A look back at the creatures of Trust!

I am refreshing my blog with some of the creatures from the game Trust that didn’t make it to the blog in time. I will just show the different creatures! The blog is a great way for me to remember the things I’ve done and I realised that there were many of them absent! 🙂

 

Sleeping rock troll!

Waking rock troll!

Water troll!

 

The arms, coming out of the water to try and grab the kids!

 

Tree Troll!

Tree troll arms! Suddenly these could come out of the forest grabing you!

Concept of Älvor running! We were uncertain if they should have legs or not, so boths versions are here.

 

Until next time!

 

 

It’s Unreal.. 2!

 

Here comes more pictures in-game and what changes we have made. At an early stage Thea our producer was building the levels and boxing out where things ought to be after the concept art I’ve made early on in the project. I’m very happy with the end result and how close it actually is to concept art and plans. Much of this is because of our talented lead art, planning every model and piece needed in each room! Here is the same plan you’ve seen a couple of times now if you’ve followed the blog:

This is a screenshot of the very same room early in the process when Thea was still boxing out the groundwork for the different rooms. After her Amanda and Thea together changed a lot of the floors and walls to make it look less ”boxy” and more interesting. You can also see here in the screenshot that most meshes are still placeholders at this point, except for the big pillars in the middle. These pillars still suffered from the ”wet texture syndrome” however, that all my textures had in the beginning, and that I eventually solved using the fix I explained in the previous blog post.

Here it is later in the process after I’ve worked a lot on making the scenes more interesting. Note that it’s still very close to the early concept art. Also no more wet looking pillars! Amanda have also worked a lot on the lighting, illuminating the room.

Here is my concept for the two corridors leading down to the statue room. The corridor in the game is almost identical and looks amazing, especially with Amandas’ cool texture on the floor that reflects the lighting in a really cool way.

I also wanted to show the concept art I made for the Horus Sun in the Horus room, which later also became our logo. The concept arts look and the final products look are very close, which I am very happy with.  I did not have time to make the arms very detailed however, and I’m not super happy with how they ended up. The arms light up with every torch lit in the room. When every torch (and arm) are lit, the puzzle is completed.

Lastly I have a screenshot of a portion of the Hall of Statues that you can see many of the models I’ve made. Every urn, fire cauldron, pillars, wall decorations (like the little eagle thing behind the fire couldron in the background, the big triangle above it etc), and the obelisk. I have also placed them all in the scene, vertex painted the sand on the floor and tried making the scene look neat.

That was it for this time, next time I will show more rooms that I have worked on. Until next time!

It’s Unreal!

Hi again!

The last placeholder has been modeled and textured, so my work of replacing things in Unreal has started. Thea has been for quite some time now replacing the placeholder walls and floors, making the different rooms in the correct sizes with the correct meshes. My job now is to polish and populate the world with all the dodads I’ve been creating the last couple of weeks. A problem I’ve had however has been the texture and how it behaves in Unreal. For some reason a lot of my things look ”wet” and very shiny, and some things that look really great in Substance Painter (the program used to create said textures with) have a completely different look in the engine.

At first I simply thought that this had to do with how my levels were lit. In short, an object looks completely different depending on how it’s lit in the world. In Substance Painter while you paint, you can select different backgrounds and lighting to simulate the lighting the object will have in the real game later. I tried lots of different kind of lightings however, and none would work. The object simply looked dark, shiny, but not when the light source was close. something was clearly wrong.

After talking to Jona, an experienced light artist in Unity and Unreal, he gave us the tip that Unreal liked OpenGL more than DirectX when exporting from Substance Painter. This is an easy option in Project Configuration in Substance Painter, simply selecting one of the two (directX and openGl) to work with in the project.

My objects still looked kind of wet however, and things that were supposed to be shiny and metallic looked more like wet stone. It can be kind of hard to see in the pictures but it was driving me nuts. Here is the version with OpenGL this time. 

See how it kind of looks wet where the light is halfway illuminating the object and not shiny at all where the light is at its strongest? This bothered me (note that the lighting is unbuilt in the level so these are just to show the changes), and I looked further online.

Turns out Unreal has a little button on each texture you export called sRGB. When looking this up online I discovered that changing your Roughness, Height, Metallic and Ambient map texture to sRGB would create a look not matched in substance painter. Simply unchecking the sRGB check box in the texture solves the problem (only on your Roughness, Height, Metallic and Ambient maps, not your normal or basecolor).

Here it is, not looking wet. It might look like a small difference, but in-game, with the correct lighting, this solve made wonders. 

To get to the sRGB button, simply double-click the texture and uncheck this button:

 

Sorry for the overly technical bit, I just hope it might help someone working in Unreal. Until next time!

 

Getting there!

Hello again!

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and during this time I’ve been very busy. The programmers have done super well and made a functioning build of our game that we are currently play testing and hope we can send to our loved ones on monday.

Our game is a puzzle game, which means it’s focus group of player’s might not be people playing a lot of games. In can be people quite new to games, so we are going to use our loved ones and relatives to see if the game can be played by someone who isn’t very used to games. The reason for this is the simple reason that we all are gamers. And since we are gamers, we tend making games to other gamers. Gamers and non gamers have very different priorities when playing games. Enemies is an excellent example. People not playing many games want’s to avoid enemies since that is what they would do in real life in most situations: avoid confrontation. Gamers on the other hand would probably seek the enemies out, as a source for experience and new gear. Beyond that enemies can show the path the player should take to move to the next level, since empty paths usually means you’ve already been there.

My job the last few weeks has been to create the last placeholders for our game (placeholders are low quality items, furniture, walls, door etc) and with these populate the game world. Well, I didn’t put the placeholders in the world, that has so far been Thea job, a talented graphic artist in my group. While she’s been placing the placeholders in the world after the sketches and plans I showed in my last post, I started making high-end assets to replace the placeholders with.

Here is an example of a placeholder:

Here is the end result that is put in the game:

This has been a tricky, time-consuming job, but also insanely fun. What I am doing with each set is that I take a few assets that will share the same texture set, put them all into the same 3Ds max file and have them share the same UV map. As you see on the right in the example, that’s the 2D picture of all the texture on the objects in that 3Ds max file. After that I can save each object individually and place in unreal induvidually, but Unreal (the game engine we are working with) will still see that they share the same texture file. As long as I connect the texture set to one of the object in the scene, all the other objects sharing the same texture file will automatically instantly get textured.

What’s even better is that in Unreal (the actual game) you can simply select the placeholders that Thea has placed and replace them all with a new mesh, the textured high-end meshes I’ve made! This makes it easy to keep rooms and design exactly as they are, as long as the sizes and pivot points are exactly the same.

A lot of the things we place in the scene have no texture to start with. Some things like walls and similar we paint texture on in the engine (Unreal; in the game). These Kevin and Amanda in my group have more insight in, since I texture and model the meshes who do not use this method.

As a last thing, I can show you a door I’ve made concept art, placeholder, high-end mesh, and texture on! From scratch to finish so to speak! 😀

Concept art:

Low poly mesh:

End product:

Until next time!

 

 

Getting started..

Week three in an eight week production is coming to and end. These weeks have been productive yet scary in a way, since it is very hard to tell if you are on the right track both with the game as a whole and with your time schedule.

My role in this new Amenti Game is primarily two things. I am the lead designer, which means planning the mechanics of the game, the feeling of the ”fun” of the game is on me. Not a small task at all. The second task I have is to be the main, and so far only, concept artist, drawing up the turnarounds and sketches the team needs to make level design, art, assets and so on.

My first and biggest challenge during these three weeks have been creating these puzzles. If solving a puzzle is a mind twister, how much of a mind twister is it to create one? We first started with what mechanics we wanted to have in the game. We knew we wanted all the mechanics to be focused on the hands, the cursed one in particular. So we came up with a few things the cursed hand can and cannot do.

The cursed hand can:

Siphon fire from a torch or similar so the player can take it with her.

Siphon life force from rats and other live beings to turn statues partially to life, aiding the player in various ways.

With these base mechanics (that changes slightly during the game, but basically does the same things with slight modifications) we set out to create puzzles. By using paper prototypes we set up the different rooms and puzzles. Early on it was decided that lighting all the torches in a room was the solution to every puzzle, so the player always knew his objective. The question was how she could reach all the torches and light everything.  By giving life to a statue she can raise and lower platforms and fire pits from where the player can draw fire.

A third mechanic was implemented, a vision conundrum. If the player stands on a platform with an eye on it and look at the right thing she can change things in her environment, aiding her.

All these things might sound hard to grasp when explaining them, but the first thing we did when we actually started setting up our levels was creating tutorials and small puzzles, easing the player in to the thinking required to solve our puzzles.

 

The two main mechanics (transporting fire and siphon and giving life) are connected to two gods individually.  Horus is the god of the sun and of fire, to complete his puzzles you need to spread the light, represented by the fire. Here is my concept art (turnaround) for him:

The other god is Anubis, god of death and afterlife. He will be the main theme of our game and it is in reality his temple the player is in. To complete his puzzles you must still spread the fire like the player has been tought in the Horus rooms, but now you need to give and take life to achieve your goals. The statues scattered throughout his rooms can rise higher when given life force, thus raising fire pits or platforms so the player can advance. Using your cursed hand is a risk however and you can only use it a set amount of times before passing out. You must find the most optimal way to finish the puzzles. Here is concept art (turnaround) of Anubis:

 

The main hub of the game will be a giant hall where two statues of these gods will be and is the pathway to the two puzzles. When the player has completed everything in the puzzles it is  also here he can venture further down the pyramid through a pathway down between the statues. Here is an early sketch on how that room is planned:

The puzzles are planned and sketched out but we also know that a playtest might change everything about it so I will not go into detail just yet about that. Untill next time!

New course! Amenti Game!

A year has passed since the creation of Trust and more than a year and a half since I was part of the development of Potato Pirates. Since then I have learned tons! I have started using 3D assets, modeling, texturing and animating them. It will come as no surprise then that the new game that I am part of making is a 3D game with a lot more ambition.

I am the lead designer and only concept artist on the new project of a game called Amenti. This new game is a first person puzzle game set in a fantasy world with heavy influences from ancient egypt. My original idea was ”how cool wouldn’t it be if the worlds pyramids, in egypt, the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incans etc, what if all those pyramids where connected?” From there we played with different ideas. What if the pyramids are all connected by a deathrealm, and all the different cultures worshipped the same gods, only in a different way.

We decided to make a slice of life as it’s called, a demo version of an entire game. This demo version is set in an Egyptian pyramid. The player will have one hand cursed and dead, and thus in tune with the death realm. With this dead hand she can solve puzzles and venture further down…

 

Here are some early concept art I’ve made for the different rooms and statues.

 

It’s been a while..

Hello again everyone!

During the development of Trust I took some time off writing this blog and focused more on the actual game development.

It will take me too long to describe the entire workflow of Trust and it was also a year since it was created so my memory is a bit hazy. Trust was a huge success however for us with second place on five different prize categories on GGC. If you want to know more about Trust go to our facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/TrustTheGame/?fref=ts

Hugs!

Trust week 2

It’s decided, our new game is called Trust! Very happy about the name since it’s so short and to the point, but still very much describes the game. You need to trust your fellow player and choose who among the forest creatures you are to trust.

This week I’ve spent mostly on doing the front page for our design document. It looks a little like this: 

I did not make the logo (the Trust text) but I made everything else. My hope was to create a fairly magical forest, magical but scary. The actual art in the game is to be inspires a lot by the art style of this Front page and we hope it’s the right feeling of the game. 

This in an early animation of the tree troll. I made it scarier than the original since we wanted it to really force the players to hug when they see him. He is supposed to look away at times, giving the player the option to move again. While he is starring at you though, you might want to hug and hide..

The sprite is here fully lit. He will not be in the game, but instead have light source from his eyes. Thus his face will be lit up and the hair closest to his face. The rest will be almost hidden in shadows. This will be done later by the programmers though.

Lastly are some elves I made, one kindly but easily frightened and one mischievous and with ill intent. Can you guess which one? Who can you ”Trust”..?

New Course: Theme Park!

 

 

Top picture is art made by famous swedish children painter John Bauer. Below is my art made inspired by him.

Hello again everyone!

We’re done with Potato Pirates. With a new group I’m creating a new game: Trust!
Trust is a game about physical interaction and.. HUGS! We are making a game about being lost in the woods as a child. Two players must somehow find their way out of a scary fairy tale like forest. The two players will wear vests or harnesses (we haven’t really decided everything yet, we’re very much in the beginning of this game project). Each vest or harness has two buttons on them, on each players back. To make the two children go forward one player must press both buttons on the other player vest. If trolls are near, the children (and players) must hug to calm down, and thus press all buttons on both vests.

Me hugging Joni, what a wonderful time we have ❤

This week we’ve been planning much and writing even more. But I have been doing some concept art for the trolls in the game. When I first thought of the ”fear of the dark, lost in the woods” idea, I thought of a Swedish famous children book artist, John Bauer. He made trolls in the style you can see in the picture bellow. He made the art to a lot of old fairy tales, and managed to make it amazingly mysterious. The trolls and other characters he made really seemed to sprung out of the Swedish forests and I imagined them when walking around in the woods. Below is some concept art I’ve made for the trolls, god I like drawing trolls! 😀

Thanks and I’ll see you next week!

Final post for Potato Pirates!

Main menu without the buttons. The animation is just to show you guys that the clouds will move . This blog page can only upload things in potato quality so that’s why it is in potato quality. 

 

This week has been exhausting. Let me first apologize for the terrible grammar and spelling you’re about to endure. My trusty spellchecker, my girlfriend Victoria will not be able to proof read what I write this week so now you have to endure the train wreck that is my written English.

As I’m writing this it’s less then 20 hours before the final version of the Potato Pirates game is to be submitted. The work creating it has been exhausting and… So. Much. Fun! I’ve been animating like crazy, bossing around and crying blood at times, but it’s finally completed (well, close to being completed)!

This week I’ve been animating a potato drop menu (won’t go into that but it took me quite some time) and creating a new main menu. I’m not going to write about the drop menu, I’m just going to show it of, since it’s so cute. LoL.

Skriv en bildtext

What I am going to write about is the main menu scene I’ve made. It has taken me 20 hours to make and some stiff shoulders, but I’m quite happy with the result.

Our last main menu art was a couple of mountains. Clouds  were moving slowly from left to right. I was given the task to create a new such scene, but more detailed. The environment we have in the game is a landscape with mostly free nature, lots of grass, woods and mountains. So I made a main menu with lots of grass, woods and mountains…

First I was going to create the scene to look like it’s night time, but decided against it. In the game it makes sense since we use lights to show were enemies and points of interests are. In the main menu how ever I felt that a day scene would better show the quite features in the picture. A main menu scene in darkness felt so.. dark

I made the scene in two layers, one is the foreground and includes the two closest mountains and the field between them. The second layers include the mountains you see in the background and the field in front of them. By putting clouds between the layers, it will look like they are moving in the distance. The other clouds I made I put in front of it all, and they are moving across the picture slowly. In the gif I posted you can see how that clouds move, however it moves straight and very smooth in the game, not like it does in the gif (didn’t really have time, I’m sorry!).

I’ve used colors to help simulate perspective in the picture, and things get brighter the further away they are since the air between the eye and the object can bee seen!

Thanks for reading folks!