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:

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.

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.

Fort Mexizona - Alpha

Here is a video demo I recorded of my Fort Mexizona Alpha test! Winnebagogo baby.

Custom Particle First Pass

For my race level, to give it that extra patriotic touch, I thought I would add in a fighter jet flyover, with red white and blue trails.

While finding an example wasn't exactly difficult, I found it ironic that the most famous example of colored contrails like this is actually attributed to the French air force as part of a Bastille Day celebration.

As these jets and their contrails would be seen only briefly, I saw it fit to ignore the cloudy smoke effects for the moment and focus on the actual trails themselves, which I attained in Cascade through colored ribbons. As we had already gone through a number of Cascade tutorials previously in class, this was relatively simple to accomplish.

While I still need to adjust some things, particularly the rotation of the particles (which currently retain the facing they had on spawn, in other words meaning that as you approach them they continue to face your previous location)

Explosive and Turret: Mexizona Assault Helicopters

 The completed turret design for my race level. The helicopters are actually 2 separate turrets, a main body with the rocket launcher functions, and a small proximity-detecting machine gun turret parented to the nose.

Explosive and Turret design: Attack Helicopter

 

For programming class we needed to design a turret and a projectile, for the purposes of putting them in our race levels as well as, obviously, learning how to program projectiles and turrets. Fortunately I already had a helicopter modeled for my racetrack, which seemed to me like it would work perfectly for this assignment.

We also needed to program an 'exploding barrel', which in my case was a landmine that I adapted from my destructible stunt to apply damage to vehicles and function more closely to a landmine than the explosive springboard it was before.

Vehicle: 1972 Winnebago Brave

Here are some final beauty shots of my vehicle project this semester, a 1972 Winnebago Brave, modeled in Maya 2015. Later on in the semester this vehicle will be implemented into a racing game being constructed by all of the sophomore classes.

(Click on the images to view them in full resolution)

In these shots the model has been implemented into Unreal Engine 4, with 6 different materials applied, 3 being tiling 'generic' materials for the metal and rubber, one 1:1 painted texture for the body, a simple cloudy texture for the windows, and a customizable license plate, which I plan in the future, when we begin implementing the cars into our race game, to make a randomly selected material chosen each time the vehicle spawns.

Fort Mexizona Story Board

Here is a quick, simple story board of my racetrack design for Fort Mexizona, walking you through all 4 laps of the race and highlighting any important stunt details.

The majority of the stunts are helicopter and/or explosion based. This is an important element of the design process.

Racing Level Concept: Fort Mexizona

 

My racing level was adapted from one of my earlier ideas in the last semester, Fort Mexizona, a nuclear armed military base in the vague southwestern United States region. In the distant future of 1999, World War 3 is on the horizon, and it's only a matter of time before those nukes start flying free! But perhaps the catalyst will not be some world power, but a band of misfit street racers with no regard for anything but speed...

Much of the level is rocky terrain and dirt roads, bristling with military buildings, barbed wire, guard towers, and other various military/Arizona decor. There is a brief section where you leave the road to drive on top of a stationary train on a suspended bridge, and as the race progresses the military base starts to actively attack the racers and the track itself in an attempt to stop them.

The track contains numerous stunts, and there is an ambient atmosphere of chaos as artillery fires, helicopters maneuver around, and planes bomb the road. There is seldom a time when something is not firing or exploding near the racers. On the 2nd lap, bombers begin attacking the spiral section of the track. Tanks create impassable barricades on the 3rd lap, forcing the players into the railroad/minefield route for the last 2 laps of the race. On the 4th and final lap, a squadron of attack helicopters destroys the railroad out from under the racers in a massive fireball.

Array Lights Video Demo

In Programming we've been starting to cover arrays, in this case using them to create a highly adjustable system of moving lights.

Admittedly I've had some difficulties fully comprehending this, although with what we walked through in class I was able to tinker a bit and make this spaceship taking off. Hopefully as the semester progresses I'll be able to understand it better but for now, flashing lights are cool.

Level Design: Crusher Castle

My level design was heavily influenced by the Koopa castles and assorted fortresses in Super Mario World. Also I really like castles.

- Takes place in vague Mario time (modern?)
- Castle is supposedly haunted (mostly just bats, actually), but also is full of loot.
- The only occupants left here are bats.
- Classic medieval architecture, stonework with rickety old wooden balconies and supports.
- The castle has been abandoned for some time, and is generally falling into disrepair.
- The player is here because potential riches are a surprisingly effective motivator in the face of certain peril.

The Golden Prince: Printing and Cutting, Cutting, Cutting

So this weekend I started work on the Golden Prince Print and Play, spending most of Saturday formatting and drawing, and most of Sunday cutting, folding and taping everything together.


 The board and army cards were fairly straightforward, requiring only slight trimming and basic folding in half. The soldiers, on the other hand, had to be designed for easy use, as they will be picked up and moved around quite a lot, and needed to be easy to pick up out of a grouping. Flat pieces would easily flip, scatter, be picked up by breezes, and generally make playing the game a huge pain to play, even if it was easier to cut out.


 My solution was to create elongated 'triangular' pieces, that you would fold over and then tape the two tabs at the bottom together to create a simple base with an easily picked up 'point' that would be finger-friendly in tight groupings. The only problem with this is that, unfortunately, it is very time consuming to individually trim, fold, and tape 90 pieces. Since it was a weekend I decided I would just get to work, starting with trimming and folding all the pieces.



This took roughly an hour and a half. Trimming wouldn't have even been necessary under ordinary circumstances, but the cutting board I used would not cut in a straight line, so I instead had to cut each piece by hand.










The end result, however, more than made up for the misery of the preparation process. The board came out a tad smaller than I had intended, but this will be a fairly quick thing to fix as the board is not in its final stages (the game still needs testing!). I look forward to testing tomorrow, to see how well my initial planning works out.

Freshman Flashback

This was the last piece I made for freshman year, in my drawing class. This was an important step in combining several things like 3 point perspective, color theory, and composition all together into one unified piece. It's certainly some of my best work in recent years and appeals to one of my personal interests, Greek Mythology.