Halloween

Everybody is out there trick-or-treating, and I'm just sitting here updating.

So unfortunately Overcast got the coat hanger. Still, the concept is simple and the art is 2d so there's no chance I won't someday finish it after I'm not as busy.

So instead I'm working on HEROES OF ROCK. Imagine if Ninja Turtles and Mortal Kombat had a baby, then that baby became a metalhead. It's a side-scrolling, combo-heavy, hack-and-slash brawler with musical (mostly rock) overtones. You play a frustrated musician smashing his way through the safe, corporate-controlled music industry only to find out it's actually all Satan and his demons.

The cool thing is this game is designed to be played with the Guitar Hero controller, so you can feel like a rock badass as you bicycle kick your way through a horde of suit-wearing demons. For this first pre-alpha spring we are getting one enemy character fully fleshed-out, with animations, textures, and bump maps. Here are my concepts for it:

 

The idea is that the weakest, most numerous enemy is the fan: a mindless zombie turned stupid by crap music that obeys the secretly demon artist's every whim. My idea for the first level was you to go and kill Dustin Beaver (see what I did there) at a large downtown concert, only to find out, of course, that he is a demon hell-bent on controlling humanity through terrible music.

Ultimately we liked the idea of having "fan" enemies, but instead of a fat 12-year-old-looking girl, we're going to go for something more "imp-ish". While that's happening I'm going to be popping out environment concepts.

Also been doing some main character concepts. Our idea is that you should be able to choose your character and guitar and those will give you different combos and stats. Here's my idea for a punk:

Meanwhile progress on Nighthawks continues well. I more or less have the main scene down with the correct lighting and textures, here it is:

I've already modeled all the humans and 99% of the background objects, like coffee cups and salt shakers. Speaking of which, here's my little experiment with caustics on said shakers:

I'd love to have that level of detail on all of them, but there are a lot and just that one took something like ten minutes to render at small resolution. For the sake of rendering time I'm going to have to abandon caustics and just play with refraction instead.

Here are some quick renders of the untextured human models, too:

I've never done hair before so that was interesting. For the final products I hope to be able to do subsurface scattering on the skin, but again my rendering time will suffer. Expect more updates soon. I'm supposed to start animating this week, god help me...

Bonus artwork: Zombie Interactive is having a fan art contest for Blacklight Retribution: an excellent fast-paced free-to-play FPS. I've wasted much more time than I care to admit on that game when I should have been productive, so the least I could do is something productive relating to the game. Here is my entry, and another reflections experiment for me:

My post is on this page: http://blacklight-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=538031&page=6 vote for mine when the time comes okay? My handle in-game is ClassyGentleman4, so if I kill you and wag my finger disapprovingly over your corpse, don't take it personally.

Welp Happy Halloween, enjoy all your drunken rager parties while I dress as a dapper gorilla and take my little brothers trick-or-treating.

Updates Schmupdates

Progress on Overcast is coming along warmly (what I did there... do you see it?). Though we have ruled out the use of xTile as a level editor, we have a physics engine which will make level editing fairly simple as well. Already we have many ideas for weather-based puzzles, the storyboarding of which I shall do. For now, here's a concept art of the main character who we have affectionately decided to name "Al". Apart from explaining jet stream patterns, high pressure zones, and cold fronts to the villagers, he will also literally control the weather with his magical umbrella staff and impressive gut.

Now might as well update you on another course project. For a certain class I have to take a famous master old-timey painting, model it in 3d, and animate things in it. I have chosen Nighthawks by Edward Hopper:

Here's my progress on the lighting and modeling so far, I'm pretty proud of what I have especially how close I think I have it to the actual angle and look of the original piece. I have character models ready to go for the people, just need to make clothes and extrude some titties.

Weatherman...cy

So the bollocks news is that Unfathomable didn't make the first cut, though it wasn't as if nobody voted for it.

Instead I get to work on Overcast, a 2d sidescrolling puzzle game about changing the weather to solve puzzles.

You play the village weatherman, who besides explaining high pressure zones and jet streams, actually controls the weather, until his powers are taken away and all goes tits-up. The weather (and climate) can change in instants and it's up to you to get your powers back and stop that nonsense.

So far we have most of what the game will be nailed down in our heads, we just need to flesh out exactly what the puzzles will be like and how exactly the weather changes will solve them.

We decided rather early on on a 16 bit art style, reminiscent of Contra and the old days when all the cool kids were playing games but I was either not born or too poor. Expect some mind-blowing concept art soon.

As sad as I am to see my mind-baby get aborted so unceremoniously, I tried, and if every game developer only worked on the game he wanted to make first, we'd have some craptastic games out there. We are all cogs in this machine and we all gotta turn.

Earth 1.5

Started on this spring 2012, had this awesome idea for the whole setting and even gameplay ideas and storylines to go with it. Turned out to be quite the job to finish it, if you can call it that. My attempt at cyberpunk you could call it.

Unfathomable Pitch Part Deux

So the more I think about the time constraints, the personnel constraints, the fact that we would have to make our own game engine and level editor from scratch, and the universe in general, the more i decide I need to scale this down to be a viable idea. Behold: Unfathomable! Now with one less dimension:

Other than that it's pretty much the same idea i had before. Submarines doing impossible things like loops, barrel rolls, and DOGFIGHTING. I'm sure you've played something like this before, flash games like this are all over the internets. Here's some examples for the uninitiated: Dog Fight, and Effing Worms!

With 2 dimensions we can still have unique, interesting level designs, possibly more so than with three dimensions. We can still make it beautiful and have fun lighting and rendering effects. We can still have a scary dark level where you fight that anglerfish from Finding Nemo. You can still have Cthulhu. Now it's just a lot more simple, feasible, and maybe even more fun.

Instead of an "open world" it would probably be better for the overall gameplay to be a set of "linear" levels, one after the other. Example: intro level. Go through around on the seafloor, fight some bad dudes, build up to a big giant submarine fight or sea monster, finish the level, upgrade your stuff, next level. Levels themselves don't need to be perfectly linear in a sense, there could totally be a couple of different ways to beat each one.

Just imagine the art style as more in line with what the first pitch showed, though. That there is more of a "gameplay" description, i guess...

Well here it is. Wish me luck, presentations are in fifteen minutes.

Here's the Pitch, Slow and Straight.

Behold! My pitch. Basically imagine something like Crimson Skies, or some other console flight sim, but UNDERWATER. Genius.

Why underwater?

Firstly, as far as I can tell it hasn't quite been done before. A quick google search of "underwater flight sim" revealed only videos of people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator and trying to fly underwater but not succeeding. If you're willing to take some serious liberties with the concept of just how submarines work, this could maybe be "physically possible" and somehow believable. Uberrealism, while great in games like Arma II and Gran Turismo V, doesn't translate too well to casual little games like what this class usually produces.

Secondly, I think an underwater setting would just be prettier than just sky or space or wherever else flight sims have been set. You can get all sorts of beautiful things like giant spires of rock or volcanoes or trenches or seaweed or animal life and so on and so forth. It would create a much more memorable experience, visually and aurally. You can have all sorts of old timey nautical textual references everywhere, like saying "Aweigh" and "Avast" and "Starboard". This means we can make it a bit silly and whimsical. Nobody hates a funny game.

Thirdly, along with the new visual stuff comes more potential for gameplay, like for instance fighting giant sea monsters or navigating tiny trenches or grottos. A submarine can stop to do things like explore wrecks. Naval mines can be released behind you. All of this could still be reasonable within our time and hardware constrains because...

Fourthy, we can cheat. An underwater setting essentially allows us to turn down the draw distance to make the developmental rendering process easier and quicker. Also the game will run more smoothly on xbox graphics allowing us to focus more on object detail to make things prettier. I had the idea to split the game areas into open world nodes connected by essentially empty stretches of open ocean. Enter one of these designated loading areas and you'll just swim through nothingness for a few seconds while the next area loads, like the elevators in Mass Effect.

I'm sure there are more reasons hidden in my mind right now but I'll remember them later. For now know that THIS IS A GOOD IDEA DAMNIT.

It's the future (or is it the past?) and people now live underwater. The oceans are covered in an ice cap, so you can't surface (but light can still get through. ingenious, no?).

Imagine docking at a seafloor station, repairing your damage and buying that new torpedo launch tube you've had your eye on for a while before setting off on a quest to clear out some pirates, or hunt down the Kraken, or loot a wreck. The possibilities are large, and I think it might even be reasonable for completion within our time and resource constraints.

and sorry about the "UNFATHOMABLE" font. Typography is hardly my strong point.

Here's some more versions of the pitch picture without the scribbles of a crazy person or the header if you want. It's not terribly beautiful right now and the submarine looks positively derptastic. I promise the final product will be a magnificent piece of engineering, if I get to make this.

Now to have my brainchild absolutely torn apart by my professors and peers tomorrow. Will update with a picture of my devastated face immediately afterwards.

First off before I get any sternly-worded cease-and-desists in my inbox, lemme plug Dr. McNinja for the inspiration for my super-secret game developer identity. I love you dearly, Christopher Hastings. Please don't have me assassinated.

So thus begins my trials-by-fire in the development crucible of EAE Capstone at the University of Utah. Over the next year or so I should start kicking my crippling PCP, bath salts, and reddit addictions to the curb as I'm going to do my absolute best to focus on this noise and be a useful cog in this efficient game-churning machine.

About now shall begin the pitching process, where I must come up with a game that will someday be birthed to XBLIG! Now believe me when I say I have no shortage of game ideas, the entire reason I went into this field was to hopefully someday put these ideas down on production in some way, the problem of course is scaling this down to the parameters of XBLIG and the available time to work on it.

Have you ever wanted to do a barrel roll... in a SUBMARINE?