University game project - need advice/crits
polycounter lvl 8
Hello good folks on Polycount.
I'm currently enrolled on the game development education at Stockholm university, Sweden. There's a lot to be said about the education but just so we're on the same page: It hasn't been very great.
For our final project my group has been trying to put together a game. It is not finished yet but I thought I wouldn't be one of those fools who didn't try to get help from the eminent Polycount community until it was way too late. Uhm.. We have about a month of time left.
So, I would like to submit to you what we have come up with so far...
But first I'd like to describe the game so you know what it is about:
The game is a two player coop game set in a science-fiction world. Basically the goal is to cooperate and beat various bosses together. You view it from a strategic perspective (third person but pretty far out).
These screenshots are taken from our editor:
We're mainly looking for advice/crits/suggestions on the game art. As none of us has had any formal training or experience in making any kind of art at all we are very open on how to improve this.
Things we already know:
- We needed a concept artist a long time ago cause we've just been improvising every piece. There is no concept art I can show you guys that we are working from. We did dig up lots of different games and movies as a reference though.
- There's very little props. We'd like to know what to add though. Usually you would add props that fit into the room. We have general themes for most of the rooms (entrance, control room, warehouse, research area.. and so on) but we're having big problems with coming up with what should be in each room and how it should look.
- The lighting isn't done yet
- There's no GUI to be talked about
I would also like advice on how to design levels for this perspective. We are having a major headache with walls blocking the view or not blocking the view when they should. We're trying to solve this without programming but it seems very hard.
For people wondering; the game was coded in with the help of XNA. We have our own editor made for this project. Uhm... the engine supports most common stuff such as normal mapping, mesh instancing and depth of field.
If there's any questions please ask away.
Thanks in advance.
I'm currently enrolled on the game development education at Stockholm university, Sweden. There's a lot to be said about the education but just so we're on the same page: It hasn't been very great.
For our final project my group has been trying to put together a game. It is not finished yet but I thought I wouldn't be one of those fools who didn't try to get help from the eminent Polycount community until it was way too late. Uhm.. We have about a month of time left.
So, I would like to submit to you what we have come up with so far...
But first I'd like to describe the game so you know what it is about:
The game is a two player coop game set in a science-fiction world. Basically the goal is to cooperate and beat various bosses together. You view it from a strategic perspective (third person but pretty far out).
These screenshots are taken from our editor:
We're mainly looking for advice/crits/suggestions on the game art. As none of us has had any formal training or experience in making any kind of art at all we are very open on how to improve this.
Things we already know:
- We needed a concept artist a long time ago cause we've just been improvising every piece. There is no concept art I can show you guys that we are working from. We did dig up lots of different games and movies as a reference though.
- There's very little props. We'd like to know what to add though. Usually you would add props that fit into the room. We have general themes for most of the rooms (entrance, control room, warehouse, research area.. and so on) but we're having big problems with coming up with what should be in each room and how it should look.
- The lighting isn't done yet
- There's no GUI to be talked about
I would also like advice on how to design levels for this perspective. We are having a major headache with walls blocking the view or not blocking the view when they should. We're trying to solve this without programming but it seems very hard.
For people wondering; the game was coded in with the help of XNA. We have our own editor made for this project. Uhm... the engine supports most common stuff such as normal mapping, mesh instancing and depth of field.
If there's any questions please ask away.
Thanks in advance.
Replies
-N
Looks really good so far, especially for a student game. I know the quality of the graphics that most student games have.... so this is crazy good in comparison.
Other than that I really like it, the shadows look cool.
HAL: I think the spec part is actually more due to bad lighting rather than bad spec maps. everything's basically lit with a directional and ambient light. the parts that you thought looked good actually have spot lights on them. I'll have to look a little on how to fix that though. thanks.
Great concept!
Your environment lacks a couple of things to make it really work. First, if you can, it would be good to put a low frequency decal over the repeated floor texture- just to help break it up a little. Something like a subtle oil stain or something.
I would shift away from brown and feature tones surrounding it - so copper, burgundy, red, orange dirt - all of which when combined give a brown feel- but a rich, complex feel. Maybe throw in a theme color to offset all the brown - so put all the floor patterns in yellow, the text and icons on the boxes in yellow etc. Something that pops. (imagine batman - grey, black a little pink and a pop of yellow)
A big tip is to squint at your screenshots and see what you can make out- your eyes tend to get drawn to bright areas- so your eye gets pulled away into that orange backdrop- this can tire your eyes out as they are trying to look at your characters but are magnetically drawn to the sky.
I suggest to all students to grab a screenshot of the original pacman- then squint at it and tell me in what order the objects are in brightness and contrast. Its a masterpeice of balance.
I've gotten a lot of comments on that it is too "drab" and "boring". The color suggestion you made is probably going to help. I'm hoping that the programmer will get time to implement the decal system that's been talked about. We're using deferred rendering and that means that we won't be getting proper alpha without this decal system.
The orange backdrop is supposed to be lava... and a couple of versions ago it looked decent. Now it just looks terrible. Any tips on creating nice lava would be appreciated.
Good luck
-Neil
First off we added more detail (molding and floor path) with some nice yellow to add some more variety to the boring feeling.
Then we tried to make everything more interesting by adding some contrasted lighting.
Here's what we got so far:
Note that the position where these shots are taken from is way farther out than in the real game cam.
Issues I'm concerned with right now:
- The lava backdrop issue is still a big concern cause it really takes away too much of your attention and it's hard to light up the other areas properly cause of the huge switch in contrast.. cause of HDR
- Lighting the scene in general is tough with HDR cause it's hard to know what everything will look like. Not sure what the workflow with this is.
Oh, I might as well get this one out too. Green would be a real winner here for more contrast but we're pretty much saving up on it for important stuff. One of the main characters got green glowy goggles, there are some explosive barrels that are green. And well.. greener lighting usually marks something special.
Green would work only if it was desaturated- otherwise it would directly fight the orange. Having yellow green laser blasts could work - but a hot cyan would be much more punchy.
The cyan color of grey you picked is great- if you add more hints of cyan here and there your getting a great tension using complementary colors- that adds excitement.
For the lava, how about making it under cracked black molten rock floating on the surface to tone it right back down- than you could have this seething and moving, and suggest heat shimmer with a camera normal ripple. Animated models of bursts of lava leaping combined with flashing orange light would give a lot of life to the scenes.
You could also add a hazy fogging - that lava would be throwing up a lot of crap into the air- one idea to explore may be to have little bits of black papery particles occasionally blow past the camera at several depths. Another logical step would be that ash would build up in places on your deck, and occasional scorch marks from chunks of lava thrown up onto the deck.
Also, how about making the edges of your plaforms molten and shiney in places?
Another tip would be to make your doors and switches pop out from your scenery- give them some more contrast, perhaps some self illumated components and fine details.
Dave
Heres a quicky crappy paintover that may give you some inspiration.
I added an edge texture for the hexagonal material, and added a little more interest and tonal variation by giving that a welded, indented grey edge. Cyan speckles add interest against the red dust. since its the most striking thing on screen, its good to spend a little time on it.
For the characters, I made their skin sweaty - and toned them down in places to work together. I added some edges and panels to give the viewer something to explore with his eyes. The green pants I switched to red, because they fight against the characters red visor and the general orange feel.
The robots blue grey is shifted so sit him better in the world, and I put crap and damage softly all over everything- a little specular hits here and there punch edges out and make them a little sharper.
Hope that helps.
I'm wondering a little about the green though. Is it really just bad to have green or could it be used for something? Originally we had planned it to be reserved for important things since it actually does pop out as soon as something green shows up. I'm talking about the intense green. Basically we want to make a point that this is something special. I guess just making it glow would also work.
Thanks again for all the help. I'll try to get an update up later this week as soon as I convince everyone else about this. Shouldn't take too long.
Here's some gameplay footage though:
[ame]
We still haven't gotten any particles or decals in but we should be able to cram it in during the last week. Hopefully we'll get around to updating the textures and lighting too.
Also here's our entry page for Swedish Game Awards:
http://gameawards.se/competition_entries/283
[ame]
We never really had time to fix most of the graphics after all cause a lot of stuff came up at the end. Still big thanks to Dave and I'm definitely going to take everything he said with me for my next project.