BEAT-EM-UP! | naturon

naturon

Hey guys, I originally wasn't interested in the sidescrolling theme but seeing everyone's ideas have inspired me and as I was starting to gear up to make a isometric jungle themed scene I thought I'd change gears to go with the sidescroller.
So I'm gonna go for a indiana jones temple of doom (first scene) kinda feel in the jungle then transitioning to some sort of mayan/ aztec temple underground cave thing.

Now my mood board/ semi layout is probably unintelligible to anyone but me but thats ok, hopefully itll all come together. Also I'm going to Mexico at the start of october so I've only got half the amount of time but thats ok this is mostly just for a bit of fun and to see what I can do in a month.


Assets Needed:

3D:

At least 3 types of trees
- Big branching, big butress roots, maybe a strangler fig version as well
- palm
- thinner branching
(make sure they have distinct silhouettes from different angles)

Vegetation - smaller palm bush, shrubs, vines - lots of vines

rocks - moss covered, etc

Helecopter crash (I'd really like to get this done, hopefully Ill have time)

Rope Bridge/ cliff face

Various aztec ruins - old arch, totems, maybe face carved into cliff side or overgrown tree
Temple

Torches

Spikes

Stone wall

Idol

2D:

Mountainous Vista
Skybox

Textures:

Dirtpath
Flowing water
Waterfall
Grass
Jungle trees


Ok wow thats alot of work ... Good luck everyone, and stay tuned for progress ... Hopefully

pr1mus

Hey you'v stole my Idea (i have the same theme, but without Indy) Just joking around. Sounds good so far. Good luck on your project, hope you'r getting your Helicopter Crash finished.

naturon

A few assets that will be contributing :

naturon

@primus oh yeah I must have missed yours. damn I thought I was being at least semi original :P ... good luck man it'll be good to see another persons perspective on the theme.
I'm gonna try to get alot of depth out of my scene (I know weird for a side scrolling game) and really try to push the colour pallet.
Anyway good luck

naturon

I can't sleep so here's a grey box over view

naturon

Ok getting stuck into the trees, heres the first big butress ... obviously the textures are still very early.

I also forgot to mention I'll be doing all this in Unity - so yeah rendered in Unity3D

Permanent

nice bro! love the theme! so many ways you could take this

naturon

Bit more work ... I'm really loving this challenge.




Just a basic normal map and occlusion done from a Zbrush sculpt as a base so far.

Loren Broach

Nice progress Naturon.

I do have some critiques on the bridge. Right now the bridge is too noisy. Those wood planks don't need that much grunge, it's just adding buzz. Also I'd maybe half the ammount of rope on the sides and thicken them up a bit. Lastly, I like the missing planks but they seem too evenly placed. About every 5-6 planks there is a missing plank, which is too uniform, try to vary it up more.

Keep it up!

naturon

Thanks for the advice on the bridge man, I totally agree and it will be reworked in due time. These are all pretty much first passes on the textures etc, I;ll go back through and optimise and rework and but yeah that bridge sux ... I think im gonna go a more derelict tribal version of it anyway.

So PLANTS!

naturon

Little update on the look - sorry I know I'm updating alot of small increments but if I don;t do it I don;t see progress and get disheartened.
Anyways let me know what you think.

LoTekK

Glad to see some organics. You've got some nice-looking props so far, but that foliage is suffering the same issues as the bridge: noise. I assume the "in-game" shots will be closer to the trees, but they still strike me as being very noisy, and would potentially draw too much attention away from the mid ground (player).

ParoXum

http://i869.photobucket.com/albums/ab252/saxondixon/butress_tree.png

Hey, nice start, looks like this tree model has some UV mapping problems with the foliage tex.

At a lot of places it seems like your texture is being cut by the edge of the triangle/quad, if you did your foliage placement using instances it'll be an easy fix tho.

If not, you can fix that easily by scaling up the foliage planes with the 'keep uv' on. Thought will create more overdraw.

naturon

Hey thanks for the advice - I've fixed up the UV problems with the tree and altered the foliage type but you probably can't see it in these pictures. Its still quite noisy over all but the jungle is a bit like that in general, I think what I might do is create a dark jungle scene and lighten the area around the player to make him stand out more that would lead to a better focus on the player and solve the problem on him getting lost in the background.
I also like the possibilitys that come with the different colour palettes and mood, new enemies, background animations of panthers bat/birds, spiders etc.
Something I'd also really like to do is have the lighting change from the dark opressive atmosphere of the jungle to the wide open sunset across the water falls when come out of the jungle going across the bridge. I think that could be a huge visual payoff.
ANyway without further ado some very small progress :





Oh yeah if anyone know's a good tutorial on good way's to make running water (unity based would be awesome) please let me know, I've got some ideas of how to go about it, mostly involving animated normal maps but yeah Ive never really done that kind of thing. Cheers

gsokol

Looking like a good start!

The trees, when clustered together..look really nice.

For your question about running water...here is a good example project: http://unity3d.com/support/resources/example-projects/sewercontrolroom

You can mimic what this does. Basically its just a mesh with a UV scrolling script and a tiled normal map with reflection/refraction. I've used this method and got great results.

LoTekK

Yeah, scrolling uvs are pretty much the easiest way to go about it. To embellish it a bit, you could loop a slightly animated texture (surface disturbance) instead of a static one.

naturon

Hey guys long time no see :P ... yeah ive been a bit busy this week and havent got around to doing a whole lot. Worked a bit more on the butress tree texture and the rocks, got some water happening (cheers for the advice btw) ... switched to Unreal for about half a day before I realised I had no idea what I was doing as apposed to an 8th of an idea with Unity.
Yeah other than that playing around with Unity's lights and scripting etc. I dont have Pro so I dont have realtime shadows which is really annoying ... anyway heres the very FIRST build of the very first section of my side scrolling game. Very very very early but judge away

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1576800/build_preAlpha_1.0.html


Oh and for those who dont have the Unity web player installed or cant be bothered

Mike Yevin

Wow, I'm loving the progress so far, and I'm pretty surprised at what you've been able to accomplish with Unity. Keep it up

JohnnySix

Not sure what the web based, or even the normal version of unity of is cabable of lighting wise, but perhaps if it's not so hot , maybe think about baking lighting in? At the moment it seems some things like the trees in the background receive a LOT of bright yellow light, and the surrounding ground and foreground objects instead seem a dull purple.

It reminded me a little of the old Genesis/Megadrive game Castle of illusion (and the sequel World of illusion), in that you have some great potential for foreground elements being used in a similar way- like the big leaves in the second screen for example.

woody_294

Looking good man. I'm a fan of your theme