The usual late update hah. Still working with my teams but hitting some snags. One might switch over to blender for various reasons and the other is having issues with collisions in unity. Ultimately the decision about switching to blender is still in the air. It has a lot of advantages, but there is also the whole setback issue that it would cause since this wasn't decided at the outset. Its just a mess really. Working in blender is easy enough, but redoing all that we had will definitely be a hassle. And getting the appropriate license and re-saving is also a pain. Lesson learned? Make sure these things are planned thoroughly from the outset.

Anyways on to the pictures of progress!

This was the tentative textures we had for a sort of run down house. You will notice the exterior was really blurry and distorted. Not too bad far away but up close it had a sort of smudged paper look. This is because of too many UV shells on one map. Ultimately we had to split the house into three parts and their respective maps to get the details we wanted:

The walls there were actually made from pictures of a house up the street. Had that run down paint peeling look we were going for and turned out a lot nicer.

Working on some creatures. Keeping the style simple to give it more of an anime feel. Finished up a golem and goblin.

Can't wait to see them in action in game.

In other news also got some more work done on the arms and gun for the fps we are working on:

Fairly productive couple weeks. Look forward to more project updates soon! I am actually considering doing a quick video of what we got on the fps so far. Just some animations of a player and some zombies they can shoot, but everything starts somewhere!

Over the last couple weeks I was working on a building project that was meant to be a sort of tavern.

originally there were a lot of things that made it unusable for the project. However, I heard the problems and told them to give me a couple more days to fix the issues.

 I mean, we still needed this asset, and it would be the same if not more time wasted just trashing it and redoing. I like to think that overall spending a couple more days fixing it was better than starting something from scratch. This also gave me the opportunity to refine the design a bit more such as adding actual stairs and a guard on the balcony instead of going the cheap optical illusion and alpha channel route.

In other news I managed to get a lot of animation done for my other project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Tt0jUIW-s

Still improving those and figuring out all the animations we need but it is coming along.

Still working on various things. This week I got some fishing gear done for one game while I worked on gun animations for another:

There we have a low poly harpoon and net model with textures.

I am working on some arm+weapon animations for another game. Textures still very rough pretty much just placeholder or a base to put more details on. Running into a problem importing them into Unity though. The gun and arms come in just fine, but moving different parts of the gun is not working. Probably a problem with the base rig, but not quite sure how to solve it at this time.

Hopefully I will remember to update this more regularly someday hah! See you soon.

So originally I was working on a wolf and it came out like this:

Aside from the fact it could use refining in various areas they neglected to mention it was supposed to look more anime. So I took that feedback and made a very simplified fur pattern:

The mouth still looks a little odd, and there was some extraneous linework to clean up. But the overall design was approved! Later someone commented about the good UV setup, which was cool.

Last but not least working on a gun for my other project:

Lots more to do on it, but the general shape and look is coming along nicely. That is about it for progress the last couple weeks. I look forward to updates from my teams as we move forward with our projects!

Lots of new stuff going on over the last couple weeks.

This first set of things is a set of supplies for a game project I am working on with a group. Just some tools and food that a player can pick up.

The other project I am working on has re-tasked me to creating a wolf model of which I have almost got the basic model hammered out:

Next up with that is cleaning up the edge loops a bit and simplifying the model to cut the poly count. Lots of stuff to do! I find myself looking back and being pretty impressed with what I can do now vs what I could do when I started with these projects. Still a lot of things to learn and improve but even flipping back a few pages in this blog and then coming forward again it is cool to see what changes.

Will try to keep the progress updates coming! See you again in a week or so!

Whew tons of birthday stuff going on. People ask you: how does it feel to be whatever age this year? Pretty much like any other day, aging is slow enough to be hardly noticeable to the person aging I think hah. However, I do wake up and wonder where all that teen or even early 20s energy went sometimes. As for work, just working through lists with similar assets to those in the previous posts. Hopefully I will create my own library of that stuff, back it up, and just be able to re-use some of it later!

My friend dropped by and hung out for a bit, we brainstormed some game ideas. It is pretty easy to come up with some silly ideas, implementing them is the challenging part; since most of us are more programmers or artists and not often both. There are tons of tools out there to help, but it still is a daunting task to take on alone at times.

Overall a slow couple of weeks, but at least projects are still ongoing at this point!

This week I continued practicing textures and creating more stuff for the interior of one of my projects.

But what is really interesting to me is the talk of creating games in one of my facebook groups. A game called Wizardry Online shut down in the US a year or so ago, and ever since we have all kept in touch and tried to find another game to play together. Thus far that goal has not come about, so there is now talk of perhaps creating our own game. I warned them an MMO is probably a rough place to start, but it is an ultimate goal of mine to create one, especially if it is inspired by Wizardry Online which is basically like Japan's take on Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I have discussed my thoughts on this in a previous post, but I feel that a lot of dungeon games are missing something these days. Dungeons feel like stepping stones and not really an integral part of the game one visits frequently, especially in an MMO like world. Wizardry got around this by making the dungeons the only place to go outside town. Whats more, you often go back to previous dungeons to help friends or do quests that might be needed to change your chars class. You might even run into an old enemy doing the same which adds spice to the whole thing. On the flip side the lack of a truly open world has its own effect of confining chars to closed in dungeons and dark places. Still, I do like how it was set up overall.

Anyways, hopefully we can bring something similar to Wizardry back in the US for this group. If nothing else at least we can have fun trying and designing.

Some more random stuff this week:

Lots of random furniture basically. I am actually pretty happy with how fast I can create this sort of thing now. Still not quite as fast as the videos I watched, but compared to before I can map a lot more efficiently and make something that works pretty quick. Most of the projects I join may not seem to amount to much, but I have been learning better modeling/texturing techniques at least.

Practicing textures

It was brought to my attention that I just might be doing texturing wrong, or at least badly after a meeting for one of my projects. Now, this is partly due to me still working on my skills in this area, and partly due to no one really giving me a whole lot of instruction as to what they wanted. For example, they said model a house as one object, so I did; however, putting everything that goes into a house on one texture map was apparently not part of the plan. So I listened to what they had to say and have been watching a set of videos they reccomended. Still working on finishing the set, but already learned some neat tricks.

Anyways, here are the results of following the videos so far for texturing:

Basically the videos walk you through modeling the thing and even unwrapping and some texture work. However, I still modeled the object and everything on my own. The videos were sort of an instruction booklet for putting something together from scratch.

Anyways, going to finish this set of tutorials and hopefully get back to some project progress soon!

Back to Work!

Anyways back to working on various things, sorry it has been awhile since I have posted. It was not that I was not working, it was that I am trying to forget about blogging, again lol. For this update we have a mansion I have been working on:

and the interior

The textures are still very rough at the moment, but I do like the roof at least.

A different project has me working on some filler items to put in some rooms and such:

Still very rough, but the basic idea is there!

GDC, The Survival Guide

Whew, well, I survived the week of GDC! A quick overview of what I learned:

The Survival Talk

(imagined a crumpled list, perhaps it has been stepped on or ripped by being caught in an escalator; hopefully you are in better shape than the dirty tattered thing remaining):

1.) Don't put aspiring anywhere in your GDC badge title. Reason? Well, the short of it is everyone is aspiring to something, or should be. Find a label for yourself that matches you as closely as possible so you don't basically label yourself a GDC noob. A speaker commented about this and I turned my badge around in shame when I spoke to him lol. The badge title can help you meet people, or not meet people in this case (though if they get close enough to read your badge they're close enough to better explain at least!).

2.) If you want to get into a popular talk show up at least an hour early. Popular talks may vary, but a common thread is: if you see people from Riot or Blizzard speaking this is likely to be popular. If in doubt, show up early if you really care about seeing or hearing the thing to check the line. Also, the portfolio critiques are popular. Bring your own device as well (I was looking around at all the portable portfolios and initially thought my phone would work in a pinch, but it apparently doesn't support flash). They might have had laptops, but the guy with the ask me shirt said they probably didn't. Lesson learned: be more prepared and observant earlier instead of passing time with a book. The upside is at least it was a good book.

3.) If you are attending an igda meeting the floor is pretty open... Ask questions earlier. I wanted to know more about the Atavism plugin, so I ended up asking around after and no one knew about it. I guess ultimately that means it isn't popular or well known and my initial thought of too good to be true is correct. Or it could mean someone knew something but since I didn't ask the entire room at once when I had the chance I will never know!

4.) When looking for food or whatever the people you met can point you in the right direction. If you lose all your friends after the first day at least your phone will still be there.

5.) If you lose all your friends after the first day and find yourself on your own don't panic or get depressed. In fact this might be an advantage, people flying it solo are easier to approach, and you can also approach others easier as well.

6.) Networking woes. if you are worried about networking, don't be. Even if you absolutely suck at talking to people you will end up talking to people and learning a ton if nothing else. However, it is a great opportunity to just walk up and ask someone who might be a big deal some noob question. They are surprisingly approachable, and while they might not hire you for some dream job they can and will try to help you out by answering a couple questions. Nothing is lost by talking, and yeah it can be scary, but if you know you have some skills or are looking for something let people know! If you don't have some skills or know you need to improve try to find similar skill levels to work with (personally I like online forums more for this like tigsource, but it can work in person too).

7.) Most importantly think of what you gained. Many people I talked to were jealous I got to go to this event when they couldn't. I mean a lot of people do get the chance to go but in the big scheme of things that bunch of people swarming around in the conference is about as many that attend a popular university. Speaking of which, I compare everything I learned and did to about a years worth of classes. So much is out there that you have access to and it is all in one place: industry experts, new tech demos, students looking for work, employers looking to hire. It is like one massive convention with something for pretty much anyone into this sort of thing. So if you do get the chance to go I would definitely recommend it, even if you have to attend on your own for the most part. The city is noisy, and annoying in my opinion, but the conference is like going to one of the most intense schools ever.

closing remarks: You might be asking why I wrote this little guide or list of tips. Well, partially for myself, but also because I couldn't find a lot of accounts about what the conference was like as a whole. I want to remember that 1st GDC, there will never be another one for me personally (I mean another 1st, it is gone like many other 1st experiences one may have). Another question might be: why is stuff about GDC on your game design blog? Because a trip like this changes ones perspective. You see people in all walks of life at all ages discussing games and tech. The advice given in the talks has definitely influenced how I approached designing games. That is why it is all here. Anyways, I hope any who read this enjoy my little survival guide, I definitely enjoyed the experience that inspired it. See you in a bit after I recover, hopefully all my projects are still doing well and ready for my return!

GDC day 2 and 3

Couldn't get hotel internet to work before I headed out this morning so combining a summary of the days here. Day 2 was the conclusion of the game design workshop. It was very tiring mentally after the first day. The first activity was basically recreating a game without any of the digital graphics. So, taking a video game and using just some paper and dice to try to replicate some of the feeling of it. We ended up choosing League of Legends, which was horrendously hard to boil down to a simple tabletop game prototype. It felt like the teams were a little too large, as it seemed only four of the six were able to contribute here. I sort of felt left out no matter how I tried to put forth some input, but that may have just been this group of people being less collaborative. I play tested some lane fights with the remaining member while the others hammered out their idea and ignored us for the most part. I then went to lunch alone, ah well, can't always have an awesome group like that first session.

The final activity was trying to make a story to change how a game played. Basically descriptions of what pieces represent or the situation they are in can drastically change a game without changing any rules. Interesting stuff all around!

All in all even just the workshop was great for meeting people and was almost as good as a year in some game design course imo. Definitely worth ones time!

Day 3: 
This was today. First I went to a presentation about Real Sense from Intel, featuring some devs creating games for this new tech. Basically it is a camera that allows a computer to sense human gestures or bio metrics; pretty sci fi stuff! However, it is still pretty basic at this time. Still, even just what I heard was pretty neat: gestures controlling game actions, voice commands, games reacting to increased heartbeat. Lots of potential here, and I look forward to the future of such tech, especially as Virtual Reality options improve.

After that it was basically a solo day, relaxing and taking in similar presentations. I needed to sort of distance myself and recover after those first couple days. Still, after seeing all this mind blowing stuff I can't help but feel a little intimidated as well as inspired. I guess it is best to think of it this way: These guys are breaking new ground with new tech, we are all constantly learning new stuff in this industry! One step at a time into the future of gaming!

See you tomorrow for day 4 as GDC week continues!

GDC day 1

Originally I was not going to post a lot of updates. However, after the first day I have to say that there is just so much I need to do a sort of journal to even organize it!

When I first got here there were crowds everywhere. They weren't there to stand in line to register, but just to chat with groups of friends; big groups of friends. Registering was as simple as signing in and printing off the badge. After that, this being my first GDC and the groups looking pretty well exclusive I decided to just rest up for tomorrow.

Good thing I did too, because the next day when GDC officially started was a whirlwind. I met a couple other first timers, some volunteering for the convention, some paying like myself. We talked about what we did game design wise and a little about ourselves, the usual.

Afterwards I went back to my room and prepared to go. In fact I should have went earlier than I did, the game design workshop was pretty packed even arriving early! Pro tip: Arrive about an hour and 30 minutes early at the minimum for this popular workshop. Passed the time in line chatting and exchanging business cards. Then the game designing started. We ended up in some random team modifying a game first, then later in the day had to design a game based on a random set of constraints. That is two games with a fresh team in one day, which was crazy fast; amazing what we could do with a little guidance from industry vets. Thanks guys, it was an awesome first day!

Pre-GDC

So it is the day before I am traveling out to GDC... Not sure what to expect other than what I read online haha. Feel a combination of excitement and nervousness when I think about it. I go armed with business cards and resumes. Meanwhile project news: working on some buildings for a project:

Other than that still polishing animations among other things. Seems there was a bit of trouble with one project, lost an artist, so when I return I may have to try my hand at level design in Unity (not a bad idea, would be interesting).

Alright, little late again this week but been working on animation mainly. Sorry for the quality of the video I will post but it gets the basic point across which is a preview of a string of animations. If all works well we can use these to have the creature basically play a portion of it when doing some action such as walking or attacking.

As you can see I have refined this character a bit from the previous version. Fur looks a lot smoother, some more details on the face, normal map with some minor sculpting applied.

Here are the animations . It has been awhile since I have animated, so lets consider these rough animations for now. However, I also feel I will never be fully satisfied with the result at this time. I suppose more confidence would come with more practice! Taking a character from a simple sketch to a full on animating character is definitely a time consuming process. Still, it is definitely a good way to pick up a lot of skills quickly, or brush up on some things one may be rusty on.

Other projects still in the works, got some 2D animation coming up, hopefully I can get some more of that done before I head out to GDC. Also, I recently joined the Age of Aincrad team! It is a really big project setting out to create a game inspired by the popular Sword Art Online anime. To find out more about it be sure to check out facebook or their forums.

Whew, lots happening recently. I look forward to seeing where all these projects go though!

So busy I missed a week. Anyways, still working on various art endeavors to improve including a couple projects. On deck atm is this guy:

I dislike the fur pattern a bit, so will try and blend it together more. Other than that is it just refining details now and the bump map. This model is taking some time as I had to learn about alphas almost from scratch. Been learning a lot lately, it seems you can find tutorials for just about anything on youtube or floating around the internet.

Another thing I was looking at was atavism, but it seems somewhat incomplete at this time (see http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/atavism-whats-your-opinion.260957/). A lot of base elements are there, but to truly customize you still need to know how to create content. Honestly the idea reminds me a lot of Spore:galactic adventures. I put together a few scenarios/missions in that. It was cool, but no matter what you do the weapons or powers are the same presets. To add more you would have to get into the code and then add models, effects the works, or sub out what is already there for something else.

Anyways, that is all I got for game creation etc for the last couple weeks. See you again soon for more updates!

So here we have another character I started last week. Some sort of zombie. Anyways, lots of projects on deck I edited my thread on tigsource saying that I had all the projects I can handle at this time. Great place to meet up with other peeps and get better at creating things.

Also, I find myself thinking about GDC and its a combination of nervousness and anticipation I feel. Then I distract myself with project thoughts because it is easier to think about that stuff than a completely new experience lol.

Creating a demon, crazy how fast I got this mapped, a testament to a good base mesh? Hope so!

Other than that still working on various projects thanks to TIGsource forums for giving me stuff to work on. Skills leveling up, now if I could just get a game finished with a team hah. I have been noticing that many are eager to start projects, but few will take them to the finish. I am guilty of this as well, though I at least finish my part of the project if it is a team. Something about being in a team makes me feel like I have to at least keep going for other people. A solo project seems harder because as your own boss you can be too easy on yourself. Though I have read a deadline shifts some of that to a time limit and puts a challenge forward to finish something. Either way lots of projects cooking, so that's something at least.

Not much to report this week. Got distracted from my game, but this is a good thing actually. I think I need to think about scale and story elements. What would make my dungeon game unique? Also I might have to make a simpler game, hard to say at this time.

In the meantime other projects all over that I am working on in addition to learning some more odds and ends about programming via MIT open Courseware.

below: trying my hand at some pixel art and other styles for small sprites.

below: More zbrush stuff, working with alpha brushes to bring out some rough stone textures.

all in all not a bad week, good for learning especially.