BEAT-EM-UP! | Andrew Mackie

Andrew Mackie

Hello Interwebs!

So I know that we are very late in joining this contest but I feel like we can still get a decent amount of it all done (maybe even all of it!).
I will be working with a friend of mine Lorena Ponce. She is a concept artist and all around awesome artist.

Here are some of the references that we are striving to emulate.








We are going for a Castle Crashers style game and here are some rough silhouettes of concepts/ideas.





I will be starting the block ins tonight.

Andrew Mackie

Some of the challenges that we hope to overcome is the huge problem that, at least, I have with spacial differences between foreground, middle ground and background.
I have also really wanted to always do an environment in the style of Deathspank and Castle Crashers. It just seems really fun to be that stylized but still involve and immerse the player into your own world that you have created even though it isn't amazing realistic and high poly.

UPDATES ARE COMING SOON!

Andrew Mackie

Heres a link to Lorena's blog of work.
http://art4lore.blogspot.com/
Check out her stuff!

Andrew Mackie

Some screengrabs from Maya of my WIP. Just playing around with how I see this environment coming together. Got to go check with my partner now and see what she thinks.
Enjoy!

LorenaPonce

Yes, I believe in the next few weeks they will be intense game making but I feel loads of potential and fun can be made

Andrew Mackie

Quick castle texture update.
Still in it's rough stages.

Andrew Mackie

Still messing about in Maya and Photoshop trying to get that style that we both want. Lore has given me a great painted stone texture that I have placed on a few of the objects. I have also created a few styles of trees that I would like to incorporate into the scenes (as long as I can cut down on their polycount).
I like the idea that I have for creating a cardboard style high school prop play theme. I'll run it by Lore to see if she likes it as much as I do.
Feel free to C&C!
UNTIL THE NEXT POST!

Andrew Mackie

Some of the Castle and Woods levels are in Unity and I just set up most of the colliders and the PLAYER sample mesh so I can walk around and see the environments.
Still working on the Swamp and the Cave levels.
C&C welcome!
Also check out those awesome looking textures that Lore drew!

Andrew Mackie

*EDIT*
Lighting still needs A LOT of work. I may touch that up a little tonight...

Andrew Mackie

Okay. So I have a new Unity Build of the game so everyone could play it, but I do not know how to attach folders to download onto this forum.
If anyone reads this and knows how please let me know and everyone will be able to play through these levels that we have been creating.
Until then I'll just post some screen grabs.

Andrew Mackie

Newest screen grabs.
Enjoy!

Ben Apuna

That's a pretty good start.

You might want to sculpt the terrain a bit, the flatness is really emphasizing the tiling nature of your textures.

It might also be good to get a 2nd dirt/rocks texture so that you can blend between the two on the terrain. Right now with the single texture it's looking pretty monotonous.

At some point you're going to need to bake some lighting into this level. It could really use some shadows to help bind the various objects to the ground.

Anyway, keep it up.

About Unity, you can do a "web build" so that people can play in their browsers.

In Unity:

1. File -> Build Settings...

2. Choose "Web Player" then hit "Build".

3. Select a folder to save the .unity3d file.

4. In that folder, you should now have a filename.unity3d file and a filename.html file.

5. Get a Dropbox account (it's free) and upload both the .unity3d and the .html file to your public folder.

6. Open your Dropbox in your browser, right click the Dropbox icon in your system tray and click and choose "Launch Dropbox Website".

7. Navigate to your Public folder and right click your .html file and choose "Copy public link" then click "Copy to clipboard".

8. Paste that url into your post here on Polycount using the Insert Link button, or place it in between some url tags in your post like this: [noparse]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/[/noparse]yourdropboxaddress/filename.html[noparse][/noparse]

That should do it.

If for some reason the Unity file doesn't load you'll need to go edit the html file with notepad to reflect static url of the .unity3d file in it's location on the Dropbox site, but I just tested it without editing the urls and it worked for me so it should be alright.

Andrew Mackie

Hey Ben Apuna - Thanks for the help! I'll get to working on putting the files into a dropbox so people can run around the levels . I agree with the terrain and the lighting. I'll add some more dynamic lighting and do some lightmapping soon (VERY SOON WITH THE END OF THE CONTEST COMING UP).

cholden

With a locked camera position of side-scrollers, you don't need to tile textures so much. Measure the pixels of the screen resolution versus the pixels of your textures. General rules don't always apply and this case is one of them. Same as a cinematic character model's face has more detail than an RTS unit's face. You can have much more custom work by properly using your pixels here.

Andrew Mackie

Cholden - Thank you! I will be touching up and re-sizing the textures once I have everything placed. I'm treating this environment(s) as a fun side project. (get it 'side project' 'side scroller' ... this is why I am not a comedian). But I am not paying AS much detail as I do any other project because I just want to have fun with it. But you do bring up very valid points that I will address over this next week.