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.