it all with. And design a 2d image for the background to plug it in. But for the most part i'm really happy with how it's turned out.

More Creating...

Happy Easter to all!
Hope you all getting fat and eating chocolate, not really. Hope you are all safe and sound and doing what ever pleases you the most.

Been doing some designing and more creating of random creating of some game assets and just general modelling to see improve my skill sets.

I made another tree and worked harder on the tree roots and general shape.

I did some modelling of a future like work station, was used to do transfer maps exercise, from low poly to high poly.  

More Organic Modelling.

Bashed out a 3d organic model of a haunted tree in like 30 mins. Between League Queues.
Will be used as an assets in a game later on so stay tuned with that. Only probably another 9-15 tree's to do I reckon for starters and ill be happy. I'm committing pretty hardcore to this project so hopefully the fruit and the time I put in delivers.

I'm really trying to focus on producing work in a fast pace while being effective, while working
consistently to get better. So hopefully I can see some improvements in the future.

This was the base scalp in Zbrush. I'm really starting to enjoy this program. I wasn't happy with the roots in this particular item but I figure that in my animation or game I can easily hide it.

As I start ramping up the polygon count I went into a lot of detail with the ClayBuildUp tool in
ZBrush. It's fantastic the amount of detail that you can create is insane. I love it!!

All in all so far I'd say I'm reasonably happy with the model in ZBrush. I really wanted to work 

on the roots but i felt towards the end that it was basically polishing a shit and i figured that to get it really right i'd have to start over again. I'm really happy with the Alpha textures and detail and especially the branches but those roots man.. There shit!