Big Game Project Week 4

This week was the week where I was originally supposed to start building the level but due to complications with the programming of the splines, there was a change of plans.
Instead for this week I have been modelling some environmental assets. Partially some assets that I were supposed to have created last week but never got around to doing due to changes in what I had to work with.
I have also created a testable level, the prototypes that were created were never supposed to be in the game and therefore they were modeled in an ”unusable” way.

So to begin with, the rocks I created. I created about 5 different stones, two of which were decent with a usable polycount, the other three were tests I made to see what way gave the better results.

 

The boulder looking stone to the left is not yet completed, the texture was merely placed there as a test. To the right we have two models, one High poly and one Low poly. That is the stone we decided to go with, it has both a normal map and an ambient occlusion map baked and only needs a diffuse map & roughness.

 

 

These models are the houses I created this week. No texture work is done for them, but the modelling is completed, during the coming week however, more details might be added (might model in doors and windows) and some of the scales for the left building is going to be reconsidered. These buildings are going to be somewhat destroyed, this will come through mainly in the textures. Other assets might also be placed in and around the buildings to reinforce how broken they look.

 

 

This is the test level that I created in order to give the programmers a chance to test cameras/gravity/swapping in the game. The problematic areas so far with the level are: the spiral, the area with half tracks in the bottom left and the loop. The loop has the mildest version of problems and the spiral is extremely hard to pass through.

 

And that is about it for this week, the playtesting took some time away from the friday and as a result, the friday was probably the least productive day of the week.

 

 

Weeks 2 and 3 of Big game project

I’m mashing these two weeks into one post since the first official two weeks that I’ve been with the group are coming to a close.

Week 2

This was the first week that I spent with the group, during this time there was a lot of writing/documenting with the game design document and some trouble with offices.

The office troubles consisted of us getting placed in a ”common area”, the group saw problems with this since we would not be able to discuss as freely between each other, this was obvious during the entire day that we spent sharing the room with another group. The problems were quickly resolved and the group got a new office space, this was, however, time consuming as we had to change the rooms furnishing around to be able to fit all six of us in one room.
While these are minor issues, they still mattered, since if we had not been able to fit all the group in one room, communications would suffer somewhat.

While trying to find our group an office, the group was also working on the design document as well as having partially started production.

As the groups level designer, I also spent a lot of time reading about tracks/levels in racing games. I also searched for ”similar” games and played through two of them in my spare time. This was done in an attempt to further my understanding of the genre and how I could build levels for the game.

I created a really bad looking prototype during the first week, which I could not find right now, but it still helped me to get ideas on how the level could look with the help of feedback from group members.

In the end though, most of my time was spent helping out with the design document.

 

Week 3

During this week, we still had some work to be done with the design document and about halfway through the week, the group decided to put the info from the document in to a wiki page. The producer did the ground work, starting up the wiki and moving some information over, but soon after, he needed to move back to programming.
At that point I started moving all the remaining information over and during Wednesday everything had been moved.

 

The new prototype that I worked on this week came out looking far better and more thought out, it contained most of the ideas from the original prototype, added to it and I made sure to keep the games core mechanics more in mind.

Well, for some reason the resolution of this picture became awful. I’m going to try to explain what the different, barely visible, numbers mean. they run around the track so try to follow my explanation anyways!

1. (top left corner) This is the start/finish of the track, nothing that notable, other than the double tracks which run throughout the entire level.

2. (below 1. to the left) A steep slope with a track running down the middle, this track will be possible to swap to both when running down the slope and when running up it on the other side. A track is hovering slightly above the upward slope, making a skilled ”Swap skip” possible.

3. (continue down) a set of the double tracks with gaps, forcing the player to swap swiftly between the tracks to move forward without falling off the stage.

4. (to the right where the tracks are separated in a large curve) A punishing section for the players who did not swap tracks in time, the player needs to make sure that they are on the most profitable track at all times.

5. (the messy area above and to the right before the cylinder) A twirl of tracks, changing the upper track to the lower and lower track to the upper.

6. (the cylinder) A tunnel section where the player would be able to move up on all the walls and swap freely.

7. (the track moving on towards the middle) Exiting the tunnel the player is given a slight scare when the track disappears before the vehicle, but due to gravity, the player is only swung around, leading in to the section that is consisting of smooth curves running up towards the loop.

8. The loop, the final area before going in to the finishing line.
This is obviously not a final version and more iterations will probably come out and there are things missing from the prototype, such as booster placement, track event triggers and usables.

 

After posting this, I will also return to trying to model rocks for the environment.