This week our art team has been working hard to bring out the character in Klepto. We have given him a new face rig which includes facial animations, continued working on the interior of the van and much more.
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The last week of Beta has been interrupted by NZGDC. With most of our planned assets for Beta done, Corne worked on the important ingame UI elements which we have neglected for a little while since Vertical slice. The main elements we needed to address were the in-game icons to represent the medals for times, the icons for the secret token and the icon for the floppy drives that the player has to collect. The floppys that the player collects in the levels are meant to represent the data that he is collecting in his simulations in order to be a better thief. The speed running/ time trial gameplay mechanic became apparent to us after playtesters seemed to enjoy speed running through levels. We decided to capitalise on this and make it a feature of our levels. And to reward the player with Gold silver and bronze times. The secret token in each level is there to give players the impetus to explore and not rush through the level. Similar to the bread crumb style floppy drives that the player collects, the secret tokens unlock mini games back in the space van.
Week seven has been a massive week for Klepto’s art team. This week, we’ve managed to implement most of the art assets made so far, and we’ve also made a whole lot more. We’ve solidified Wild West World’s theming, as most levels now have proper lighting and colour grading set up. We’ve gone through each level and finalised the placement of most assets, excluding the van. The van will be finished off next week. New environmental objects and structures have been implemented, such as massive canyon rocks, water towers, cactuses, wagons, horses, etc. The world has really come to life, and the humour has found it's way back in through the art style.
For the opening of the beta section of the project, we outlined new milestones and goals that we wanted to achieve. In terms of the art of the project, the milestones were:
Whilst working on the main milestones, we also achieved a lot of little in-between things as well over this first week. During week 5, we added in textured floppy disk pickups. We gave them large areas of reflectivity and strong grey/white/red colour scheme to help them catch the player eye in a potentially busy scene. This week, we textured the Rotisserie Engine that will be powering Klepto’s Space-Faring Van. This is an environmental prop that adds a bit of flair to the inside of Klepto’s van, and it’s this engine that powers the vans ability to be smaller on the inside, as well as the vans space travelling abilities and the warp room. Finally, we began planning out the props for the Wild West Environment. We looked at cliché’ cowboy and western imagery as out inspiration. Klepto, in his quest to become the greatest Thief in the galaxy, wants to replicate the various places on earth that he wants to rob, so everything in Klepto’s simulation is hand made my him. To this end, we’ve decided that everything should be made of cardboard, tape and other rough materials that would be easy to find. All of the mountains and scenery are huge hand-painted cardboard facades, and most of the props are as well. We did a page of concepts, and then made a few props to see how they’d feel in-game. The final thing we got in-game this week was the 'Zap-fence'. This is a simple barrier that if the player passes through, they get electrocuted and lose all momentum. This week we created some more animations for our character which will be implemented into the game as random events. We also modeled a few assets which include a mouse on a wheel which powers an electric fence. The collectible that Klepto will pick up was decided to be a floppy disk implying that he needs to get data from each level to complete the mini game on the arcade machine. We also tried a new technique to modelling the interior of the van which turned out to take a little longer than anticipated, so we decided to change to what we were using before. The holo room we created is influenced by the cerebro room in X-men with rotating mesh and colours which complement the design. Our shader was a conversion of an existing shader which was shown in one image using another shader program and recreated in amplify, with some adjustments. The glider also now has some feedback when the player collides with walls or floors.
This week’s work was continuing on the creation of the environmental assets for the game, whilst completing the models needed for the mini games that include the cop chase game and the gliding game. The glider animations were finally finished off so we were able to move onto the next mini game which would be the cop car chase. The cop car chase mini game needed to have actual cop cars that chased the van around in circles. Scott went on to create concepts and started modelling the cop car. Conrad went on to finishing the model as well as texture it. Corne went on to replacing the make shift wind turbines that Josh had created. The wind turbines were a really cool aspect to the games environmental puzzles as this was a more creative way to get elevation in the levels. One of the most important mechanics of our game was the grapple and the model for the points where you are able to grapple weren’t looking that great. Juane went on to model a grapple point where Conrad went on to texture it. Corne also made a logo that would be used as an easter egg for the texture. Another important feature for our game was the completion for the texture and shader of the platforms. Juane had purchased the Amplify shader plugin for Unity, and went to create the main platform for the levels.
This week was a doozy, where last week we were conceptualising new ideas, this week we were implementing these ideas by making the assets and getting them into the engine as soon as possible. By pushing out a finished mechanic within a week was a lot easier than it seemed as we still needed to add basic jumping mechanics to make the movement feel better. From last week, what we had needed to finish off was the eel turret. As all the textures had been finished, all we needed to do was to animate it as Conrad had rigged it whilst he was modelling it. From there, Scott went and started to animate the turret. We wanted to try out some new techniques for animation and we really wanted to test if doing a squash and stretch animations work. From help from another team, we were able to find an animation modifier that would allow us to do it. The other animations that he did were just the standard idle and fidget animations. This first mechanic that was needed to be done immediately was the propeller. Conrad had textured the propeller while Scott modelled, rigged and animated the propeller. We were quite happy how the propeller turned out, it did have its fair set of issues when it came to imputing it into engine. The problem was that the scale of the bones was 0, so if you are scaling bones in animation, make sure that the scaling is .001. The second main mechanic was the glider. Corne was the main person on the project, conceptualising the shape and the style of the glider. After he had made the glider, we had a short discussion about extending the style of the model by making it more DIY looking. Juane had gone through and edited to fit this kind of style, whilst Conrad went in to texture the glider wings to make them look like newspaper articles with wanted signs of the main character. To get the newspaper to look like it had wind going through it, Juane had made a shader that would apply an effect to the mesh that would look like it simulated wind. The animations of the character with glider was kind of tricky but we were able to centre the character to the glider. While we were steaming ahead with our progress, we used this momentum to think of more mechanics that may challenge the player but didn’t want to use any more buttons that we already had. One of the ideas was to create more environmental mechanics for the player to navigate around and to slowly improve their skills. One of the environmental mechanics that Corne focused on was the fan which was used to practice the texturing styles.
Heading into the Alpha build of our project we have focused our asset production on the main mechanical parts of the character and the levels themselves. Things like the Robotic arm used for grappling and as a propellor/glide, as well as environmental mechanics such as enemy turrets and the level select overworld. Part of our overall level design philosophy is to mechanically build solid levels and character mechanics first and foremost. A new mechanic and level section is the hang glider. Unlike the propellor which is used to slow the players decent and give a longer descent arc, the hang glider is used as a Spyro like mechanic to cross long distances while managing speed and height. In line with our art direction, we want the glider to look like it’s made from newspaper and PVC piping as if Klepto haphazardly built it himself. Corne worked on the initial concept, modeled the Glider parts and UVed the sections for Conrad to texture in Sprint 2. In tandem with the Hand Glider we concepted and started working on an enemy/environmental obstacle that can make the hand gliding sections challenging but more interesting than just flying around. The idea of a turret that shoots at the player was formulated. In keeping with some of the humour of our game design Conrad concepted a turret that has an electric eel as the turret operator, and also as the power source. With Conrads concepts we have a really solid base to work from in terms of art direction. This is a nice change from previous pipelines where we kinda made stuff on an Ad Hoc basis. Juane spent alot of time during the first sprint (week1) of our Alpha working on the character rig. And integrating the Obirope plugin to function as Kleptos robotic arm. The ObiRope arm is much more stable than the previous animation and physics based arm rigs we attempted earlier in prototyping and vertical slice. Scott was tasked with rigging and animating the propellor arm for Klepto. This propellor pops out of Kleptos arm and is used to slow his descent. Scott went through a few iterations of this rig in order to get the best out of his animations. The animations themselves were also tweaked throughout the week to best suit the situation and timing of Kleptos jump height and arc.
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September 2017
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