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.
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!
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
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”..?
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!
This will hopefully be the last time I redo things in this death animation. I hate smoke but I hate animating smoke even more.
Shown here are the three death animations I’ve done so far for the player avatar and I’m still not entirely satisfied. I’ve described my workflow for each animation in previous posts, each describing me finally feeling done with the animation. Now here I am again.. think I might be a bit of a perfectionist?
FirstsecondThird
The first animation was made in the wrong format and when I redid it I added perspective by tilting it downwards. I also made the plane spin downwards instead of just dropping like a stone. This was where my problems with smoke animation started. I felt that what ever I did, the smoke and fire looked glitchy and moved unaturally around the plane. To be fair, it looked really nice in the game since the player plane spins even more than it does in the animation alone. The reason for that is, in an animation like this the plane has to be in the exact same position throughout the animation to later be moved by the programmers as they see fit. If I hadn’t put the plane in the same spot throughout the animation, the gifs above would be as big as an A4 paper.
Redoing the smoke, I decided to first make a reference ring around the plane that the smoke would always follow throughout the animation. If you compare the second animation and the third you can see that in the third the smoke is moving in a tight circle compared to the uncontrolled fire/smoke mix in the second animation.
The exaggerated spin that the circle creates, works better in the game where the spin is pretty much 360 degrees, compared to 90 degrees it is in the gifs you see here.
Making these three animations have taught me a lot and making the smoke with these animations was a pretty easy and fast process. I made one smoke cloud and copied it. The further the plane moves the more copied smoke clouds are released. When the plane actually hits the ground and the explosion starts there is a total of twelve small clouds put together. All while following the reference ring I started with, to make sure the smoke followed the path I wanted. A new layer above the I created a new layer on top of the copied clouds so I could draw on them to make them appear connected and hide the fact that the clouds are identical. This was the finishing touch. I’m not sure if I like the second or the third one best though…
Thats all for this week and hopefully this !?=()/# death animation! 😀
(PS. I think I keep redoing it because I like it so much)
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