[UE4] Robots, Death & Venice
Introduction
Hello everyone! We are a group of 14 students from Barcelona, studying 3D Design & Art for Videogames in FX Animation. We would like to share our new and last project. It’s called “Robots, Death & Venice”. We will keep you updated with the progress. We started the project around 15 April and we will finish it around 15 June. So we will be posting the process of designing from scratch till the final result. For this project we decided to make a simulation as if it was a real studio. Our teachers took the role of “owners” of the game, and we divided in two big groups, Environment /Props and Characters. Each group has its own Lead Artist and Scrum Manager.
Owners/Teachers:
- Alberto Martinez (Programmer) (https://www.artstation.com/albmarvil)
- Javi F.Flores (Environment & Props) (https://www.artstation.com/javiflores)
- Dani Sánchez (Characters) (https://www.artstation.com/daniele86)
Characters:
- Brandon Jibaja (Scrum) (https://www.artstation.com/brjaid)
- Patricia Campos (Lead Artist) (https://www.artstation.com/gamespxy)
- Valentina Verdaguer (Social Media) (https://www.artstation.com/valentinaverdaguer)
- Juan Darío Arango (Logo) (https://www.artstation.com/juanchoav92)
- Guillem Suriñach (https://www.artstation.com/hotsur)
- Alex Díaz (https://www.artstation.com/alejandrodiazcastellano)
-
Lucas García (https://www.artstation.com/lucasga99)
Environment & Props:
- Nuno Filipe Moura (Scrum) (https://www.artstation.com/nunofilipemoura)
- Andre Caetano (Lead Artist) (https://www.artstation.com/caetanoart)
- Martin Danlos (Social Media) (https://www.artstation.com/martindanlos)
- Fran Ruiz (https://www.artstation.com/cesk)
- Victor Agrisuelas (https://www.artstation.com/victoragri98)
- Marc Lupión (https://www.artstation.com/pixelkiwi)
- Carles Borras (https://www.artstation.com/borras)
The Main idea for this project was to be inspired in Venice (Italy), but with the style we’ve seen on the Dishonored games, a mix between realistic looking games and stylized. For the programming part we have the huge help of our teacher Alberto Martinez, developing gameplay, IA, SVN....
The plot
It is a dictatorship in chaos, there are many barricades and it has a dark aesthetic since there are many wars and the city has been taken by force. There is a private barrack in an "X" building, there are not many citizens on the streets, gangsters rule the city and make guards throughout it, protecting its leader and using his strength and privileges against the citizens. Your objective is to kill the mob leader and try to ruin his gangster empire. The protagonist is a bounty hunt paid for what they fight for the good of the city and that the main enemy, leader of the mafia is the evil jester.
Gathering the References for Environment and Props
The main inspiration for our game is Dishonored, so we spent some days to gather as many references as possible, from Dishonored, Bioshock, Venice (city), different concepts and many others from websites as Google images, Pinterest, Arstation, 80Lvl, Polycount. We looked for references that conveyed the mood and feeling we wanted to simulate on our scene, as well as the composition that we found interesting.
After collecting the references, we made a list of items/buildings/rooms that would be present in the architecture. Next step was to think about gameplay and check again for further changes.
Gathering the References for Characters
As for the environment, the main inspiration was Dishonored, so the research for the characters involved a lot of pictures based on the style and characters of the game. The plot demands a lot of robots and cyborgs, as well as the main character and some specific enemies. At the beginning we did not know how it the final boss was going to be or where the main action would take place, so our leads gave us the freedom to create the characters we wanted following the aesthetic and the environment art direction. That is how we created two mafia robots and one cyborg, the evil pizza robot, a robotic exotic ballerina, a cyborg jester and the bounty hunt. And, as chaotic as it sounds, it is working.
These are all the references the character artists used to create their character.
One month of work brought us here.
We have done the high poly of the 7 characters. And now we are currently working on the low poly and skinning.
Blockout
We have three scenes, the first one is the safe house of our main character, then we go to an exterior, the city and finally we go to the theatre, where the Jester is located.
This is the first scene, the safe house. It has a common area (stairs), the flat and a secret room inside the flat.
This is the second scene, the exterior and city.
This is the third scene, the theater.
This was an early blockout, further changes were made, we will keep you updated.
Basic gameplay
Gameplay for the first scene (safe house).
Gameplay for the third scene (theater).
Our Programmer (Alberto Martinez) has been working on the gameplay development, you can watch on the links below the early development of physics and playthrough.
Shooting gameplay, testing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vql4aYVj9Y8&feature=youtu.be
Playthough, gameplay:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwvDoQyLKRE&feature=youtu.be
Modeling and importing into UE4
Interior of the Safe House.
Secret Room inside the Safe House.
Common area from the Safe House building.
The city exterior.
Hall from the theater.
Theater.
Materials
Fran Ruiz has been working exclusively on the materials so far. There is a large numbers of materials to be made, but these are the ones we are working with now, we will import them into UE4 for the next update, so stay tunned!
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We are going to update our project every week, you will be able to see the process and if you have any feedback or comment you want to do about the project, please go ahead! We are willing to read from you!
Replies
Hello everyone!
In the first post you have seen a sneak peek of the characters we are developing. We are very glad to bring more details and the progress of the characters.
Main character: The bounty hunter, made by Brandon Jibaja.
Mob Robot 1: made by Patricia Campos
Mob Robot 2: made by Alejandro Díaz
Mob Robot 3: made by Juan Darío Arango
Pizza Robot: made by Lucas García
Ballerina: made by Guillem Suriñach
Main enemy: The jester, made by Valentina Verdaguer
We worked on the exterior. Added lighting, textures, updated meshes and added more buildings.
Patricia campos, Nuno Filipe Moura and Alex Díaz worked on different guns for our project.
Martin Danlos and Carles Borras are working on the first props form the environment, props for the exterior, safe house and theater.
Alberto Martinez worked on a water shader for the project and now we are deciding which variation we should use fitting our style. If u have any suggestion or thoughts let us know!
Finally, Fran Ruiz kept working on the materials for the scene, and will have most of them finished by the end of next week.
Thank you for checking out our weekly update! Feedback is appreciated! See you again next week!
On this week, all our character artists, have been working on the textures of their character. They also have been implementing the character in UE4 and made it playable.
We will be very happy to receive feedback from you! See you soon!
As a team, we made a sprint this past week to reach out our goal. We have been working on Texturing the environment, props making and finally, finishing almost all characters. Also, we are very glad to present the first trailer of our game.
Click on the link below to see the first and more trailers that will come! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEqCSrDwwqw&t=1s
We made some screenshot to show our progress.
On this week, we've been working mostly on the exterior scene, so we could record a WIP Trailer from our game and attend the gamelab contest. We'll be updating every scene during the rest of the weeks and improve it considerably!
The renders above were presented to the Gamelab contest first entry, much improvement to be done, but a WIP scene that will end up looking great! We'll keep you updated!
The Safe House progress so far, we were developing other areas so we didn't invest much time on this scene. Next week we'll make a big improvement! stay tunned!
Finally these 2 screenshots are from the Theater scene. We added a Bar and some decoration on the stage. For the next week this scene will be filled with materials and some props!
Hope you enjoyed this one! We already recieved some feedback and we are working on it!, if you have any suggestions or ideas about our project, let us know!
See you again next week.
We are happy to bring the progress of Rosetta.
On this part the lighting it's proxy, it'll change and imrpove, dressing aswell!
Our UI has been changing lately, this is our last update!
Finally our third scene, the theater has new changes, we are doing dressing and lighting right now, so you'll be able to see a huge improvement for the next post!
As i wrote before, the next post will probably be the last update! I hope you enjoyed this one and feel free to comment anything about it.
See you soon!