Coming the end of our First project which focused on a particular point we were to express in the form of a game, although the time was limited I had loads of fun constructing a world that expressed my jump from small town to a large open world. This Week We will be preparing for our next project that involves the invoking of emotion in the form of a game, where we create and structure our games in order to create a sense of ambience around a certain theme to provoke particular emotion.
LIGHTS OUT!
For my second project, Lights Out I will be focusing my game around the theme of fear and Power, the game is set at what begins as a child about to go to sleep, as the mother turns the light of players instantly get sucked into this otherworldly realm, filled with nightly creatures and a monster that the players, with the aid of their trust stuffed toy will have to defeat in order to conquer their fear of the dark.
The Theme of the Game will Centre or draw a lot of inspiration from much of Tim Burton's style of artwork and movies, where I aim for a thriller esque experience but still keep a light hearted feel to it, something that Tim Burtons work has always had the ability to do.
For the Style that the game will be set in, along with the overall theme of a "Nightmare before christmas" like feel i will be drawing a lot of my inspirations for lights out's overall structure on the 3-D modeling styles of David O'REilly whose style already employs a-lot of tim burtons aesthetics with the added bonus of already being set in a 3 dimensional space. I choose David o'reilly's model style as the models themselves are low resolution but still able to communicate a lot of information which I find to suit a game's project very well.
To follow along the Overall look of Tim burtons films and also begun investigating that will give more of a rough dough like appeal to assets created within the game to give it a more fantasy like appeal.
On the left is Standard diffuse material and the Right is the Oran-Nayar shader that is a diffuse material with light scattering.
Look Back at Horizon
With Horizon Development coming to an end I step back to reflect on what I find to be certain recurring issues as well as talk about things i Found I handled better.
Things to Improve Upon
FeedBack and HuD
With the time constraints of just over a week to create horizon, creating and implementing assets for the game proved a challenge and with that some things that are needed wasn't able to be worked more upon.
One Such Instance was overall GUI layout and Feedback prompts that if worked on more would improve the overall quality of the game hugely, without proper feedback people playing horizon would be confused as to what it is there meant to do or to follow the overall plot.
Prior planning and structuring
The Overall base that horizon was constructed on wasn't at first properly set out, this caused a lot of small things to clash or things that would make the game overly more understandable and fun to play. With prior planning of game layouts such as quest structures,level layouts and code hierarchies the game development would run alot smoother and is something i will be keeping in Mind in future Projects.
With the time constraints of just over a week to create horizon, creating and implementing assets for the game proved a challenge and with that some things that are needed wasn't able to be worked more upon.
One Such Instance was overall GUI layout and Feedback prompts that if worked on more would improve the overall quality of the game hugely, without proper feedback people playing horizon would be confused as to what it is there meant to do or to follow the overall plot.
Prior planning and structuring
The Overall base that horizon was constructed on wasn't at first properly set out, this caused a lot of small things to clash or things that would make the game overly more understandable and fun to play. With prior planning of game layouts such as quest structures,level layouts and code hierarchies the game development would run alot smoother and is something i will be keeping in Mind in future Projects.
Things that keep up
Content Creation
despite the constraint that was set, I still managed to create the assets I wanted for horizon including extra's that helped to overly theme my game. The mentality I followed was to avoid viewporting as much as I could and be satisfied with the overall communication of the models which is something I will incorporate in future projects.
Composition
As with last year where I begun studying more artistic theories to improve my illustrative/concept design, I find that the more I understand the more I begin to incorporate into not only initial project concept art but with the overall layout and aesthetics of the game itself, from asset creation to level layout all improved the more I study.
despite the constraint that was set, I still managed to create the assets I wanted for horizon including extra's that helped to overly theme my game. The mentality I followed was to avoid viewporting as much as I could and be satisfied with the overall communication of the models which is something I will incorporate in future projects.
Composition
As with last year where I begun studying more artistic theories to improve my illustrative/concept design, I find that the more I understand the more I begin to incorporate into not only initial project concept art but with the overall layout and aesthetics of the game itself, from asset creation to level layout all improved the more I study.
Conclusion
Although the Game's Asset's were all created ontime, with extra assets created to help with overall theming, more time could have been spent with overall game mechanics/Feedback and Layout which will have created a better experience for the player. Creating assets for my games is always my favorite part of development and is something i'm passionate about but that should not come at the cost of games experience and carry on with my studies I will be looking and techniques that will help improve player experience, player feedback and generally just divide my tasks evenly to ensure that I am creating an experience and not just walking simulator.
Reversing my development strategies
In the past. I would favour creation of the overall visual aspects of game projects, which in teams would work out fine, but as we begin working on more solo projects I had to find ways to learn from my mistakes in previous projects such as game mechanics or player feedback. One solution was constructing a project template, which including Basic scene's that all projects would feature such as Hud layouts, start screens, music managers, characters controls, camera controls and other generic scripts that I found I would reuse.
This approach came about with the end of horizon where id spend bulk amounts of time on asset creation and left the games structures for last which created many issues and i'm hoping this approach will help give more time to fine tune feedback systems and Game structures.
Meshing with meshes
Along with studying concept and illustrative theories, I also begun playing around and understanding how 3D model composition works, from Vertices to Triangles that are connected to them i'm slowly demising how meshes work and without that free some limitations for future projects