BA2B - Game Project - Week 4

BA2B Collaborative Game Project

Week 4

This week my job was to just keep working on the environment and implement the assets/textures that the other's in the team have created and textured. Since the making of the environment isn't much more than placing objects and painting textures etc this will be a very image heavy blog post, instead of lots of text like previous posts.

To start off with I lowered the amount of grass in the scene after last weeks feedback. It definitely made the environment look a lot less dense which was great as now the player will be able to see the ground/grass textures more clearly. I also received the dirt texture from Nat which I applied underneath the water for the river.

Since I now had both the grass and the mud texture, I decided to create a "stream edge" which allowed me to make the edges of the stream a bit more substantial than just a slope, especially as most streams are not flat around the sides.

Stream edge in Maya

I ended up creating two different variations so the scene wouldn't look too repetitive and distracting to the player.

When continuing to work on the level I stumbled upon an issue. The space between the elven bridge and the start was very large and we had no concepts of what to put there. 

I brought this up amongst the team and we came to the conclusion that just following the stream would seem pretty boring because it was just a straight line and not particularly interesting. So after some discussing back and forth, we decided that we should add a cave where the player has to go through instead.

The reason why the player would head towards the stream instead of continuing forward is because there would be a  goblin camp next to it. So naturally, because the character would not want to risk getting into a fight with the goblins, they would turn and travel in a different direction.

Blue line is to show the player path

When we had decided on this idea I continued to work on the environment. The goblin camp was rather difficult to composition because I didn't have that many assets yet, when I wanted to make it look a bit busier to fill the empty space. However, I will go back to it later when I have more assets to add.

First pass of the Goblin camp.

Because the player is forced to go to the right because of the goblin camp, I figured that this area would be a bit narrower and overgrown with vegetation. This also adds to the idea that its not a path that people would normally take when walking through this area, hence why it is overgrown.

After this bit was done it was time to start working on the cave. Since I had already placed a lot of rocks when working on the elven bridge, this went a lot quicker as I was able to copy and paste bundles of them.

Overview of the level

Cave Entrance

This cave quickly became one of my favourite areas of the game so far because graphically it was a very beautiful environment. We have plans to add glowing mushrooms and also adding assets such as torches and campfires as well.

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An issue that we unfortunately are unable to solve with the cave is that the water is still reflecting the sky outside. This makes the water look very bright even though it's inside the cave, but since we have so much to do and just two weeks left; this is something we will have to overlook for now. 

While working on the environment I constantly shared screenshots with the team members and asked for feedback. We also discussed what things we could add to the environments and all of us came up with new assets to make.

Since walking in a stream is not really a natural path for the people living in the area to make, I had to come up with natural ways of making the player feel as if they were on path (and not just walking in a random place). Because the game is on rails, this really helps but it is still important to keep the feeling that the environment would feel natural for a person to walk in that direction. This meant I had to add things like the log (shown in the above screenshot), to make it feel as if it had been placed for a person to walk up on (also so that the player can see where they will be walking up). If the player has no idea where the character will be heading next and he all of a sudden makes a turn to somewhere that doesn't make sense, it will break the flow of the game. This can also make the player feel uncomfortable while continuing with the game. 

At the end of the week Nat had finished the rock textures so I replaced them and it really made a cool visual impact with the environment. We had to be very careful with the texturing on the rocks since I have scaled some of them to be huge and some are tiny. They are also rotated a lot so if Nat would have added too much detail it could've looked really odd in the game. Luckily Nat found a good balance and it suits the vegetation and scenery.

Cave entrance with the new rock textures

Goblin Crossbow

Since what I really want to become in the games industry is an 3D Artist, it was really fun for my to help out with making the crossbow, as Jack was currently swamped with assets to create. This crossbow was a very cool team collaboration since Billy made the Concept for it, I made the 3D asset and Charlotte made the textures for it. The end result turned out really awesome and I'm really happy with how the textures look on my finished low poly model.

Concept Art made by Billy Machin

High Poly version of the Crossbow, made by me.

Low Poly version of the Crossbow, made by me.

Wireframe

I am not entirely satisfied with the low poly version of the crossbow because of the topology but because of the time limit I did not have time to clean it up properly or fix the bakes. We decided to move on with it anyway because with the hand painted textures over it, the player would not be able to see the bake errors (so it would just be a waste of time for me to fix them). The topology could be a lot better and efficient but again, due to lack of time I quickly just had to decimate the bones and the rope in Zbrush to get it done, as I needed to keep working on the level.

Finished Crossbow. Model created by Me. Textures and Renders created by Charlotte Lawrence.

Finished Crossbow. Model created by Me. Textures and Renders created by Charlotte Lawrence.

Since the bolt itself would be very close to the player camera when it penetrates the shield we ended up adding a bit extra details to the bolt tip.

Week 4 Summary

This week we did lots of progress on the game. Half of the level is now finished and we are really starting to see the game come together. We are very happy with the art style and am very excited to see this game finished. It was fun to work with some 3D as well, the collaboration on the crossbow was very exciting and the end result looks great. Next week we will hopefully be able to finish the whole level and the last week will be spent on gameplay and polish.