Meat Your Majesty

The final project for 3D and Game Design this semester, a workshop environment with capacity to be adapted into a short 'puzzle' game, with interactive elements and useable items.

My workshop was a butcher shop, where a murderer has disposed of his weapon. You, Sherlock Holmes, must find this needle in a haystack to help your investigation! (the thumbnail is a lie, the video is in HD)

Art Update: Fall 2015

Been a while since I posted any art! Here are some of the pieces I have been working on this semester:

Project Update: Knight of the Tower of Time

During the semester I have been working on a side project, a small adventure/RPG game inspired by classic roguelikes.

At the moment, I am planning for 4 'acts', which are each moderately sized overworlds with 2 possible endings. The player will have 30 in-game days to complete these acts, with occasional opportunities to expand their time limit. Each ending will affect the outcome in the final level, placing the player on the path of 'Sun' or 'Moon', forcing them to adapt a different strategy than the one they preferred.

I don't have very many notes to add at the moment as I am only developing the base system at the moment. Here are some shots I have taken during the development process:













I have added a Knight of the Tower of Time tag as with my other projects, so if there are any major developments in the process I will be sure to add them in another post.

Puzzle Analysis: Deponia

The puzzle I chose to analyze comes from the adventure game Deponia, by Daedalic Entertainment, a publisher that deals almost exclusively in such games. As an adventure game, it uses the classic point and click to interact and move scheme characteristic of the genre. However it follows the more modern trends in these sorts of games and forgoes complicated interaction menus in favor of a context-sensitive mouse; that is, the action accomplished by clicking will vary by object but will always be relevant.

The first 'level' is fairly straightforward. You have a list of things you need to pack for Rufus' non-specific 'escape', and must gather them from around your house. This is a common puzzle throughout the entire game, where a great number of your objectives are to gather some recipe or list of things and then assemble the 'key' item to proceed to further chapters. These lists take several different puzzles to accomplish, so I will focus on just one object: The socks.

A common theme in this game is a massive abundance of items. Generally speaking, you will start off by searching every place you can go to, and talking to all of the available characters, accumulating a wealth of junk and odd advice that you will later start applying to the solution.

Relevant to this puzzle you will come across a blowtorch, 3 socks of different colors, a pot, a fork, detergent, and a number of angry notes left by Rufus' house-owner/ex-girlfriend. You might think that having 3 socks you could make a pair, but Rufus doesn't want mismatched socks! Thus, you must find some way to make these socks match.

First you will put the notes into the stove at the bottom level of the house, lighting them with your blowtorch to start a good blaze. This makes the stovetop hot.

You will then collect gross junkyard water from the sink into your pot, and start boiling that on top of the stove. Adding detergent creates a nice bubbling mixture of cleansing, boiling hot chemicals.

You will notice your socks are blue, yellow, and green. You add all of these into the pot, and Rufus will observe that they are going through a number of colors. They probably haven't been washed in ages.

 As this is boiling water you don't want to just jam your hand into it, so you will remove the socks with your trusty fork.

The blue and yellow socks will have merged into a second green sock. The other sock has been sacrificed for the sake of color mixing.

You've now accomplished one of the items on your list! Congrats!

Being a classic example of the adventure genre, this first puzzle combines both ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary uses for objects, as well as expecting the player to know how to improvise. There is no kindling for the stove, but the player should be able to figure out that paper is flammable. The water is filthy, but the player can figure out how to make it clean. The items provided give just enough clues, like the blowtorch and the detergent, and then the player has to use that information in a thoughtful manner.

Deponia's puzzles are almost universally reliant on this simple concept. Anything from fabricating a disguise to stealing mail and cleaning a car relies on the player being able to figure out how to use piles of junk items to create something that is 'close enough', in the half-assed spirit of the protagonist.

Hero Prop & Game Mechanic Development Part 2

From the previous 10 ideas, we were then instructed to refine 3 of them and make some rough isometric sketches exemplifying some of the uses of the chosen gadgets.

In keeping with the styles I have been gathering for DFA, where we will later refine the design of the actual chosen gadget itself, I went with a sort of 'cowboy' theme.

Hero Prop & Game Mechanic Brainstorming

For Game Design, we needed to brainstorm a few ideas for game mechanics that would accommodate some sort of articulated gadget or mechanism for the player character:

1. A grappling hook fired from a crossbow glove, allowing the player to swing around the environment and grab objects.

This idea comes from an earlier idea I had, for which I did some very rudimentary gameplay sketches:

While obviously the Wii motion controls are somewhat dated, the actual idea itself still stands.

2. A revolver that uses switchblades for ammunition. As each knife approaches the barrel, it is 'switched' out to be prepped for firing.

3. A steam powered railroad gun with a firing mechanism much like a train's wheels.
(Reference Motion)

4. A Swiss Army sword with multiple retractable blade options.

5. A glove that conceals rockets, which when extended allow the wearer to punch with rocket propulsion behind his fists.

6. An arm-cannon similar to Megaman or Samus Aran's weapons, but a sniper rifle with a mechanically extending barrel and scope. The entire design would be a sort of wrist mounted system around the forearm that retracts into a more compact form when not being fired to allow easy movement.

7. Based on this mechanism, a large, gatling-esque machine gun. The red gear would be the barrels, with the fast motion being the 'firing' motion and the slow motion being a 'reset' motion.

8. Combat roller skates with thrusters and spikes. The spikes would extend out from the wheels and allow the wearer to 'stick' to surfaces where gravity would normally pull them down.

9. An automatic slingshot crossbow a la Joerg Sprave's insane homemade designs:

 

May not be this specific mechanism as Joerg makes a great number of these devices, but the general theme is there.

10. Jump jet boots similar to the Thwomp boots seen in the Super Mario Brothers movie:

Boots would be much more mechanical than in the movie, being spring loaded with some sort of stabilizing mechanisms for flat landings.

Dog Fighter Development 1

So I unfortunately had to set 50 Ton Sword aside for a while, as it turned out that the vast majority of that project required a lot of non-humanoid animations which is, at the moment, well beyond my knowledge and would in my opinion be better to learn from my instructors this year than to try and wade through myself.

In the mean time though, I started making something else that was more feasible, Dog Fighter.







So it started off as an idea to make essentially First-Person Asteroids, which went along pretty well. The ship controls very closely to the one in Asteroids, with lots of heavy drifting, very difficult turning, and terrible brakes. Basically, just like in the game, you have to be aware of what you are doing and how fast you are going in order to maneuver effectively.








After getting the ship to work, I felt like just shooting floating rocks would be pretty boring, considering the whole point of a first person perspective is to put you directly into the action so there should be at the very least some stuff to look at. So I built a dystopian metropolis.







I also made it rain







So while I was working on rain I came up with this idea for the player to sort of get introduced to the setting by walking to a parking garage from your messy apartment, which meant I would have to make an apartment and a parking garage and while in retrospect that may have been a bad idea it did lead to further ideas on the gameplay.



I then had a friend do some voices for me and by this point it turned into an adventure game (as things inevitably do when I make them). Think of Walker Texas Ranger but on Venus. I am still juggling around plot so it's all still very vague but trees are involved.







Since it's a space cowboy story there's gotta be some quick-shooting! The main character is a cop and has taken a personal oath to never kill, so he disarms his opponents with fancy shooting. This character is BAD-I, who is basically a tutorial baddie for when I work out how the shooting system works. I want it to be a minigame sort of thing but I loathe quicktime button press nonsense so I need to work out a good, non-repetitive system.



And here is the parking garage atm, which is getting pretty close to being done so I can go back to working on the flying parts.

So anyway, that's what I've been doing the past few weeks. I'll try to keep this updated as I go (for real this time haha) since there haven't been any roadblocks nearly as massive as with 50TS. Obviously character animations will need to wait until I learn how but the base game is definitely feasible so far.

If you have questions about this or Unreal in general feel free to ask away, this is primarily a learning exercise for me so explaining stuff helps me to understand it better as well as you.

Arcade Game: Get Rich or Die

For our final project in programming, we were split into groups to recreate arcade games in UE4 with Blueprint. Me and my classmate Zaq chose to do Smash TV, a room-to-room horde shooter. We chose not to completely mimic the game, going for a slightly different spin on the same general concept both for better PC controls and less work-intensive assets (we needed to do this in 2 weeks).

The end result, in my biased opinion, is pretty fun! This was easily the best assignment this year, and definitely the most useful one in terms of putting all of the things I learned to use in one project, a game that I built from the ground up from scratch.

Concept Work: Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry

Recently I've been drawing a lot of knights, since 1) I like knights and 2) 10KT has knights in it. When the knights are all Norman, I think it's kind of tempting as with a lot of medieval settings to make them into stormtroopers that are all identical with no real identities or distinguishing features. However, since this is supposed to be an adventure game, the knights are a whole lot more than just cannon fodder for some boring hack-n-slash, they're characters



I tried to achieve a certain level of uniformity but still make the knights distinguishable from one another. In the case of an adventre game, you will often be going back and forth between numerous locales, and it's important not only for the environments to be separable but also the people within those environments.

Racing Game Attract Trailer

50 Ton Sword: Development 1

So I'm building a game over the summer (and ongoing as time allows for it), primarily for game design portfolio purposes and also to get a good grasp on UE4/Blueprint and any other areas that happen to arise. It is absolutely 100% for professional purposes and there is no relation to my obsessive love for robots.

It'll probably be in the ugly flat colors and simple models stage for a while, since right now I am working on the systems/weapons/etc. which don't exactly lend themselves to being very pretty to look at, but from a functional standpoint I think it's kind of neat. That may of course be personal bias related to navigating the Blueprint spaghetti soup for too long.

So let's bring everyone up to speed:


These are the Lances: Hunchback, Petard, Zeus, Pummel, Buzzard. Lances are highly personalized, sophisticated war machines, which can only be afforded by wealthy Barons and Dukes, who consider their Lances to be their most prized possessions. Most of them are pretty apparent functionally except for the Pummel, which has massive 'fists' instead of the standard arm-gun setup.


In Maya measurements, they are actually only about 5-6 feet tall, although a person stands only a little higher than their feet at roughly 5 inches. The dropship on the other hand is pretty massive, it's basically a flying garage.

50 Ton Sword is kinda like a MechWarrior Lite. While there probably won't be custom loadouts/armor building as that's kinda outside of my expertise at the moment, it's got a very fighter jet-esque control scheme similar to MW, and the different lances will offer varying loadouts for all manner of property damage. This is mostly the Pummel's fault, because it has some very large and unique weapon functions planned that would make a loadout system... more difficult than usual.




Right now I have the movement and weapons systems implemented, along with most of the HUD. Movement is fairly simple, kinda like flying a plane, your forward/backward speed is constant movement based on the throttle, while you 'manually' turn, and firing is a matter of arming the desired weapons and firing. There is also of course a Fire All button to noobspam things close to you.




There are also jump thrusters and a spotlight, because duh. For some reason it has not occurred to me to add an indicator for the lights until just this moment, so that's probably going in there. Also toggling viewports. I am debating swapping out the rear-view camera (which I am finding surprisingly difficult to work out) for just a third camera option but there may be some confusion as a result of that kind of thing.

So yeah, right now I'm working on making the actual weapon parts of the weapons, which is mostly a matter of figuring out projectiles and making them go in the right direction. I'll try to update fairly regularly, although it will depend on how interesting I think the part I'm working on is, haha.

Arcade Attract Trailer: Outrun 2

I never played much on arcade machines, so finding an arcade racing attract trailer was a bit tricky. After some digging through Youtube however, I found one called "Outrun 2", which I thought was pretty good.

The trailer is super fast paced, generally keeping the car in the center of our attention as much as possible. It also, instead of simply being a recording of a single race, shifts between numerous locales, showing off multiple levels and environments all at once, which would entice me much more to waste several quarters than any single level. The fast pacing also works well for the game, presenting it as a non-stop pedal to the metal thrill ride.

HUD Mockup: Winnebago Brave

As one of my biggest struggles with modeling the Winnebago in the first place was the complete lack of consistency in its builds, being essentially a long running series of plywood boxes stacked on top of old van chassis, I felt it would be acceptable to fudge a bit in the accuracy of the speedometer and tachometer layouts for my racing HUD.

Thus, I opted to go with some classic horizontal layouts, because nothing says a chunky square 1972 Winnebago like a nice, chunky square dashboard, with some faux wood paneling for good measure.

To complete the look, and match the aesthetic of my level, I added some patriotic banners for the timers, and some snazzy stickers to personalize. The result, I think, is a masterpiece of star spangled excellence worthy of my Winnebago.