Project: Infinitesimals - An Indie Game Art Development Log
interpolator
Hello Everyone and welcome to the Infinitesimals - Indie game art log.
I'm making an Indie game and this thread will be the dumping ground for the work in progress artwork for the game. It's in the 3d Section because the final result will be fully 3d, however I will include some 2d concept art because it will of course directly inform the 3d work.
Infinitesimals began as sci-fi side-scrolling cinematic platform adventure with a strong emphasis on story, atmosphere and fantastic environments. I decided to move away from the Side scroller genre and it's now a 1st/3rd person game.
You take control of two aliens inside their mechanical spider like vehicle called an Ajoxian Gyro. The pilots find themselves on a HUGE planet full of big bugs and dimwitted bipedal creatures but thats the least of their worries because there is another alien faction down there too.
Ajoxian Industrial All terrain Multi-Purpose Gryo Pod. (Officially abbreviated to AIATMPGP. For your convenience you may refer to it as a POD)
Dimensions: about 3.5 millimeters tall, 8 millimeters wide including legs in idle stance. Crew capacity: 2
Here is one of the very first concepts of the POD:
The POD is modular and will be fully upgradable and customizable with a multitude of attachments and modules.
Here is an early 2D animated concept for some of the PODs locomotion/abilities. I should note that the games art style will not be black and white silhouettes its just quicker for me to animate the concepts this way
Full Videos w/ sound here:
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The POD will come up against some formidable foes. Such as this Hunter gatherer (piloted by currently unidentified adversaries!)
Here is an initial rough concept for how a smart POD crew might bring down one of these large Hunter Gatherer's enemies...
Then came the creation of a 2D animated mockup of a Hunter Gatherer takedown...
The next step was to create a more polished 2D animation to better represent the games art style:
Inside the POD's cockpit, the outside world is displayed to the pilots on a screen that spans almost 360 degree's. Here is an early mockup of the POD's internal UI.
Here is the latest shot of the hi-res POD with side panels removed. No textures yet, but I've done some initial materials:
So, eventually I decided against having a traditional gyroscope mounted cockpit. In the latest POD cross section above, the small dots on the spheres surface are electromagnets which hold the cockpit mounted sphere in levitation a tiny distance from the adjacent hull sphere. The electromagnets are then used to rotate the gyrosphere during POD motion to align the cockpit upright at all times. The nodes containing the magnets also conduct electricity and system data to and from components outside the cockpit (With the conductive adjacent hull sphere bridging the connection).
Finally, here is an early in engine test scene:
Ok, I think that's enough for now to get the ball rolling on this thread! Still a long way to go from this point onwards.
James
I'm making an Indie game and this thread will be the dumping ground for the work in progress artwork for the game. It's in the 3d Section because the final result will be fully 3d, however I will include some 2d concept art because it will of course directly inform the 3d work.
Infinitesimals began as sci-fi side-scrolling cinematic platform adventure with a strong emphasis on story, atmosphere and fantastic environments. I decided to move away from the Side scroller genre and it's now a 1st/3rd person game.
You take control of two aliens inside their mechanical spider like vehicle called an Ajoxian Gyro. The pilots find themselves on a HUGE planet full of big bugs and dimwitted bipedal creatures but thats the least of their worries because there is another alien faction down there too.
Ajoxian Industrial All terrain Multi-Purpose Gryo Pod. (Officially abbreviated to AIATMPGP. For your convenience you may refer to it as a POD)
Dimensions: about 3.5 millimeters tall, 8 millimeters wide including legs in idle stance. Crew capacity: 2
The pilots can climb out of the POD and walk around but their suits only have a limited air supply (its also very dangerous!).
The PODs cockpit itself is mounted within a 3 axis gyro. This ensures that the pilots are sitting upright regardless of the PODs hull orientation. This is valuable for comfort of course but also ensures minimal spillage from beverages in the seat mounted cup holders.Here is one of the very first concepts of the POD:
The POD is modular and will be fully upgradable and customizable with a multitude of attachments and modules.
Here is an early 2D animated concept for some of the PODs locomotion/abilities. I should note that the games art style will not be black and white silhouettes its just quicker for me to animate the concepts this way
Full Videos w/ sound here:
[vv][/vv] [vv][/vv]
The POD will come up against some formidable foes. Such as this Hunter gatherer (piloted by currently unidentified adversaries!)
Here is an initial rough concept for how a smart POD crew might bring down one of these large Hunter Gatherer's enemies...
Then came the creation of a 2D animated mockup of a Hunter Gatherer takedown...
The next step was to create a more polished 2D animation to better represent the games art style:
Inside the POD's cockpit, the outside world is displayed to the pilots on a screen that spans almost 360 degree's. Here is an early mockup of the POD's internal UI.
Here is the latest shot of the hi-res POD with side panels removed. No textures yet, but I've done some initial materials:
So, eventually I decided against having a traditional gyroscope mounted cockpit. In the latest POD cross section above, the small dots on the spheres surface are electromagnets which hold the cockpit mounted sphere in levitation a tiny distance from the adjacent hull sphere. The electromagnets are then used to rotate the gyrosphere during POD motion to align the cockpit upright at all times. The nodes containing the magnets also conduct electricity and system data to and from components outside the cockpit (With the conductive adjacent hull sphere bridging the connection).
Finally, here is an early in engine test scene:
Ok, I think that's enough for now to get the ball rolling on this thread! Still a long way to go from this point onwards.
James
Replies
And the video is realtime in Unity? Wow!
The animated concepts alone are amazing.
Really excited to watch your progress. Thank you for posting this on Polycount for us to watch!
RH2: The 2d animations were done in After Effects. I created the POD (and other animated elements) as pieces to allow me to animate it (with a basic rig consisting of null objects and parented layers). The POD's legs were a bit trickier and I just had to animate bezier curve splines. They were the hardest part really...
Thaiauxn: Do you mean, making the game with the 2d black and white style? It would certainly be easier to make so it's tempting!
The game as the 2D animated 'silhouettes' was already perfect for me.
best of luck!!!
Next up I began some of the internal POD components and made an initial start on the cockpit interior. As the POD takes damage you will often see some of the interior machinery as armour panels get blown off.
I also have been taking a lot of reference photo and video recently, I'll put some of them up here in the next post.
For a bit of fun I created this little conceptual video below by using a wide angle lens with extension tubes turning it into a macro lens. Gives quite a nice sense of scale to the world and makes the flower seem more substantial in size...
So next up... I've been taking some photos of the local bugs I find. Some of these look like good candidates for creatures for the player to encounter in the world. I haven't fully decided which part of the world to crash the aliens on yet, though it will probably end up being in the UK because that's where I live and can easily take reference footage for.
The POD vehicle measures about a centimetre in length and the pilots measure only 1mm tall, so most of these creatures will be larger than the player. This means I'll need to model them in sufficient detail so I've been grabbing as much up close shots as I can.
For instance, this fly's measured about 1cm, which makes it about the same size as the POD vehicle:
This one was even smaller:
These Bee's were somewhat bigger, measuring at least 2-3cm's or so:
One night I noticed a spider and crane fly (sometimes called a 'Daddy long legs') in the midst of a battle. The Crane fly didn't stand much of a chance once ensnared:
These Crane fly's were more fortunate than the last: I think these guys would be pretty cool to see in game. They would be huge compared to the player.
This Harvestman was captured on our bedroom curtain (my second job being to capture and deport spiders from the house whenever I hear a scream) He seemed to settle down under the glass and began cleaning his legs:
After a lot of thought I'm starting to now piece together the pipeline and editors for the POD's procedural animation system.
There are a lot of requirements that must be fulfilled by this system. For a start the final result MUST look just as good (better!) than the animated concepts but it will also be extremely tweak-able and driven by a base set of stats and parameters to allow influence from modifiers (upgrade modules will be a big driver of that aspect among other things).
I had originally conceived of a square grid based editor approach to storing foot and leg parameters but after playing with early implementation of that approach I decided that it was ultimately too limiting. The approach below aims
to only add foot location parameters when needed to refine a leg shape. I'd begin by adding leg shape parameters at key locations (top, middle, bottom etc) and add more refining parameters in troublesome foot locations wherever the interpolation breaks down.
For now, here is an snippet from an overview of one of the first stages in the pipeline: How far we'll develop the actual editors themselves is an open question right now. The tools will only be used by myself and the coder who's coding it, so some of the steps may be less visual in the final tools.
BradMyers82: Thanks!
Next up:
I'd never consider myself much of a character artist but I realized I'd not been progressing much on the alien designs. So next up are a couple of quick concept pieces. Given the scale of these creatures (1mm tall) I wanted to think about how that would impact their biology.
I want them to be vertebrates but their skin would be very translucent due to the tiny size. Therefore I'm thinking you can see some of their internal body structure through the outer skin.
They don't have nostrils because at the macro scale they simple breath through the skin surface (much like some very small insects can do). They also don't have ears and instead have the forward antennae, which could also serve facial expressions in some way similar to eyebrows.
Their eyes are also different from ours. Human eyes cannot actually function at such a small scale as these creatures but I don't want compound eyes either, so the mechanics of how they would work is still forming in my head.
I'm not particularly happy with these but they are a start at least.
Tonight I took a break from design/art and did a piece of conceptual music. I'm leaning towards a bit of a retro OST though not in the normal indie way of 8bit/chip tunes. Instead I want a more classical and romantic score. In anycase, here's the little track, which is quite lyrical and would be used during in the softer exploration areas:
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