MDDN 343, Project 3, Reflection

This assignment was quite a challenge for me. There were ups and downs during the times which I had with my groups. There were times where we would get really frustrated with one another. But in the end we managed to all put our differences aside and finish the game. In the end I do think the game turned out well. At the beginning it was a real challenge for Francis and I to get things done in time since we were down one designer for a lot of the assignment. But once we all got together we managed to get a lot of work done. It truly does show that 3 is better than 1 or 2.

We had to do an individual write up about the main things which we have done for this project so here is my personal write up.



If I were to do this assignment again there would be several things which I probably would of changed if I were to make all of the design Decisions myself

1. I would change the game to a 3rd person runner like temple run
2. I probably wouldnt have had a story driven game and just make it a time and distance based game
3. I also would have made the puzzles suit the runner type of game I wanted and just kept it to dodge, jump and also phase into the other screen.

There are probably a few other things which I would of changed but I cant really think of any off the top of my head right now.

But overall I think that it all turned out well. From what I heard from people who have played the game, they liked it and as a game designer that is all I can hope for with the outcome.

Now its time to work on Charge 2.0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MDDN 343, Project 3, Final Hand in

So we just had our final hand in and Final Presentation. I believe that it all went really well. The game turned out really well and I am actually really happy with how it turned out. In the Presentation we played through the entire game and the audience seemed to like the game play.

Unfortunately I cant upload the game on blogger but we are planning on posting it up somewhere so that people can actually play it somewhere.

Here are some screen shots from in game.

As you can see from these screen shots that our game has managed to come together quite well.

We have also made a trailer for our game which shows several of the key elements of our game.


Sequence 01 from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.
I hope that you (the reader of my blog) can play Upside Down, Downside up sometime and I will post a link on my blog once it is up online for people to play

MDDN 343, Project 3, cinematics

I have managed to fix the walk animation for Uddu and it was just to move the leg back more while walking. Now it looks a lot better and also gives him more of a sway when he walks which looks a lot better in game.

Now what I have been working on lately is 2 small cinematics which we are going to be playing in our game. The first is a video which will play at the beginning of our game whenever the player starts a new game. And the other is a quick one which plays between levels.

We just wanted to sort of have a video which kind of sets the scene as well as something a little humorous to add into our game.

The opening video is just Uddu waking up in the prison cell and then he tests his powers. Because Uddu doesn't talk it was quite hard to show the story.

This is the scene which I set up to animate the video. All up there was about 1100 frames which I had to render for this video.

UNFORTUNATELY the night which I was working on this video. Just as I was about to click Render somehow I blew a fuse in my house and half of the video was lost. The fuse blew just as i plugged my laptop into the socket. It was really frustrating and took me about a couple hours to catch up to how it is now. Again unfortunately the video isn't the same as it was originally and it doesn't really state why hes in jail but I ran out of time to redo the video to how it exactly how I wanted it.

This is how it turned out and even though its not exactly how I want it but I still like how it looked.

Intro Cut Scene from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.
The second video is Uddu in the elevator which is what he enters to finish the level. I wanted this video to be a little scene but for it to be funny. All that I have done in this video is used the elevator model which I was given to by Katie and animate the frame of the elevator and have Uddu with his idle animation. And to add the humour factor I want to have some really cheesy elevator music. This video was a lot easier to do and this one came out how I wanted it to.

  Elevator Scene from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Doors and animation Update

Our game is finally starting to take shape and it is actually looking alright. We have put in the animations for Uddu. Ryan managed to figure out how to import the animations without doing it the strange way in which he wanted to (thankfully). The animations transition between one another really well and it looks really good. I still have a problem with the jump fall animation and I want to see how it looks without it and if we can keep it out. Also the walk animation needs a little bit of tweaking because at the moment it looks like he is marching. I think all I need to do is to bring is back leg back more when hes walking.

As asset wise we are finally starting to get textures thanks to Katie. Since the beta she has always been in communication with us which is awesome. She also had the same problem with the guard animations which I had but I showed her how I fixed it so she got them working fine.

There are only afew more assets which we had to make. Me and Katie split the ones which we need so that we are both doing them. I have been working on a door which will be put in several places in our game. I want to make a sliding door which looks like it is something which could be in a government facility and also be secure.

I took inspiration from these doors which I found online

I like the way which they have pieces which kind of click together so that is what I tired to replicate and I think I managed to go a good job of it.

I really like the Look of the door. When the doors open they will be hidden withen the walls which will be next to it. We have decided to use rectangles from unity to be used as the walls and add textures to them. This will be good because then we wont have to stretch models to fit the exact way which we want them to and the texture wont also stretch. This is also because our walls come right up to the camera so they dont really have an end point from the viewers eyes.

Door Open

MDDN 343, Project 3, Guard

Our game is based in a government facility. UDDU has been captured by the government and is trying to escape. Along the way he has to try and avoid guards. The job of modeling a guard was given to katie but we hadn't heard from her in awhile.
I started to model what I think that could be good for a guard incase we run out of time and we havent got the models from katie.
I thought that because the scene is a government facility that most people would think of the men in black. I thought it could be cool if they had sort of robots patrolling the facility.

I didnt work on this much because I was always still hoping that Katie would get hold of us (which she did)
If she never got hold of us I would of taken this model into mudbox and then made it look a lot better than it currently does. But I wouldnt mind working with this for a future piece when I get some free time

MDDN 343, Project 3, Beta Presentation

We just had our beta presentation and I think it went alright. Luckily we have finally managed to get hold of Katie and she has given us the guard model and animations. For the beta all we had was un-animated guards because we didn't have time to put in the animations but it is better than nothing. She has also promised us that she will always attend the times which we set to meet up between now and hand in which is a couple weeks away.

Unfortunately the art is still lacking in our game but now that Katie is back she can go back to focusing on art while me and Francis go back to our originally set roles.

We got good feedback from the guests who came and watched the Betas. Especially from Jim Simmons from Resn. He told us that he really liked how we had the gameplay sorted out and that he didnt mind that the art was lacking since it was still fun to play.

From the Beta we have realized that we still have a lot to do. Francis, Katie and I are planning on coming into the lap to work most of the days next week so we can all collaborate with one another and make sure we are all going well. The coders are also planning on coming in whenever they can to do there parts but we do have a proper all group members meeting next wednesday.

We are planning to try and have our game 99% finished on the Tuesday before Hand in (18th June) so that we can spend all of Wednesday working finding/fixing any bugs which we might find. I think that this is possible if we all get our heads down and focus on it.

Not long to go!!!!!

MDDN 343, Project 3, Meeting before Beta

Our tuesday meeting this week is our last one which we are having up at the kelburn campus. From now we plan on having full working meetings down at te aro.

We still havent got the animations from Katie but Dawn said she is going to try and get hold of her and make sure that she puts them onto our dropbox in time for thursday. 
All of my animations have been given to the Ryan as he is implementing them into unity. For some reason though he wants to do it some really weird way in which I have to cut up UDDUs body into the separate pieces. I am pretty sure that I dont have to do this because Dawn managed to get it working perfectly fine with my project 1B. We are going to wait until after our Beta Presentation on thursday before I cut it up to see if Ryan can figure our how to import them without having me cut up our character.

MDDN 343, Project 3, New animations

Now that I have got the new higher detailed character off Francis I have been able to focus on the real animations for our character. And I have also found out a way in which the Fbx export will always work exactly how I want it to and for it to perfectly go into Unity. 

I had a long chat with Ben Richards and he also was really confused about how it wasn't working. But he lead me to a site in which it gave you step by step instructions on the exact way in which I should do it. In the end it just turned out that I have to select a different Fbx export type (autodesk media and entertainment) and then export it.

I have done the Rigging, Weight painting and contrants with handles about 20 different times on this character so I was 90% sure I knew exactly where everything should go and what they should all look like when they move.

With a high polly it was a lot harder though but I managed to get it sorted.

This time with the animations I kind of cut them up a lot more. They all have seamless transitions when looped which is a real good thing. Also for the jump I have cut that up into 2 sections so that there is a Jump start and a Jump fall. Im not 100% for the fall animation so im going to see what it looks like when we dont have it in game but for now I have put it in.

Something which the Coders have told me is to not have the end point as the origins of the character because they can do that crossfade thing between animations to make it look more natural.

Walk

Idle

Carry

Idle carry

Jump Start

Jump End

MDDN 343, Project 3, High Character

Francis has finished the Mudbox high polly version of UDDU and it looks really good. At the moment it doesnt look like he has any eyes but the higher level does and once we put on the normal map onto it then it will look even better than it does now

Now that I have this model I can fully work on animations, I think that I have figured out the reason why the animations were screwing up before, and if it is the way why I think it is then it will be really stupid and would of meant a real waste of a weekend where I was working on those animations.

Our team have also had another meeting the other week but unfortunately I could not attend because of other commitments. From what I have heard of is that we have had some contact with Katie and that she said that she has uploaded the model as well as animations for the guard onto dropbox but we still cant find it up there. This is kind of annoying because I started working on a guard which will be in my next blog post but also that she has done the animating but then this means I can work on other stuff swell.

MDDN 343, Project 3, More asset design

Because I got really frustrated with the animating of our character I have decided to leave it until I get the low level from Francis

Some more assets for what we need are boxes which are double the original box.
We dont want it to be different than the other boxes so I am keeping the same design. What we are planning on doing is changing the texture of the double boxes.

I really like my box design because it is really different from other boxes which I have seen made in the past.

In one of our scenes we have our character UDDU jump onto a pipe which falls down and crushes some guards which is bellow it. The pipe is a real simple model but will looks a lot better once we add the texture to it. I modelled it off the air vent pipes which we have in the 4th floor media lab at te are.

The middle part of the pipe is separate from the ends so that the center can fall off and leave the 2 ends attached to the wall

In the beginning of our game UDDU starts off in a jail cell. In one world the cell has glass and in the other it doesn't. I didn't want to make a typical jail cell that we have in prisons but something which looks like it could hold a alien. I took inspiration from the jail cell from the Avengers movie where they hold Loki.

When creating this I made it into 3 different parts.

The Frame, the jail cell itself and then the glass. 

The glass will be transparent so that you can see through it. I think that once this has been texture that it will look really nice and.

There are afew other assets which I need to make like lights and doors but at this moment animations are more of a priority.

Also we still havent heard much of Katie and I really hope we hear from her soon because we are getting to the stage where we really need to have all 3 designers working a lot on this project. We had a chat with Kah and Stu during our last play testing session and they said that for now to leave the stuff which we have given to Katie and if we haven't heard from her by our beta presentation then it would be best to do her parts and think of it as if she isn't finishing the course.

MDDN 343, Project 3, importing animations into Unity

with the walk animation which I just finished I tired to put into Unity.

I really dont like Unity at the moment because it really doesn't like me with trying to import fbx's.

When I import the FBX into unity the character box comes out with a black character. When I click onto it I cant even see the character and when I play the animation nothing happens. I bought it into the default unity game and what comes up doesn't even look like my character.

The object which is in unity is just a random object rather than my character.

I exported the walk animation 12 different times with having the exact same problem. Each time I re rigged and animated the character. This got me so frustrated because it took about 4-5 hours to re rig and animate the character.

Once I thought that I had fixed it and the character was imported into unity properly and the character looked how he was meant to another problem came up.
This time what was happening what that for some reason the camera was being animated instead of the character. So the character was in the right position when in Unity but still wasnt animating.

After this happened I started to get really frustrated with what was going on so I decided to move to more asset creation to give me a break from animating.

MDDN 343, Walk animation 2

I have redone the walk animation for our character to see if the other group members think that this is better.

Unfortunately I couldn't Loop it in maya but this is actually looking a lot better than the original one I did. From what Stephen in my group told me I am going to have to create all of my animations from halfway through the animation. He said that in Unity you can cross fade animations so that they will do that for our animations in unity.

MDDN 343, Project 3, animation Issues

From our play testing we got a lot of feedback which has really told us that we are quite far behind what we want it to be.

In our group meeting we discussed a timeline for what we want done and when we want it. There is  a lot which we need to have done and we dont have much time to do it.

Something which has made this quite a struggle is that Katie has been absent for the last few weeks and have havent heard anything from her. We have given her the role of modeling a guard which we are hoping to have in our game asap as at the moment it is just a cylinder which is in its place.

Something which I am specifically having a problem with is the animations of our character. When I animate our character some of his joints dont animate properly and end up twisting on itself. Francis told me that the reason for this is that I used duplicate special on the character when I wanted to mirror the model. I forgot to delete the history of the model before I rigged it and so when I was moving one side of the object the other side would slightly be effected even if the weight painting said that it wasnt meant to be effected. Another thing which I am having a problem with is that the animations don't look continuous. When the walk animation is played it seems to stop for a split second at the end of the animation. Stephen told me that I should try doing the walk cycle from starting at the middle of the walk and see if that looks better when I loop it.

MDDN 343, Project 3, animations

I have done a quick animations which I plan on giving to the computer science students so that they can use it for animation testing.

I havent done this to high detail because I plan on creating simple animations on this low polly character and then get to know the rig and weight painting and when the high polly character is ready form mudbox I plan on redoing the animations onto the lower level of the high polly character and then add the normal map onto that character.

Walk

Idle

Pick up

Jump

Carry

MDDN 343, Project 3, Before animating

The other day we had a chat about animating in class. Ben Richards told us several things which we should do to help with our animating.

The first thing was to have a look at a book called 'The animators survival kit' by Richard Williams. 

This is actually a really good book and I highly advise anyone who plans on having a career in animations should have a look at this. There was a lot of stuff about walk cycles which come in handy.

What else he told us to do is to record us doing the animations which we want to do.

So that is what I did.

Sorry for the bad quality but there wasnt much places I could do this at my house.

MDDN 343, Testing for animations from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Rigging

Francis has completed a simple box modeled character for what we want to use in our game. He plans on taking this character into mudbox and doing some high sculpting in that. Here is how the box model version of the character looks like.

There are a few things which I have changed from this original model which francis gave me. I have made him less wider as this model makes him look quite fat. I have also shorted his arms because they seem quite long at the moment. In this model he also doesnt have a tail which is what I am adding. His feet is also very plane at the moment so I am adding more of a hoof to his feet which also matches his hands.

This character looks a lot more balanced in the proportions of his body. What we plan on doing is to animate this model and then after Francis has put this model into mudbox and done some sculpting on it to add a normal map to make it look more detailed.

I am now focusing on animations for the character. The Rig is made for a simple Humanoid character as he walks pretty much like a human. 

The main animations which our character will have is
-Walk
-Idle
-Jump
-Pick up
-Idle while pick up

MDDN 343, P3, Importing Character into unity

The computer science students want me to give them a real simple character without animations which they can put into our game so they can test a lot of the simple mechanics for it. I was using the model which I was given the other day and was just going to export it as an fbx and give it to them. Unfortunately something wasnt right. when I exported as a fbx it decided that there is a massive area of empty space between the 0 points and the character.

This was a real annoying problem which I could figure out how to fix. I exported it about 6 different times before I managed to fix it. Im not even sure how I did it. I just ended up selecting the character and coping him into another maya scene and it managed to work with that

This was such a frustrating thing to try and get sorted but hopefully something like this doesnt happen again now.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Progress

Our progress for our game hasn't been that much unfortunately. But its just starting to improve.
We had another game meeting this week which francis and I tried to make it more design orientated.

Francis is working on the character model because we havent heard from Katie over the last couple weeks and this is quite an important part of our game. He bought along several sketches of what he thinks is a good idea for our main character.


Me and Francis met up the day after to have a day completely focused on working on our game. I was working mainly on assets while francis worked on character design. We decided not to work on extremely high detail at this moment as it would be good to just have something in our game. The assest which I worked on were the boxes and floor. Using maya I created some objects which we are putting into our game. Box

For our boxes we don't want them to look like typical boxes but something really strange. This is what we are going with for now as it looks really different, and it also is easy to stack on one another which is what we want for our game.

Tiles

For the floor we want it to be something which can be tiled really easily in our game. At the moment one of those squares 1m x 1m and have 4 small tiles in them. What we plan for this is to have a simple white tiled floor and for it to be expanded over the entire level.
also Francis has modeled a really simple version of our character which I can use for animating testing for the time being. It is really low polly but the rig probably wont change from the other characters I get from him.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Intrim presentation

We just had our first intrim presentation as a group and we were all given an aspect of the game which we are going to write up about in our presentation file.

Katie and Ryan were both absent from our meeting on tuesday so it was just the 4 of us this time.
We didnt really cover much and I didnt bring up the things which I wanted to talk about because I wanted to tell them to the entire group.

What we have thought about is that since we are in a government bunker which is holding several types of aliens in them that it could be cool if we have different eco systems in our game. So one level could be a hot desert environment and another could be a cold snowy one. This is a part of our wish list of things we want to do but aren't really necessary for the game at the moment.


For our presentation we are to have a design Document about the game. This tells people the core mechanics of our game, how we want it to feel and look like to the player and also the main roles of our group.
At this stage I have been put on rigging and animating all the characters in the game. I will probably also have to do some modeling of things in the game like boxes and the environment.  To somewhat shorten our game title we have named our alien UDDU which stands for Upside Down Downside Up.  This makes talking about our game a lot easier because we often get mixed up on what our title is actually meant to be.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Team UDDU, Inrim Presentation

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Final Hand in

Here are 6 high res images from Mudbox of my model. Each of them show different aspects of my character.

A final orthographic view of my character

A turntable of my final character

MDDN 343 P1B Turntable from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

Drawings from the part A hand in which were required for this the final hand in