Week 3 of Big Game Project - The Track

For the third week of production for Big Game Project we have made a lot of progress. The results of our past work has finally been starting to surface. We have an enjoyable and playable version of the game now that runs smoothly. Everything isn't there yet but we're making good progress.

This week I've mainly worked on generating the tracks for the game. At first we planned to have a spline system in Unity to generate our mesh from but that didn't work out. Luckily, I had a backup plan for if our Spline system failed us or if there wasn't time to implement it. So what I did was to generate the mesh inside 3DS MAX instead, using their own built-in spline system.

There are some kinks to work out when using 3DS MAX's spline system which can be a lot of trouble. The spline system is clumsy overall and you have to really wrestle with it to get it working. 3DS MAX's Path deform is a modifier that I use to make the track mesh follow the spline and it isn't perfect in any way.

I succeeded in generating a simple track with this method and the results were quite good. The process however was very clumsy and not optimal. Here below are some screenshots of the tracks I generated.

Overall it's been a good week, a lot of stuff has been implemented and it's looking good for the project. Thanks for reading.

Week 2 of Big Game Project - Making progress

I've now entered week 2 of production for our project and some good progress have been made. Firstly, we finally settled on a name for the game. After a lot of indecision and a few rounds of voting we ended up with TwinShift as a name.

So what have I been doing this week? I've worked on several things including a skybox, environment and tracks. Let's start with the skybox. We needed a skybox for the game that reflected the game world so first I had to look at where the game takes place. The game takes place on a planet far off in space so I had to show that it wasn't as familiar as earth. I tweaked the colors of the skybox to give an alien feeling. You can never go wrong with a couple of planets, some stars and a sun for a skybox.

The skybox looks good in Unity and I am satisfied with how it turned out. It was fun to make a skybox as it isn't something I try my hand at that often.

It has been a very experimental week for me and I've tried many things. One thing I did this week was the terrain which was interesting. At first I tried using Unity's own terrain tool to make the environment but it wasn't really working out. It was very limited in many ways and didn't quite me quite the result I wanted.

I remembered an article I read in a magazine some time ago that described how to use satellite elevation data to generate height maps. These height maps could be used to generate terrain from and give a lifelike and realistic result as it is generated from our own earth. I then proceeded to generate  terrain from some height maps of California. I want to give credits to NASA for making elevation data of earth accessible to everyone. 

As you can see the terrain looks good, it gave good results to use elevation data. I did however move away from Unity's own terrain tool as it was not giving me the amount of control I wanted. Instead I made my own mesh in 3DS max from the height map and made a custom shader to control vertex painted textures.

The last thing I did beside editor work was the track. In the end product the game is supposed to have atleast three or four different types of tracks to provide variation but for this week I only made one. I looked a lot at other racing games to get a track that looks good even when driving at high speeds. I experimented a lot in Unity with Physical Based Rendering or PBR, which helps in achieving a more realistic look. I used the plugin Shader Forge for making the shaders. 

I like how the track turned out, but I'm going to have to tweak it when everything else it in place to make sure that everyone looks correct. That's it for me this week, thanks for reading.

Week 1 of Big Game Project - Introduction

I have now entered the first week of production in the course Big Game Project or BGP for short. BGP is a course in which several groups takes on the task of making a game in ten weeks. My role in my group is that of a lead artist, to ensure that the graphics look appealing and uniform. As a lot of the course is preparation, reflection and reports the actual production time for the game is eight weeks.

So what is the project I am working on? I am working on Gravity Grind, a racing game which takes place in a giant scrapyard. The game is set on a planet that is covered with junk and scrap, some buildings remain but most of them have been reduced to rubble. The game draws inspiration from other games like Wipeout HD and F-ZERO GX.

As a lead artist my first task was to create a style guide for the project, this style guide is meant to help us artists and guide us to have uniform visuals, to ensure that we're on the same page. At first I struggled with the style guide, as I have never done a style guide for this big of a production. There's a lot of research involved and it ended up taking a lot of time. I'll link the style guide below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/myc277vfaqukutr/Styleguide_GravityGrind.pdf?dl=0

I'm pleased with how the style guide turned out and that counts for both the look of it and the content itself. Although there is only four pages, it still communicates the necessary information well. Aside from the style guide I have been active with other stuff this week. That includes a lot of mockups, various editor work in Unity and  starting on making the racing tracks for the game. Below is one of the mockups I made for the game. It was an early prototype to iterate on what kinds of tracks we can have in the game.

Aside from all the art assets produced, I recently got involved with Shader Forge. It's a plugin for Unity that allows you to create shaders with a node-based system, much like in Unreal Engine 4. It's a neat program which allows you to visually create shaders without the need for coding.

That's it for me this week, a bit short but I'm saving the good stuff for next week, see you then!