Thursday 1 November 2012

Tamoanchan - Game City 2012



Tamoanchan was shown at Game City, Nottingham this year. The game went down very positively - even more so than at the Grad show - since it was available to a larger audience this time. We were all very pleased with the public response and are looking forward to working on the game further in the future!


In the meantime, the game was also voted to the finalist list of the Student Game category of TIGA2012! Fingers crossed, we are up against games such as QUBE by fellow Newport Alumi team, Toxic Games.

Further information and pictures from Game City and updates about the game can be found here:
Tamoanchan Game Facebook

Wednesday 24 October 2012

University Dissertation

In my final year of University I wrote my dissertation on:

'The ‘paradox’ of women in the games industry and what this means for the future of gaming'

My dissertation attempts to unravel gender politics that swamp the video game industry and suggests that to grasp a more democratic gender audience, we need to make people aware that women are a rising demographic, and to make games more accessible to them we should look to gender equity within the circles of games industry and take advantage of the new things this might offer to game design of the future.

Below is a link to my dissertation:

Dissertation

Friday 12 October 2012

Tamoanchan - Final Year Project

To bring together everything we had learnt in our time at university, we wanted to do something special that demonstrated all of our talents. We wanted to make a complete game; something to really stand out at the end of year Grad Show. The game would need to have a simple enough mechanic so that you could pick up a controller and jump straight into the game. We wanted to recreate that arcade feeling of early 2D platformer games where you would be fighting it out in the game as well as jostling about and having fun outside of the game... Tamoanchan was born.

Tamoanchan is a 2-4 player game set on a floating arena made out of randomly spawned blocks. Players must strategically lift the blocks and push them towards their opponents in an attempt to knock them off before the time limit runs out. Only one can be victorious.

Our final year project was split into 2 halves, the conceptual stage and the developmental stage. During the first half I focused on organising the design document since this was the conceptual stage.

Design Document

Given our lack of programming knowledge we attempted to use UDK kismet to create a prototype, though were unable to find a way to make a multiplayer game set in a single screen arena. When it was apparent that this program wasn't for us we moved to Unity - a program we had worked with for our previous years project. For a short while we looked into programming the game ourselves [an almost impossible feat looking back on it now], but just before game development was about to begin I heard back from a friend who is a proficient programmer and was willing to help see this project through to the end. 

Character Design by Daisy Spiers

Our game was finally on track! Once Daisy had begun creating orthographics for the four characters we split the modelling between the four artists. Each one of us would model a character ready for the game. I decided to model the Dragon character, which I did in Maya. His shape was very rounded with a huge stomach. His stylised design gave him an unspoken jolly personality and so before I begun I had already decided to consider the way he might be animated and that it would be nice if his belly would bounce. I made sure to loop edges around his stomach in consideration of the rigging and animation to make it easier to weight paint.



I was in charge of rigging 3 of the models: The Bird, The Panther and The Dragon. All 3 were pretty basic bi-ped rigs that I lay out individually for each model. I used IKs for all the leg movements and used controllers to organise individual singer movements as well as expressions for full hand clenches. 


 I parented the head feathers of The Bird to a single curve, I then attached an expression to these to give it 'bounce' and allowed them to move in a unified action. Though we weren't going to have characters speaking in our demo, I added a control for the beak to open and close in case it might be needed later.


For The Dragon, I made sure to add a joint for the belly-bouncing movement and also additional joints in the tail, in the event that it may want to be curved in the way presented in the earlier concepts.


 Expressions were added to the control curves for the ears of The Panther allowing for individual movement and flexing of the ears in a more cat-like manner since this part of the body would be closest and most noticeable next to the camera during gameplay.


We got the game working in time for The Grad Show and it was a hit! In that sense I mean that it was popular with all ages and though hesitant to play with people they may not have met before, everyone was soon getting into the competitive atmosphere and were playing differently than we had seen before to outwit their opponents which was brilliant and exceeded our expectations.

This was the Alpha trailer that was submitted for the end of our project, there were some minor bugs still in the game at this point which were fixed in time for the grad show:



Production for Tamoanchan has temporarily been put on hold whilst we pursue other projects, though we fully intend to return to it in the future and update the models, animations and textures.

Credits:

Jamie Lewis - Animation, Modelling

Daisy Spiers - Concept artist, texturing
Craig Fox - Modelling, Rigging, Animation
Chris Cameron - Programmer

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Sparks! - Student project 2011

 We were provided with such a huge brief that we had to begin quickly whittling it down to a more manageable amount for our 12 week project. We were going to be building our first 3D game demo and working with programmers for the first time. It was really exciting!

In our brief we were given the game and character name 'Sparks' and a list of potential mechanics to choose from, we gradually refined all of our ideas and decided on building 2 set game mechanics; an open-fighting section and a more stealthy stealthy approach:


  • Day cycle: in which you would play as Sparks the robot, defending defending his village against the enemies [called Larch during development] from the forest. buildings would have hit points, so the player would need to fight off the attackers before they destroyed the village.


  • Night cycle: once the day cycle was over and the enemies have left the village, Sparks would be sent on a mission into the forest where the enemies dwell to retrieve the resources that they had stolen. In this area you would have to make your way down a set route whilst staying out of the sight of the patrolling enemies.


We were going to attempt to make an open world game with a day/night cycle - The idea is now laughable considering how very little we knew at the time and how inexperienced we were in both working in a team of 9 and with the programs we were using.

After the initial organising of what our goal was, our asset production was organised like this:

CONCEPTS >> ORTHOGRAPHICS >> TEXTURING >> RIGGING >> ANIMATING >> IMPORT TO ENGINE

We assigned each one of these roles to 2 team members, these would be responsible for managing  their part of the development process and that it kept to set deadlines to make sure that the pipeline ran as smoothly as possible. 

We all played a part of the concept stage, blocking out the game itself with a paper-build of the levels which churned up some interesting ideas about how the game would potentially play out. It got everyone involved and gave the whole team a visual idea of the size and layout of the assets.




My main role in the team was to keep up to date with what each individual was doing each week and make notes on their progress, what needed doing/changing/had been finished. I took minutes on all our meetings and made a weekly update on our production website. 

Alongside this, I was joint character rigger for the game. This was Craig's and my own first real encounter with rigging and animation in Maya. During this project I researched and learned and used joints, IK handles, animation, weight painting, curves and controllers to help with the animation progress. It was a lot to get through we only had 2 characters to animate thankfully!

Rigging Sparks 
The main character had a mechanical body; all of the main parts were detached from one another. This made the ideal stepping stone into rigging in my opinion, with all the limbs being separate parts it meant that I was able to focus on learning about the joints etc and didn't have to worry much about weight painting the model and the textures being stretched etc.





Larch [enemy]

The best way I found to weight paint it was to make small animations moving the joint that I wanted to weight paint to see the influence of the joint and then add and remove it where needed. This was a tip given to me by animation tutor James Manning and it was invaluable to this project and those followed, since you cannot get a clear indication on how a model will stretch and move until you actually move it!! Regardless of the atrocious topology of the model we were given [around the joints], I still managed the rig it so that there was very little to no stretching around the knees and shoulders.




The demo had quite a few cracks on the programming side as we only had 1 and a 1/2 programmers on our team, but the asset production was constantly in flow and the final asset quality was excellent from everyone. The demo has the level of polish to it that we were hoping for from the beginning.

Trailer for Sparks!






Credits:
Jamie - Team leader, Unity implementation
David Treharne - Modelling, Audio
Chris Turner - Modelling
Craig Fox - Rigging
Daisy Spiers/Toby Clement - Concept art, texturing
Megan Goodwin/Matthew Jackson - Programming, implementation

Dare to be Digital - 'Full English Fusion' 2011



Art by Daisy Spiers

In 2011 myself and 4 other people from my university joined together to form 'Tea and Techno'. We applied to Dare to be Digital , a competition in Dundee, Scotland, where 15 teams were brought together to work in industry- style conditions for 8 weeks to produce a working prototype of their chosen game design in time for 'Protoplay'. At Protoplay you get to show your game off to the general public where they can then vote for their favourite games.

The application process consisted of a written application explaining our game idea - with images - followed by a trip off to London for a presentation-like interview in front of a panel of industry professionals. It was probably one of the most nerve racking experiences I have had so far. We were confident, but because the application was global, we knew that our team being picked as one of 15 in the world would be really slim.

Alongside the story, our game really grew around the idea of our 'tap-tap-shake' mechanic. The player would tap 2 usable items and then once they were both in your inventory they would need to shake the phone in order to combine both items into something new that they could use. unfortunately during our first stage of play-testing that a lot of people didn't like having to shake the phone and thus we added a 'combine' button to give players the option of not shaking the phone.




Our entry was 'Full English Fusion' for the Windows Phone 7, in our game you play a mad scientist bent on taking over England!. By using the T.E.A machine you are able to combine English objects you encounter to create crazy combinations that help her on her path to domination!

Within 3 weeks of our interview we found out that we had made it into the chosen 15! We were so excited, it was fantastic experience that none of us will forget. We met a great number of interesting industry professionals that offered valuable advice on our game and their positive responses to our game boosted our motivation and inspired us. We also met many brilliantly talented up-coming designers/developers/artists etc and left with a lot of new friends. 

My role within the team was as a supporting 2D artist and designer. We only had a limited time in which to bring together something visually and aesthetically pleasing for players; we made the art bright and appealing so that it had an immediate positive impact. We had to make sure the mechanics worked for smooth gaming experience at Protoplay, and that above all, the game was enjoyable.

I worked on a lot of the pre-production and level design in the game, background assets and implementation of assets into the game, to do this I had to build a good working relationship with the programmers, working closely with them to instruct them on how the game was to play, what each of the assets were to be used for etc.

A few example assets:



For this project I needed to fully utilise my organisational and administrative skills, these helped to streamline our workflow since we had such a huge quantity of assets to produce [interactive and background assets]. I had to break down the demo into Levels which were made up of individual Scenes, this had to happen so that the programmers were better able to allocate phone memory. We had wanted the game to be a full side-scrolling level, but the Windows Phone 7 wouldn't allow for this because of the sheer amount of assets we were using. Once the demo had been broken down this way I made individual folders for each scene making it really easy with all the relevant animations attached so that they the programmers could easily swap them in to replace the static sprites I arranged as placeholders.

After discussing our initial needs with the programmers, Dave Griffiths produced his own Level Editor for the game, this meant that I was able to organise our assets and levels in a visual, more artistic fashion. The level editor even allowed me to plot in hit boxes around assets to block in where the character could go, what it could interact with and objects that would kill the character. It was  really impressive application that he adapted to fit my needs as we needed him to.






People enjoying Full English Fusion at Protoplay:





Final Protoplay trailer:




Credits:
Daisy Spiers - Artist
Dave Griffiths - Programmer
Megan Goodwin - Programmer
Matthew Jackson - Programmer

Tuesday 9 October 2012

Orb - Student Project 2010

In my second year of University we were put into teams of 4 and given the task of taking on another team's initial game idea and creating a playable prototype in 8 weeks - making any other design changes we deemed necessary.

We were given the game 'Orb'. The premise of the game was to maneuver a platformed environment where the 'Orb' of light around your character diminished over time. The player would have to collect Orbs to expand the diameter of the light source. The aim was to find the exit door to each level and the key to open said door. 

We worked on the game in Gamemaker. I was the team leader for this project and my job was to organise the group, keep workflow steady and delegate jobs. Unfortunately during this time one of our group members dropped off the grid which added the pressure but made us more focused.

The main mechanic - the diminishing light source - was the most difficult to implement and myself and Dave spent a lot of time putting it together with our very limited knowledge of GML. I was responsible for implementing assets and testing them within the game. I was also responsible for level design and testing platform layouts. Knowing that the lack of visibility would hinder the player's progression we made sure that the Orbs were widely available and that they would guide your way. 




Making this demo was a really important moment for me. It taught me how vital play testing was in the game development process and I feel that if we had had time to get others to test this before the end, I would have made a lot of alterations to the levels I designed. We had the game tested post-hand-in and the consensus was that the game was difficult to traverse wit the lack of sight and could be unforgiving. In some cases people were put off by the difficulty, but others enjoyed it, saying that they felt challenged and completing it gave them a sense of satisfaction. To satisfy the needs of the players I would still have liked to alter the game to provide a more gradual learning curve leading up to these more difficult levels.


Level Design by myself
Art by Daisy Spiers

Last minute alterations made the light decrease too fast which was disappointing as a lot of the background details we put in were lost in the final demo. Such as, animated cave paintings at the start of the first level that show the basic play mechanics and goals.

In hindsight, it would also have been nice to add re-spawning Orbs, as one of the 3 levels requires back-tracking if the key is missed.

Daisy Spiers - Lead concept artist, co-designer, asset production, animation
Dave Treharne - Co-programmer, audio/sfx


Below is a link to the final demo:

Download ORB here