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.

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.

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.

Concept Work: Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry

I've been thinking about what I want to do for thesis, and since I had a little bit of free time I thought I'd whip up some early stuff so I remember what the ideas were. Admittedly it's quite early to be thinking about, but I would like to build up ideas while I have the time to think.

Song of the Ten Thousand Year Tapestry is a fairytale adventure set in the Dark Ages. A tailor's son tries to save his family treasure, a magic self-weaving tapestry that depicts his family's past, present, and future, from an evil king (a fairytale version of William the Bastard) seeking to abuse it for his own purposes.

Historically, I was heavily influenced by the Bayeux Tapestry depiction of the Battle of Hastings as well as the kingdoms of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons. In media I drew influences from the movie Dragonheart, and games like the Banner Saga, Legend of Zelda (Both the early concept art of Katsuya Terada and the cel-shaded world of Windwaker), and Broken Age. In a way, this idea is a blending together of many of my favorite things, put into one of my favorite (but criminally under-explored) historical periods, the early Dark Ages of the 8th-10th centuries, a period where the Normans, Byzantines, Vikings, and Saxons all thrived and created much of what would become the classic Middle Ages.

While very Zelda-esque in appearance, 10KT would play much more like a classic adventure game, focusing on the problem-solving, critical thinking, and using the environment over swordplay and violence. Being a simple tailor, you are massively outclassed by the Norman knights who obstruct your path and can only very rarely try to fight them directly. You will soon throw away your sword altogether in favor of a magic needle.

While I am still working out the details on how specifically I would want it to look, there are a few elements I have set. There is very little red, that color being reserved exclusively for the bright Tapestry and important elements relating to it. Environments and characters have exaggerated proportion and a saturated, painted illustration appearance, with duller colors being associated with dangerous things like the Normans, mundane weaponry, and certain architectural elements. Friendlier characters are brighter, cooler shades.

I hope to explore this concept further as the semester goes on, as well as into the summer, along with other possibilities for thesis. I can certainly say right now that I am very excited about this and, if I learn the sufficient skills, I plan to experiment with it in Unreal to further refine my designs.