Creating backgrounds

I have created a couple of backgrounds for my platformer/sidescroller game.

This first one is very basic as it will only be used for the tutorial level of the game.

But after the basic tutorial level is done the player will then drop down into a dungeon which is the scenery that they will be seeing a lot more of.

I used a few reference images for lighting effects and still went for a basic brickwork design, the way I have made it is so that If I want to change the scenery a bit it would be more like my tile sets so I can add moss of lava between bricks.

weapon design final/Starting shield design

Today I drew up what is supposed to be my final weapon design, while I was doing this design I desired to remove the skull and bone in the hilt without replacing them and I also mover the scythe blades a little further down. (image awaiting scan)

I have also considered since then that I may need to scale down the weapon to become a one handed weapon at which I would remove the extra two scythe blades. This is dependent on my shield design as the weapon as is does not leave much room for shield use.

With this in mind my first shield concept was design around being equipped over the arm of the character. I started out the design with a standard rounded edged square shield and then split it in two, and added what will either be spikes or rivets having chains attached in a cross formation to keep the shield together and giving flexability with use.

The shield was also held together by three large straps on the back.

(awaiting image scan)

Creating tile sets

I’ve been learning to create tile for my 2D platformer using a new technique which is to bring 2 images into Photoshop.

To do this I searched on google for some images that I would like to blend together and then used the sequence of Ctrl+N > Enter > Ctrl+V, this brought the image into the window at its current scale. I did this for both images before selecting Image > Image size and then scaling down to 400×400 pixels.

I also learned that using  Ctrl+A to highlight the whole image and going into Edit > Define pattern will allow me to use the pattern stamp tool. This will allow my to paint my new designed pattern onto another image of plain surface.

The two tiles that I have so far are

I am unsure about the mossy light bricked tile as I used this for learning the process and I am currently thinking of where it could be used withing my game.

Animation Refining

Today I spent time refining my animation to make it feel a little more like it should, I mean this as I want the start up and the first two 90 degrees spins to be kind of blocky and not so smooth to further present the fact that this is the first time the machine has been started up in a while and it can slowly improve it’s movements over time.

The first thing I noticed when playing back my animation is that the pivot point had shifted on a few frames so I needed to go back over frames and refine this back to the default position so it all aligned correctly throughout.

Once I had finished with this I then had to figure out why the animation would not go to the left. I could set up four points of he animation for a full rotation

Starting at Facing forward onto

1. Facing left
2. looking behind
3. facing right
4. back to facing forward

The animation would play fine for the most part by going from forward , left, behind, right and back to forward but instead of continuing the direction it was going it would go back over the moments it had just done instead of completing the circle rotation.

Matt showed me what the problem was and how to fix it which  turned out to be the euler filter, this setting could be found within the graph editor under the curves menu. I went into the graph editor and highlighted my graph then selected this option which fixed the turning instantly.

Once this was done I worked on making the animation less fluent by copying some of the frames

 

Game Jam preperations

In preparation for game Jam I was put into a group and assigned a base of a game which we then needed to read through the code to make sure we understand it and make a game given what we already have.

The game we were given relied on attracting other objects in the scene which we labelled “sheep” and began work on a sheep herding game where the objective would have been to gather the sheep and escort them to the goal.

The catch however was that the sheep could not hit the walls or they would die, this lead to looking into things such as detection the amount of sheep in the scene and having detected. the game restart the scene if none could be detected.

These were the icons that were made for the sheep, the first being a top down view, it was decided shortly after that they should at least have a face rather than looking like moving clouds.

This was the final design of the level with the time we had to complete it (1 hour) the radius shown on screen is the pulling radius, the sheep would start pulling towards you when within this zone. The size of this made it all that bit harder guiding them without hitting the walls.

Modelling my shield design

Today I started to model my shield design, I started with a cube and beveled the edges to create the more rounded effect and then I deleted the faces that I didn’t need.

I then inserted an edge loop to create an extra middle face and deleted it as my shied will be in two halves held together by chains on the front and straps on the back.

Once I had the two halves I created pivots which the chain would then become attached to.

 

I added a non-linear curve to the chain so it could fit the shape of the shield but there was a problem with this and it made the links too thin, one of them even collapsed in on itself and started showing as a black link instead of grey(shown in second picture).

 

you can also see my second attempt the chain on the picture below which is above the shield base.

Ben helped me with this one as when I showed him the original issue with my chain he mentioned that I could duplicate one along a curve, once the curve was drawn the trow links were taken from the original and placed in front of the curve in the direction that I wanted it to duplicate.

I then attached them to the motion path which is located under the constrain tab, I needed the links and the newly drawn line to do this and once that was done I went into the visualize tab and selected create animation snapshot with a start point of 1 and end point of 120.

Unfortunately the links did not position the way I wanted then to and it gave me this kind of eel spine type of model.

I have three options at the moment which are:

• Retry creating the chain from scratch piece by piece myself
• Retry making a chain with the animation snapshot method
• delete about half of the links show in the picture above and preposition the rest

 

Vectors

Today I started looking into vectors within games and how they effect everything.

Traditionally, a vector is a set of numbers used to define a direction and a speed in one go. Every time you move, rotate or scale an object in Unity, you are manipulating a vector.  The position, scale and rotation of your GameObjects are all stored as 3-dimensional vectors. Additionally  a rigidbody will store velocity as a vector.

The number of dimensions a vector has refers to the number of coordinates it stores. Generally speaking, a 3D vector will contain X, Y and Z coordinates.

A 2D vector will have X and Y values.

As vectors are simply sets of numbers, the process for adding and subtracting them is fairly straightforward.

The coordinates in the resulting vector are calculated by applying the arithmetic to the corresponding coordinates in the original vectors. (examples taken from presentation)

{ 1, 2, 3 }   +   { 3, 2, 1 }   =   { 4, 4, 4 }
{ 8, 8 }   –   { 3, 2 }   =   { 5, 6}

Vector multiplication is not as simple. Multiplying the coordinates together in a similar way to addition does not give any really meaningful result.

Vectors can be scaled, however. The process is easy; you just multiply each coordinate of the vector by the scalar value (the number to multiply by).

{ 1, 2, 3 }   x   5   =   { 5, 10, 15 }

 

 

Creating a mech design

Today I started to create silhouettes of mechs withing Photoshop, firstly I started off by looking at some reference images for little details that could be incorporated.  these included different weapon types, legs/tracks and just general shape and design features.

After some time I came up with six different ideas.

After I had my designs i need to pick one to put into Photoshops 3D component of the software, i chose the design on the bottom right as it was simple for a first try so I could see exactly how the software worked.

Weapon research

My next modelling project is to make a sword(or any main hand weapon) and a shield.

I have spent some time looking for weapons and shields that come from games with a fantasy feel and a some that are realistic to compare between two realms, I will be picking element that I like from different pieces and combing those elements to create my own weapon set.

I have take a lot of variations of shields and different types of weapons from different games as the theme of a game can highly impulse the design of the equipment used throughout

I am currently thinking of a highly unrealistic weapon which will be different elements of 3-4 of these combined into one.

This is the first draft of my weapon design which has taken the handle of the Saradomin Godsword and instead of it having the cross in the center of the circle at the bottom of the hilt I have removed the top of it and stretched the rest of it out and attatched them onto the outside instead, then I felt as though I should fill it’s place so I added the skull and cross bones which is still subject to change.

I then added a simple hand guard and gave it a diamond shaped gen for some added detail.

After I continued the handle upward I added the ribbon effect that is on the multi-bladed scythe while also using it’s bladed design, after this I then added the spikes/teeth from the (“The Harvest”) scythe and tried to replicate the shape of the eagle axe blade.

I liked the concept for this weapon but the design was still something to be worked on and polished so I attempted another drawing, with this attempt I was trying to be neater and add more detail into the design.

I am much happier with this draft and even added a couple of notes to the side but I may consider combining the notes and replacing the skull with the orb instead.

Thinking about backgrounds

I am going to start creating a new side scroller game with Chris and have been tasked with researching and creating backgrounds with Gary that could be used within the game.

The first task was to create a moodboard of different side scrolling games to use as a reference at how backgrounds fit a theme.

The games I have chosen are (in order):

Shu, Cuphead, Super Meat Boy, Abes Exodus, MegaMan, Darkest Dungeon, Metal Slug and Terarria.

The detail and backgrounds of these games vary as they are all used in deifferent settings.

I have decided to go for a dungeon setting and have started working on some assets that can be placed within various levels.

So far I have a window, door ans pillar which I have left unfilled at the moment as the color scheme is current undecided.