Game Cinematic Assets [month 21]

GCA was shared with the game project, and since we only had this month for the project it kind of took front seat to the game. Step one was to get the reference approved, I found these odd/cool buildings over in San Zhi, Taiwan. I don't know the whole story, but apparently they're from the 1970's and never got completed. Here's a few shots:




With reference in hand, I blocked out one of the buildings in maya. I also made one of the larger structures in the yard, but as time got down to the line I ended up realizing I would fail if I couldn't focus on just this one piece and a decent yard to put it in.


Then I blocked out some base textures.
I upgraded the diffuse textures, then built spec and normal maps.
Then the big test: does it look good in UDK? It didn't look horrible, but it needed a lot of work. So I went back to the drawing board with only 1 week left to turn it all in.
UFO homes, now with non-bsp windows! :p
Got rid of the plane and added in some terrain.
The next critique was to add some mid-ground environment, and I also added in the skybox.
I started playing with light function shadows for the clouds.
After the final critique we had 4 hours to make all of our changes and turn it in. Some of the things I changed was: the depth of field, amount of fog, harshness of cloud shadows/speed, softening of shadows with the skybox light, and I had a brief moment to think about changing the sand out to dirt .. but couldn't find a good enough photo to manipulate to a repeating/tiling texture. Here are the final three shots:

Game Production 2 - Beta turn in [month 21]

This month was shared with Game Cinematic Assets, so our planning ahead really paid off. All the extra art we made was finally implemented into the game with the code, all we had to do all month was clean-up and touch-up to fit with the code. Here's some of the updates and changes:


Fender Bender has new game modes in place and we needed a keep away item, since we already had nuts and bolts planned for the smash n' grab mode I thought that combining the two into a mega golden bolt-nut would allow the players to know it's important without having to put too much thought into what was going on. The bolts on this item are the same as the other bolt pickups below, but the nut itself was "up-res'ed" since this is a single focal point of the game.

With the shield code in place, I scaled the shield to match each vehicle individually. Later on we ended up opting out for less of a bubble shape and more of a round sphere shape. Since I didn't make the new shield I don't have that file to show off.


Smash n' Grab game play mode allows other players to gain points by collecting nuts and bolts from vehicles that they attack. These items fly off the vehicle as the vehicle is takes damage. As per the description, there's quite a few of these that fly through the level and needed to be kept fairly low poly.
The old ice cube didn't allow for the modulauncher to still attack nearby enemies, so I redesigned the ice cube a little bit.


Then I scaled the new ice cube over each character's vehicle to make sure it left enough visible for players to recognize the vehicle at a glance and still realize that they were completely surrounded by this pack of ice.The shield was done, but we'd forgotten completely about what the pickup should even look like! So I went to work at figuring out what it should be. In the end I decided a shield silhouette would work as long as the shield itself looked like tech. that might fit with the modulauncher.

Here's a short video of combined game play of our beta turn in: