Building a Game - Pirate/Lost Civilization Adventure
polycounter lvl 9
Hey fellow polycounters, I open this thread because I'm with a team of students in game art and we hope to graduate this year, and we know we can get great feedback from you guys!
We're doing a game demo on UT3 PS3 version. I'll be showing the game in front of a jury made of professionals in June. So, to be precise we have one month and a half left before death/glory?!.
The game is a first person adventure (shooter) where two rival pirate bands do a treasure rush on a lost civilization island. One of the pirate band is stupid in everything (look, boat, clothes, etc..) and the other is made of snob guys but not that clever neither. Of course you play as the Stupid captain of the stupid.
That's for the wall of text, the gameplay will be very close to a tomb-raider minus climbing (we're a team of artists, not programmers) and quite linear due to our knowledge and the short timeframes.
Now let's speak technical with what we've done so far:
- 4/5 characters done
- 70% of the map is complete but we still have to make it look unique at some places.
- 0% on the two pirate boats
- 60-70% on all assets content
The map is divided into parts for the ease of level design, level building and ease of optimization. (PS3 dammit)
- The beach
- The ruins temple
- The ruins sacrifice room
- The waterfall pit
- The lava cave (undone atm)
- The Boss cave (undone atm)
- The Treasure cave
All of them separated with small parts of environment, of 50-100m each.
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa2w2OHv7-4[/ame]
Be sure to watch the video in 720p! I'll be posting high res screenshots tonight, now I must continue work
I'm looking for critiques about everything and mainly lighting, and asset quality.
TLDR: Pirate game with stoupid people and treasures.
We're doing a game demo on UT3 PS3 version. I'll be showing the game in front of a jury made of professionals in June. So, to be precise we have one month and a half left before death/glory?!.
The game is a first person adventure (shooter) where two rival pirate bands do a treasure rush on a lost civilization island. One of the pirate band is stupid in everything (look, boat, clothes, etc..) and the other is made of snob guys but not that clever neither. Of course you play as the Stupid captain of the stupid.
That's for the wall of text, the gameplay will be very close to a tomb-raider minus climbing (we're a team of artists, not programmers) and quite linear due to our knowledge and the short timeframes.
Now let's speak technical with what we've done so far:
- 4/5 characters done
- 70% of the map is complete but we still have to make it look unique at some places.
- 0% on the two pirate boats
- 60-70% on all assets content
The map is divided into parts for the ease of level design, level building and ease of optimization. (PS3 dammit)
- The beach
- The ruins temple
- The ruins sacrifice room
- The waterfall pit
- The lava cave (undone atm)
- The Boss cave (undone atm)
- The Treasure cave
All of them separated with small parts of environment, of 50-100m each.
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa2w2OHv7-4[/ame]Be sure to watch the video in 720p! I'll be posting high res screenshots tonight, now I must continue work
I'm looking for critiques about everything and mainly lighting, and asset quality.
TLDR: Pirate game with stoupid people and treasures.
Replies
If you're planning to include a flythrough like the youtube video as part of your presentation, I would recommend smoothing out and cleaning up the camera movements a lot. Right now they are extremely jarring and distracting. It looks like you are using interpmode Linear instead of Curve Auto. Use Curve Auto. You may have to wrangle it a bit to get it not to go crazy with inertia and swing far past your main keyframes, but linear interpolation on camera movements will never look good.
can we expect some breakdowns of stuff since those are always the most interesting part?
@ZackF, thanks, means a lot to me after these two months of work. Yeah the problem you adress about the beach are need to be addressed, we are going to place the boats there and there'll be two. And when we have statues done it'll help for sure make that place less generic and empty looking
@3DK.P.: The flytrhough is really made in a rush last morning to be able to show the map done trough a video quickly. It wont be in the game, but several smaller cutscene will.
woogity, mkandersson, divi: many thanks
What sort of breakdown do you want?
This place is still under progress (in fact all the map is) so feel free to give ideas on how to embelish places. I dont always find the ideas myself.
Here a proper view of the waterfall pit. We have a broken woodplanks bridge on the way and a big dead tree scheduled on the right to help the player cross the hole.
Here's the last caves entrance, it's a quickie made today, and it still looks very generic to me, we have statues on the way so I hope it'll enhance the place. Also I'm gonna have to work out the bit on the left where the tree trunk cuts the grass, maybe by adding some more dynamic grass there.
And this is the first cave room (where the player has nothing to do but pass through). It's a crypt, quite symmetrical. The torches are place holders so are the flames. I made a bit of oldschool AO on the floor and ceiling using a glue texture (used everywhere in GTA4 for instance), it helps blend all the element together I think, since this is not UDK.
that's all for today, c&c appreciated.:)
The whole thing looks awesome and very polished. I really love the temple area, would be great to see some high res screens from that.
Good luck with the presentation, for what it's worth you impressed me
How did you go about modeling and texturing the cave? I'm working on a similar project at the moment and I'd love to hear your method.
As others said, it'd be very cool to see some breakdowns of the props and environments.
also cover the base of those rocks in veg or make the blend into it small scree like stones the rock into rock doesnt work well...
and finally cover the bases of trees in veg or grass
really nice though
Yeah, good point,I'll need to turn those pilars lighting to lightmaps instead of vertex. And add some sort of socle that the torch enters in.
Thanks, will look at how epic made it, that's a true problem like you say, when you enter the light ray and see the plane-tru-camera thing. The only thing I hope is that our PS3 bare to use volumetrics into our framerate budget.
I did some tests this morning (I dont own a ps3 with the game) and it's quite under 30fps on the beach, and nearly 60hz on every other places, so we're gonna have to optimize a lot more that place yet.
Also at the moment we're using per poly collisions as a result of my lazyness for almost all the terrain meshes, and we hope to see a significant gain in performance there, if one of you know about this, we'd rather be happy to know what we can expect.
Thank you, but we're still far from the polishing we want to reach
For the tunnels I start with a spline, to define the shape of my tunnel, I then place that spline at its right place vertically, and when the shape is okay, I put a sweep modifier on it, in box or tube mode, disable banking, delete the unecessary faces if box mode, and extrude the edges to model a tube. In case you choosen the tube you only have to delete the borders and enjoy the already generated UVs that sweep does for you. All that's left is put some noise on the mesh starting from the top of the tunnel verts to the bottom using a soft selection, so that way your floor isnt spiky. UVs are done, maybe one or two relax and you're good to go ingame. Sometimes to catch more details from the noise I tend to smooth the mesh, put the noise, and then remove one loop out of two. Not sure if it really gives more details, but anyway, sometimes you have to chamfer some edges and move some verts to fix the randomness of the noise.
For the rooms like the crypt, I start by defining where my pillars are going to sit, and model the ground around them. When arrived to the borders, it's almost the same technique concerning the noise to make your mesh look like rocks. Except here you'll have to pelt your UVs
Rinse and repeat
Thanks' Yeah the camera is a bit horrible, but it was just for polycounters, it's my present
We have a cool skeleton on the way out of ZB that we'll be able to pose in any pose and some will lay ther ein the crypt. Also when those will be in, I'll adjust the lighting to make them pop a lil more in dark places.
@vofff: Almost everything in the video is from me except some objects like the mushrooms, ivy textures, crystals in the cave, and umh.. The others still have to catch up with me !
@Snader: I'll try to do some
@SHEPEIRO: About the fronds, I guess you speak about the lower level of details models (it has 3 LOD). At close range the fronds have more than enough in my opinion (more would kill our beloved PS3 a tad faster).
About the rocks, you're spot on, I have to either glue those to the ground or spawn some veg around.
And thanks!
Between last message and this one there's been multiple tests on the PS3 to optimize the game performance, and we're able to run everything around 60fps for ruins and cave places, the only place that is a tad lower is the beach where I'm fighting to stay over 30fps. Damn overdraw.
I've added a pass of ambient occlusion in almost all the rooms of the map, to give the shadowed areas some penumbra shadows + the usual AO use. Simplified shaders and that stuff.
Still looking forward to crits !
There's a lot of pictures there with the lens flare but it's because I was drooling on the effect.
The pirate ships wont be played ingame I think. We will only do cutscenes on it.
And you may also notice less foliage in these last screenshots because I had to reduce the amount of it for performance reasons. Foliage rendering was taking up to 20ms at some places before.. And we can not afford that.
what school is this for?
and if you dont mind me asking, what are the restrictions on the ps3 that you are facing?
i would consider polishing the sky a touch atm i its too saturated esp at the horizon and getting a bit more of a deeper cobalt blue higher up would be good
Reminds me of Uncharted, the first one!
Congrats to the whole team
shame there is no gameplay to see yet
Is the ship done? I see the sails on the ship are kind plain.
Me and the rest of the group had a show in front of the professionals jury Wednesday. And we did pretty well. Out of us 4 we all got our diploma of game artist after a three years curriculum.
Here's a bit shortened video of what we did show then:
http://vimeo.com/12871700
Watch in HD
Maybe I'll post my own post-mortem and some individual assets screenshots if you people want them.
And now, we're ready for job hunt!!
Anyhow, looks great aside from some weird animation stuff you have going on. The environments all look phenominal, really nice work sir.