Finished character modeling & board game!

This week the first two courses of year two ended! I really feel like I’ve learned a lot, especially when it comes to 3D.

Here’s the final version of Quinn:

And some details:

    

Quite a big step from last week, I think! I have to say, I’m very pleased with the result. It’s a bit strange to think that a couple of months ago I could barely make a box in 3DsMax and now I can create something which actually kind of looks like a human being!

I like how Quinn’s clothes turned out the best, especially the gold details since I think they add a lot to the character. His face still looks a bit strange but honestly, faces are hard and this is my first one. He doesn’t look as freaky as before, at least.

All in all I’ve learned an incredible amount of new things during this course and it’s been a lot of fun all the way through! I’m excited to continue working with 3D and to continue making character models, since I really like that!

In our game design course we finished up our board game and showed it to the class. It was exciting to see and play everyone else’s board games too, because everyone had made such different things! I really like the way Klättergetter turned out, though the balancing was still a bit off (the teleport card was waaay overpowered) but people seemed to have fun when playing it and that’s what counts!

 

(Party goats are best goats.)

The best part is, the majority of our team is excited to keep working on our board game and to try and actually make something out of it! We have a few ideas of things we’d like to change and incorporate to make it more fun and balanced, so we’re probably going to keep working on it during the next couple of months or so.

Next week two new courses start, 3DII and Motion Caption, and I’m very excited to see what those will bring!

(And yes I’m aware I used the word ”exicted” about ten times in this blog post. Also a lot of exclamation points.)

Character modeling & board games pt 3

Boring titles, I know. I’m out of creativity.

Anyway, this week we’ve continued working with out 3D models. We’ve created UVs and started working on textures. So far I pretty much only have flat colors for Quinn, so this is what he’s looking like now:

Not any less creepy than the last time you saw him. I think the lack of eyebrows and eyelashes is making him look freaky. However, I do like his overall color scheme. (He looks a bit blurry at this point, but that’s only because I took these screenshots from 3DsMax. He looks better in Unreal, promise!) I found this gorgeous model on Artstation and it has pretty much the exact style I would like Quinn to have. My art director, Emma, agrees that it’s the style she wanted too, so it’s perfect! However, I’m not confident I’ll be able to create a similar look myself, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try!

In our Game Design course we’ve continued working with our board game. We’ve updated the paper prototype a bit and added some stuff. We’ve added powerup and sabotage cards that you can collect and use to give yourself an advantage, or to completely ruin someone else’s day. We’re also working on adding environmental hazards, like ice that makes you fall down and geysers that push you up. What we need to work on the most is making the game go a bit faster, since it is a bit slow at times at the moment.

I’ve been working on making illustrations for the powerup and sabotage cards this week, and it’s been fun. I’ve drawn a whole bunch of goats, basically. Here are some of my favorites:

The top row are powerups; sure-footed, gravity racer, sledding and pogo stick. The bottom row are sabotage cards; rain, hot air, hurricane and stop and smell the flowers.

Character modeling & board games pt. 2

This week we started making heads for our characters! Unfortunately, I had already spent quite some time on my own trying to make a head and as our 3D class progressed I realized I had made it entirely wrong. The face I had made was very simplified and not at all optimized for animating. I had really only thought about making a face that looked good, not one that you could animate.

I’ve struggled quite a bit with trying to make a head this week. I think I’ve made three different versions, and I’m still not very pleased. This is what Quinn looks like these days:

Kinda creepy and alien-looking with tentacles for hair. Wooo. I think I might need to make his eyes smaller, even though they are fairly big in the concept art, and I think his cheekbones are too extreme at the moment. I kind of wanted to keep the simple profile he has in the concept art, but I’m not sure if it will work out.

I suppose I’ll just have to keep working on him.

This week we’ve also continued playing board games and my favorite was Niagara, a game in which you paddle canoes up and down the Niagara while trying to collect gems. The cool thing is that the river moves each round, and if you’re too close to the waterfall you risk going over the edge!

We’ve also started working a bit on a board game of our own. We discussed some different ideas but settled with one we call ”Klättergetter” (”Climbing goats”, not to be confused with Frog Climbers). You play as a goat trying to climb to the top of a mountain to get a prize, and then you need to bring it back down to the bottom again. The board is tilted to resemble a mountain and there are cliffs that the goats can stand on. If you end up on the same cliff as another goat you have to push them down to make them land on a cliff below you. If you have the prize when you get pushed you have to hand it over to the person who pushed you! The goat who comes down to the bottom first with the prize is the winner!

Here’s a quick paper prototype we made yesterday (is it a paper prototype if the finished product is also going to be made in paper?):

Character modeling & board games pt 1

So this week we started modeling our characters in 3DI. We had a full day workshop where we modeled everything together at the same time as our teacher. It took a long time, but it was easier than I thought and I’m actually quite pleased with the result.

This is what Quinn is looking like right now:

So far I’ve mostly put work into his torso and upper body, so I’d like to develop his legs and feet a bit more. And as you probably can tell, he doesn’t have a head. Our teacher is yet to tell us how to make a head in the best way, but I might still try to make one on my own during the weekend.

I’ve used up about half of the tris count for this model so far, as the goal is 3000. I suspect a lot of tris will go into modeling the character’s head and hair, so I’m thinking I’ll do that first before adding more detail to the body.

In our advanced game design course we’ve started playing and analysing board games. It’s a lot of fun, but it also takes a lot of time, especially with the more complex games where you have to learn a lot of rules or where you have to set up a lot of pieces before you can actually begin.

When analysing the games we’re supposed to break them down into ”atoms”, or challenges. If you view the entire game as a challenge, you can then break down that challenge into multiple smaller ones, and so on until you’ve reached the stage ”move token on game board” or ”roll a die”. This is interesting and valuable but it’s also pretty hard.

My favorite game so far has been Gloom, which I’ve actually played before. It’s a relatively simple card game where you control a family of characters, and your goal is to make your family as miserable as possible before killing them. You can also sabotage the other players by making their characters happy!

It’s made in an interesting way, because the cards are transparent, and you play modifiers on top of character cards to make them happy or sad, and only the visible modifiers count. The modifiers also all have funny descriptions like ”Was mocked by midgets. It’s the little things that hurt the most.” or ”Was popular in parliment. It’s a good thing the voters are morons.” So I totally recommend it!

In contrast, my least favorite game so far has been Tide of Iron. It’s a WWII strategy game where you can play many different scenarios between America and Germany, and each scenario has a different setup with different maps, units, skills, events and sometimes even rules. There are 200 little plastic figurines, several decks of different cards and dozens of tokens to keep track of.

We’ve spent three hours so far just trying to set the board up correctly and trying to understand the rules. We’re getting there, but slowly. In the end we were all so tired and unable to concentrate that we decided to stop for today and go home to try and read up on the rules during the weekend so that we can try again on Monday. In my personal opinion, this isn’t how board games are supposed to work.

Pumpkin Boy

Bet you thought I wouldn’t update this week?

I’ve just been a bit busy and haven’t had time until now!

In our 3D class we’ve continued working with our models and I have to say I’m a lot more pleased with mine now than I was a week ago. This is what it looks like now:

The dimensions are more accurate and there aren’t any topology errors. The final tris count is 2988, and the maximum that we had to work with was 3000, so I’m cutting it fine! Next week we’re going to start texturing our objects, and I’m excited!

In 3D we have also begun talking about our next assignment, which will be to model an actual character. It’s a pretty big step from a static object! We’re not going to make realistic humans, but rather use a more simplified or stylized style. We don’t neccessarily have to make a human either, as long as they are humanoid.

So far I’ve come up with a character that I’d really like to model, but it’s difficult to know if it will be too hard or too easy. This is what he looks like:

I’m calling him Pumpkin Boy for now. I’ve thought about a Halloween game for a while, because I love Halloween. Your goal would be to collect candy and trick or scare people who don’t give you candy. You can customize your own avatar and collect masks and costumes that gives you different bonuses and scares different people. Pumpkin Boy would be one of your friends that tag along when you go trick or treating, but the thing is you only ever see him on Halloween and to be perfectly honest you’re not even sure he’s actually human.

As I said, I’d really like to model him! But I’ll try to come up with a couple of different concepts and we’ll see which one I choose in the end. Maybe I can make Pumpkin Boy in my free time :)

In our design course we’ve continued working with Knytt. This week we gave our level to two other groups to let them play it and that was interesting. It seemed that we managed to get our message across for the most part, and we didn’t feel like we had to change that much.

My plan was to upload the level somewhere and let anyone who wants download it, but I’m having some issues with it right now :( I’ll try again in time for the next blog post! In the meantime, have some more screenshots:

A trip to the museum & Knytt

This week we did something very exciting in our 3D class; we went to the museum! I love history and museums, so I had a great time. We got a guided tour around the place, which was cool.

Afterwards we got to walk around on our own and pick out an object that we wanted to model in 3D! This was a bit complicated, since it had to be something not too difficult but not too easy either. We also had to be able to take pictures of the object from most or all angles, which proved to be hard as some of the coolest objects were behind glass (understandably…)

In the end, I chose this writing desk:

(Ignore my friends taking pictures in the background. They chose other objects in the end.) I liked this desk because I could imagine myself writing at it. It feels like it could be a prop in a video game for a wizard or a councellor.

This is as far as I’ve gotten this week:

I like the way it’s turning out, though I think the dimensions are slightly off. I’ll fix that later! I have to admit I haven’t been modeling that much this week, because I’ve been more focused on our game design assignment in Knytt!

Our assignment is to create a narrative that shows through the level design of the game and not through dialogue or other written word. I’ve been working with Emma and I think we’ve been doing pretty good! I don’t want to spoil what our level is about since my classmates might be reading this and they’re going to play and analyze our game next week.

But! Here are some teaser screenshots from our game:

Boxes and barrels (of fun!)

This week we’ve continued with 3D modeling and we have made some more complex objects, mainly barrels and boxes, which are very common things to find in games.

These two objects have a fairly low amount of polygons (sides, essentially) and look a bit simplified, so they would be suited for a relatively cartoony game. We learned how we should always start focusing on the silhouette of the object, because silhouettes are what people see before anything else. This is why many evil characters have spiky and jagged shapes and good characters have a more rounded appearance.

The assignment for this week was to make two boxes, so I made the one above and this one:

I also made some wine bottles to put in my box, but couldn’t hand them in since they weren’t part of the assignment.

We also learned how to export our objects from 3Ds Max and put them in the Unreal Engine, which was cool.

I may have gone a bit overboard with the textures. And the resize tool.

I’m looking forward to next week, when we’ll go out (to the Gotland Museeum if I’m not mistaken) to chose an object to model and collect reference pictures for it. We will also learn how to apply textures to models. So that will be exciting!

In the game design course we’re working with narrative through level design. We have been given an assignment to create our own stories without using any words, which means the story has to show entirely through the level design and the mechanics.

We’re going to do this using a free-to-play game called Knytt. This game comes with a level editor which is fairly basic but definitely lets you get your message across. I don’t want to spoil what me and my friend’s story is about just yet, but we have an idea that we think could turn out quite nicely. I’ll write more about it next week!

Second year, week one!

*gently dusts off blog*

Hello everyone, I’m back! I have to admit I didn’t do much during the summer, and it feels a bit strange to be back here. It kind of feels like I was never away. But mostly in a good way!

So, this has been my first week of the second year. It’s been a gentle start mostly, which suited me fine. The most interesting part has been finally getting into 3D. We are using 3ds Max as our program of choice and the two classes we have had this week have been very basic. We started off going through what some buttons do and some keyboard shortcuts, and then we started making basic shapes.

After that we started putting the shapes together.

Now, the parts of this desk don’t actually fit together. They are loose and can be dragged away individually. I think we’ll learn how to actually put things together next week, though I’ll probably try it on my own before then!

After getting started in 3ds Max we tried Unreal Engine 4, which is free for anyone to download and use. We tried making shapes in Unreal as well, because our teacher wanted us to understand that most 3D programs are very similar and have similar functions. However, 3ds Max is more useful for modeling complex forms and Unreal is better suited for quickly trying out level designs, as you can easily make 3D environments.

We were allowed to just mess around in Unreal, which was fun, and I ended up making this nightmare of a room.

And finally, during the thursday we had a workshop in Advanced Game Design with Marcus where we played a board game called US vs IT. The ”IT” is a robot attacking a city, and the ”US” is a number of tanks trying to stop it. Our task was to change the ”AI” of the robot to make the fight against it as dramatic as possible, which unsurprisingly turned out to be way harder than you’d think.

So this has been my first week of the second year! I’m looking forward to next week, especially to learn more 3D stuff!