GUI Art #2 -- Paper

Here, I had to design a piece of paper to be used in game. The rest of the group thought it would be a good idea for me to re create a unique piece of paper, rather than ripping (no pun intended) one off the internet. I gave it my best shot and really liked the out come. I made it so its as if it is ripped out of a manual of some sort, with all kinds of instructions, then it is further ripped in half to make it seem like the player is missing pieces.

At first, I drew out a rectangle in Photoshop, and started to erase parts away to give it the "torn" effect. Then I drew out a coffee stain to make it appear as if the piece of paper was "used" and mistreated. I then added an overlay of crinkled paper to make it appear screwed up, and not neat even though it has been torn. I added a slight brown coloring to the outer part of the paper. Then added a burn effect simply by getting a black brush and lowering the opacity slightly. Then added some slightly faded text and I was finished.

Final Design

Character Mesh Fixing

After texturing the satchel and placing it in engine with the character a bug developed where it would not move with the character animations. I trying parenting the satchel with the character, which didn't work and after talking it through with Jemila realised that it must be because I'd imported it as a separate object.

So I went back into Maya unbound the skin from the rig and combined the satchel with the character and merged a couple of vertices to make them one object. Then rebound the the combined character with satchel to the rig and imported it into Unity. However this process had broken the satchel texture.

To fix that I adjusted the satchel UVs and placed the satchel texture I made onto the same texture sheet as the character. Fortunately there was enough spare room and I didn't need to readjust the character texture. I'm glad I was able to fix this and keep the satchel in game and I will definitely remember to keep rigged characters as all one piece in the future.

Heather

Lost Factory Alpha Game Prototype

When making the alpha, what I really wanted to fouce on was getting actual game play macanics in. This manly meant making an inventory, setting up the items and making them interact with the environment. I also wanted to put in the character model and set up the game using the newer assets.

As the character was already done, I desiced to work on that first. Getting the animation to work with the code didn't take to long, but making sure the nav mesh agent was right took a lot of fiddling. Once I got it just right, I saved it as a assest and put it in game. I them realized that the model was too big so I scaled it down. But this made the nav mesh agent go funny again and it was taking me too long trying to realin it. Instead, I simply scaled the environment up, which worked fine.

As I haven't revised the final lay out for the factory yet, I continued to make the inventory using the gray box. We wanted the inventory UI to be  based around her bag, as thats where she would put the items. However, the slots where tricky to lay out in a reasonable manner. Me and Cameron descused different lay outs, and originally we wanted the items to look like they where floating magically around the bag, linking to Lavender's magical powers. But in the end we desided that this was unneeded and as I had other problems to fix concuring the inventory, getting effects in was more of an unneeded luxury.

Another main part of the game play I really wanted to get in was the animation of the smelting pot. After making the animation for the pot and cobord, i wrote a coruten on the switch that sets off the animation when the switch is pressed. This made it look that the pot had knocked down and then a small key falls out.

Peer Assessment

Overall, the most positive feed back the game got was about the visuals. People asecally liked the way Lavender looked, and that the environment was interesting. One of the biggest problems was the movement of the character. Thought the animation worked, people mentioned that she moved to fast, got stuck behind or in things, and sometimes she spins in place. 

Game Cut Scene- Story bourd

Character Texturing

To start with I set up a base texture with flat colours, which I made by assigning different coloured materials to the mesh in maya and baking out the result. This sped up the process because I didn't need to set the base colours manually. The picture above shows the base after I had edited the colours to match the reference image, there are a couple of details in the reference that I wasn't able to model because that image was produced after the model sheet.

While painting on the detail I got feedback from Jemila about the face and changed the expression to better match the characterisation.

This is how far I got with testing the texture in Maya before I moved on to test it in engine. The reason I started out in Maya was because it's easier to assess the details and faster to switch between Photoshop and Maya.

The finished textures in engine, using a basic outline toon shader. After testing the textures in engine I edited them to emphasise the the shadows and highlights to compensate for the toon shader's lack of lighting. I also textured the satchel to match. 

The process I've used to make these textures is painting them by hand in Photoshop using a combination of standard and custom brushes, this method matches the art direction more than a photo based approach would have. Overall I'm very happy with how the textures have turned out and how quickly I was able to produce them, They may need revising at a later stage if the shader gets changed or if the environment textures don't match, but that would be relatively simple to fix.

The one thing I would change if I were to do this again is the UV layout, which I left as what was generated by the automatic layout in Maya and I know that isn't optimal.

Heather

Lost Factory Initial Game Prototype

For the first Prototype of our game, I wanted to concentrate on getting the basic game macanices in. The first one being getting the point and click movement working. To do this I set up a nav-mesh and some basic walls so I would see how the walk-able and non walk-able functions work. I then made a script that finds the location of the mouse when it clinks on the walkable mesh. It then takes the player and transforms their position to that point.

I then wanted to get some rotating doors in the game. I set up the level to look more like the paper prototype so I could also check if there's any problems with the layout. Getting the doors to rotate was very hard to work out, so I had a lot of help from one of the teachers. We ended up using multiple objects to get the doors to work. An invisible "hinge" on the side of the door, so it has something to rotate around, and two "door stop" type cubes that tell the door how far to turn. When the player enters the trigger of a door, they can press E and the door will open. Then can press it again for it to close.

 Even though this worked, there was still multiple problems with the door. One being that if the play it hit by the door, they get sent flying across the nav-mesh and stop following the point and click well. Also, as the door isn't part of the nav-mash, the player continues to run into the door. This helped me realize that the hallway definitely needed to be wider and the doors could work better if they close automatically. I would also prefer if the player could click on the door insted of pressing a key as it is a point and click game. But as it works for now, I desised to move on and come back to fixing that later.

I then worked on changing the camera positions, as that was a big part of our game. To do this I added trigger boxes into all the rooms and small cubes in the places I wanted to camera to change too. I then made a script that when the player enters a trigger, the camera will change its trasfomation and rotation to the matching position cube. The only tricky bit of the prosses was moving around the cubes to make sure they where in a good position. As you can only get a ruff idea of what the camera angle will look like wile positioning the cubes, I had to keep playing the game, walking into the different rooms, and then going back out of game mode to adjust the cubes. I then had to do this prosses alover again once the gray box was done.

Peer Assessment

The most positive feed back from the game was about the over all look. They liked the simplistic shapes and use of colour and light. However, a big problem that people found was that the space was very empty and it was hard to maneuver character in some arias. Taking all the notes into account, this problem has been corsed by a commitment of camera angles being off, collides needing to be more accriat, and the doors gliching out the character. This, plus more problems are things I'm going to take into account when making the next prototype.

Character Rig

I rigged the character using HumanIK, I think it looks good when animating, although I may go back and add more edge loops if necessary depending on how it looks in engine.

I did try to get it in engine but I couldn't get it working quite right, so I gave the rigged character to Jemila and she's going to put it into our game level.

Heather