4 weeks game project
Hello!
Recently we started our second game project at our school (FutureGames Stockholm, Sweden). We are supposed to make a working game in 4 weeks. Our group consists of 4 artists and 2 designers. The game must be made in Unity. I should add also that the designers had four weeks or so of prototyping the game before we started the actual work... call it pre-production if you want but without any art involved.
Before I start showing our stuff I should also add that we started the project a couple of weeks ago and I originally planed to keep a diary sort of thing on Polycount since the first week... but time flies by and I had no time to post or do a thread... I don't have more time now but I really want to do this so, as they say, better later than never...
So here it goes:
The game concept:
The game idea was to create a team based shooter but since one of the requirements we got from the school was to make a "vehicle game" (the idea behind it being that we should avoid character animations which would take quite a lot) we switched the characters with sci-fi hovers. Also, we thought about twisting the whole shooter idea a little. Since the main game mode that we have right now is to successfully place a bomb three times in the enemy base, we introduced a pre-game stage where each team designs its own fortress. There is a commander in each team who gets a certain budget that he can spend building walls and defense towers. Another small twist is that we have power ups randomly spawned in the arena; those being ammo, speed boost, invisibility and health. The last aspect I should mention is that we have 5 classes of vehicles, each with a specific role. They can be placed in three more general categories: support, tanking and speed vehicles meant to deal with bomb placing.
We have quite a few things in mind that we could add such as another couple of game modes or more power ups or more diversity in the environment but first we want to polish the basic idea that we had and after, we can see if we have the time to add anything extra.
Since I am an artist I will mainly describe the process we went through on the art side of the entire thing but I will try to put some design stuff aswell. Maybe I will get one of the guys who works on the coding and everything to make a post. But until than I'll describe the art side of the game.
The Art of the game:
So in the first day we wanted to get down the following things:
1 - Organization of the entire group
2 - General style and art direction
3 - List with "must have" and extra assets for the game
1 - Organization of the entire group:
We decided that we will use an analog Scrum board to keep track of the tasks we need to do individually. Also we would use SVN to store our files.
2 - General style and art direction:
We first decided to go for a mix between stylized cartoony look and realism... Than Borderlands came to mind. From here we took a few decisions: we decided to avoid using normal maps for both time and resource saving. Instead, we decided that we will spend more polygons in the models to get a nice smoothing (korean bevels) to compensate for the normal maps. Related to this, we decided that we will rely heavily on the textures; out of 4 artists, 2 are quite good when it comes to 2D art... therefor we could rely on this to make up for details that normally would come from a high poly mesh.
3 - List with "must have" and extra assets for the game:
You will have the chance to see this in the rest of the post when I will start posting pictures and what not. But generally we decided that we will have a mountain like arena, framed by vegetation. On top of this we needed 5 vehicles, at least one type of tillable wall and a tower that could blend with the wall.
Week one: General concept and the first models
So after our first big meeting we divided the task in the following way: ( I will use names just for the sake of clarity...)
Hannes: coordinate the art side of the game and concept the vehicles. Also helped with modeling the vehicles
Simon: figure out a fast way to generate a terrain base, in order to allow us to generate several maps in the future
Dan: model the vehicles
Isabell: concept and model the vegetation
Here are the concepts Hannes came up with for the vehicles:
Early ideas... trying to figure where we should go:
These are sort of the final concepts that we used before starting modelling them
Recently we started our second game project at our school (FutureGames Stockholm, Sweden). We are supposed to make a working game in 4 weeks. Our group consists of 4 artists and 2 designers. The game must be made in Unity. I should add also that the designers had four weeks or so of prototyping the game before we started the actual work... call it pre-production if you want but without any art involved.
Before I start showing our stuff I should also add that we started the project a couple of weeks ago and I originally planed to keep a diary sort of thing on Polycount since the first week... but time flies by and I had no time to post or do a thread... I don't have more time now but I really want to do this so, as they say, better later than never...
So here it goes:
The game concept:
The game idea was to create a team based shooter but since one of the requirements we got from the school was to make a "vehicle game" (the idea behind it being that we should avoid character animations which would take quite a lot) we switched the characters with sci-fi hovers. Also, we thought about twisting the whole shooter idea a little. Since the main game mode that we have right now is to successfully place a bomb three times in the enemy base, we introduced a pre-game stage where each team designs its own fortress. There is a commander in each team who gets a certain budget that he can spend building walls and defense towers. Another small twist is that we have power ups randomly spawned in the arena; those being ammo, speed boost, invisibility and health. The last aspect I should mention is that we have 5 classes of vehicles, each with a specific role. They can be placed in three more general categories: support, tanking and speed vehicles meant to deal with bomb placing.
We have quite a few things in mind that we could add such as another couple of game modes or more power ups or more diversity in the environment but first we want to polish the basic idea that we had and after, we can see if we have the time to add anything extra.
Since I am an artist I will mainly describe the process we went through on the art side of the entire thing but I will try to put some design stuff aswell. Maybe I will get one of the guys who works on the coding and everything to make a post. But until than I'll describe the art side of the game.
The Art of the game:
So in the first day we wanted to get down the following things:
1 - Organization of the entire group
2 - General style and art direction
3 - List with "must have" and extra assets for the game
1 - Organization of the entire group:
We decided that we will use an analog Scrum board to keep track of the tasks we need to do individually. Also we would use SVN to store our files.
2 - General style and art direction:
We first decided to go for a mix between stylized cartoony look and realism... Than Borderlands came to mind. From here we took a few decisions: we decided to avoid using normal maps for both time and resource saving. Instead, we decided that we will spend more polygons in the models to get a nice smoothing (korean bevels) to compensate for the normal maps. Related to this, we decided that we will rely heavily on the textures; out of 4 artists, 2 are quite good when it comes to 2D art... therefor we could rely on this to make up for details that normally would come from a high poly mesh.
3 - List with "must have" and extra assets for the game:
You will have the chance to see this in the rest of the post when I will start posting pictures and what not. But generally we decided that we will have a mountain like arena, framed by vegetation. On top of this we needed 5 vehicles, at least one type of tillable wall and a tower that could blend with the wall.
Week one: General concept and the first models
So after our first big meeting we divided the task in the following way: ( I will use names just for the sake of clarity...)
Hannes: coordinate the art side of the game and concept the vehicles. Also helped with modeling the vehicles
Simon: figure out a fast way to generate a terrain base, in order to allow us to generate several maps in the future
Dan: model the vehicles
Isabell: concept and model the vegetation
Here are the concepts Hannes came up with for the vehicles:
Early ideas... trying to figure where we should go:
These are sort of the final concepts that we used before starting modelling them
Replies
This is the FlameThrower, which is also the tank in our game. Is the slowest vehicle but it has the largest health:
This is the Missile Hover, a fast vehicle that is supposed to deal with the bomb placement. Is the fastest vehicle but has the lowest health.
And the final vehicle, the EMP (electro-magnetic-pulse), is our control hover. Its purpose is to stun enemys and create path ways for the team mates to advance.
While me and Hannes were dealing with the vehicles, Simon tried to figure out a way to build a terrain quick enough in order to allow us to add several of those in case we will want to create several maps... What we thought it would work was WorldMachine. We all thought is a good idea so we allocated an entire week on learning the software and learning how to bring stuff from World Machine to Unity. After three days, we got this into Unity:
After seeing this, we assigned Simmon to keep working on a new terrain with the layout that we needed and to start working on the textures.
Isabell, during the first week, came up with the vegetation that we wanted to use mainly on the borders of the map.
Here are a couple of concepts that she made before starting modeling:
Will upload the models tomorrow, when I get to school, since I don't have them at home.
At the end of the first week, we had a meeting with our teachers (3D teacher and Design teacher) and they said that the idea and our general plan works well and overall, they thought we made some nice progress.
Week 2: Finishing what we started in Week 1 and getting into trouble:
So at the beginning of Week 2 we finished modelling and uving the hovers and the vegetation. We also made a map in WorldMachine that we got down to 70 draw calls in Unity which we thought is pretty decent.
Here's a screen with what we got
Another thing was to start thinking about the towers and the walls from the player bases. We thought we had everything under control until the second review session with our teachers.
At this meeting, they said that we should remove the whole idea of getting the terrain from World Machine because is not working. We had difficulties in working with it when we wanted to change some things and overall they said is not optimized so it doesn't really make sense to have it there. Since we bumped into problems as well and since after applying all the textures, we had quite a lot of resources eaten only by the terrain, we decided to scrap the idea and rethink the whole thing. This was quite a major set back since we lost more than one week but this was a mistake we all should have realized much earlier. I guess we were kinda stubborn... sort of the new fancy toy syndrome... It was definitely a mistake the whole group made but we have no time now to stay and cry over it... We decided that we will do a base for the terrain in Unity, with Unity's terrain generator and after, we will bring our own meshes to "populate" the terrain. This was also the reason for which we decided to cut two vehicles. We have to make up for the lost time.
Plan B and a tricky wall
So we started to model simple props that later will be used through the entire map: boxes, crates, ramps, metal peaces, metal beams, stones, cliffs etc etc.
These are very much work in progress so they will be finalized in the third week.
However, we managed to finish the tower and the wall in this second week. There is a slightly tricky part about the wall that I will discuss before showing the final model.
As I said at the beginning, the commander of each team has a certain budget to plan the defense of his team. He can spend the money either on walls or/and on towers. Now, since this will variate every game, we need to make the wall and the tower tillable from all 4 directions. The solution we found is not very pretty at the moment but we'll test in game tomorrow (Monday) and we'll see what we need to adjust. So is still some work to be done but the general idea of at least one type of wall and tower is nailed.
Here are some images with the wall and tower:
So here is where we are today, Sunday to Monday night (3rd of February 2014).
I'll upload the vegetation images tomorrow and at the end of this week I will come back with an updated for Week 3.
Please let me know what you guys think or if you guys want some more information regarding certain aspects of my post.
Any kind of feedback is more than welcome! Tell us what you guys think and maybe point out mistakes. We will not necesarilly have the time to go back and fix everything but at least we can learn from your feedback for future projects.
Thanks for going through this wall of text/images!
Cheers!
Dan
[SKETCHFAB]71617471b8944a0da21cf8b103a2a0c2[/SKETCHFAB]
why you didn't use unity for the terrain you could save as lot of time.
anyway keep us informed
just finished a quick trailer (full HD)
now sleep (:
enjoy
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