Dark Vibes - School project - video inside !

vahl

hello everyone,
this thing was completed a while ago, but I had no time to upload it, finally found some this afternoon to compress the trailer and upload it.

so, we were a little team of 6 : 1 project leader, 3 coders, 2 artists/level designers. all of us worked on the game design and general level design as this was the main purpose of the course.

the game is meant to be comics inspired... the hero can alter the sounds surrounding him (you can see the alterations in the trailer witht he purple particle effects)

we used the unreal engine 2 runtime for that project, and as eula states, we can't distribute the project, unfortunately.

the project has been shown in front of a jury of 30 professionals from the french game industry (french school) and we finished first ex-aequo, along with our friends and schoolmates from blobbieswars I don't have screens or urls for the two other projects which were pretty cool aswell, I'll put some as soon as I have the info

anyway, here's a little collage from Dark vibes :



and the trailer, 16 megs, windows media 9 video (avi)

-- TRAILER



--TRAILER

the animations aren't looking great because of the video capture mainly, this was captured in very high quality, so the framerate was very slow and as animations weren't synched to the framerate, they play too fast or too slow in the video, they're fine in the game though.

I did most of the visuals (except the subway part which was done by the other level designer), animations, special effects and characters.The game has 3 levels, the last one isn't shown here but it's the best

while doing that school project, we had like 700 hours of work for the course itself...how fun that was :d

vahl

updated the post with a bigger image, it seems the trailer link wasn't easy to see either, so I added a thumb ^^

oh little something, as EQ mentionned it, the hero is a guy, he has a very androgyn look, that was intentionnal

LordScottish

That is really cool. Is there a physique engine implemented in the unreal 2 engine? I like the look of the game a lot, it looks a bit like a wellshaded comic version of the max payne titles.
The comicshader on the gun of the playermodel looks a bit odd sometimes, maybe you could tone down the contrast a bit? Or is it too late for any changes?

notman

I think some of the animations could use some work, but over all it looks pretty cool. I like the concept and the comic book technique you did.

KDR_11k

What does that "manipulating sounds" thingie do?

Chunkey

Overall, I'd say that it's not that far off being production quality- for a small team to put something like this together does show that there is potential in the project.

Gotta say, I love those stereo speaker dudes

There are issues, though, which with most of them, in time, could be fixed easily enough:

The running anim doesn't enough keyframes spent on the jacket arms so they look less linear in their movement. A small thing but if you're constantly looking at the character, you will quickly notice this issue.

Level Art: nice use of colour, I do like my pastel colours However, the use of contrast is not enough in places and makes the environments look bland- maybe a stronger splashes of colours and also a stronger falloff in the shading effects on the levels would help make the environments fit in stylistically with the character art which is looking rather ace and contrasty

The textures look like they're in need of some more loving- using natural media effects such as watercolour would help bring out the comic book effect that you guys were aiming for.

It is a shame that you can't release the project for it looks to be quite fun- it would be great to see what the other teams did just as a benchmark