Evalutation

As we are coming to the end of our time at college, it is time to do an evaluation on our final product.

The games trailer turned out fairly well and as we had planned it. The main idea was to include a bar and our 'hero', and the bar being destroyed. We have all of this included and more, we have an outside scene which will be in the very final render and two bar scenes. The bar is the same place in the two scenes exept that one is completley wrecked and on fire with a huge tank sticking through the wall and one is what it looked like before.

The trailer fits in perfectly with our target audience of mainly male and 18 or over. This is due to the violence of the game and the fact it would not be suited to children, also would probably not appeal to most females.

The main areas in which we need to develop skills as a team is 3d studio max, this is due to nearly all of our work being created in it. The better we are at 3d max the more profesional our work will look. This being said creating the video itself in adobe premier elements 3.0 plays a huge part in quality of our trailer. The more we practice creating a video in elements the better we will get at transitioning and implementing sounds with the correct timing. All in all practice makes perfect and as we have had limited time to work with these programs i would say it all turned out fairly well.

If i were to do anything better i would of left alot more time for production work and finished all the planning sooner. This would of given us alot more time to perfect the final product and get exactly what we wanted. As a group we could of done with making one big final storyboard so we could create around this via 3d studio max and put alot more detail into it. Leaving extra time would of also given us the chance to use more animation in the scene, due to the lack of time we haven't been able to animate the character the way we would of liked to and include some form of action gameplay scene.

Overall i have gained many underpinning skills using 3d max, photoshop, audacity and premier elements. We have learnt skills in time management to be able to meet the deadline, we were fine cutting it all along but we managed to just pull it off. Mainly we have gained team building skills and learnt how working in the industry could be like in day to day life as a games designer.

Games Trailer (Teaser with sounds)

The following video is a teaser of our games trailer with added sound. This is for one unit of our course to use clips downloaded from a sound library. I edited the air siren noise because initially it was to long. However just shortening the clip proved to be difficult because the only way i could find to do this was by speeding it up. This led to problems with pitch because speeding up the clip made the pitch go 10x higher than normal and made it sound stupid, to solve this i added a pitch modifier via audacity to restore it to somehwere near it's original size. All my other clips were the right length for the trailer.

This is not the final piece as it was just a test to show we can use sounds effectivley, i thought using an air raid siren, explosion, ambulance sirens and the obvious fire crackling noise best fitted the scene.

Update - My current role

My current role in the producing of the games trailer is animation and cameras within 3d studio max. So far we have created a small clip of our bar scene. There is still animation to be done with characters and possibly animals. And plenty more camera work. Currently im waiting for some finished products to be handed to me so i can begin animation, normally it wouldnt matter if they were fully completed but as they are nearly done it makes it easier.

The initial idea with the bar scene is that it starts off all happy in the bar people having fun and then the camera pans around a pillar and all hell has broken loose. There is fire everywhere and then when the camera spins around it reveals a tank has broken through the wall and destroyed the place. I have used bipeds to represent characters in both scenes however in the second scene they are dead bipeds. There was a noticable difference in the rendering with fire and the one without, a 700mb difference infact. This caused a few storage issues with only having a 1gb memory sitck that contained other work. Eventually i put the two videos together in movie maker just to show what we are aiming for in the finished product, somehow this video was only 9mb from the original 740mb we had.

3D Studio Max - Animations

Theese are a few animations produced from the original models

All the following work is practice projects running up to the big finale which should hopefully be a semi decent games trailer! :).



This is my kitchen which originally started out just as a bagel. Over the day it just evolved into a kitchen and eventually a biped walking. The video is purely there to show the biped walking animation and for some reason no matter how many times i upload it the quality is dodgy at the beginning.



This is my X-Wing model. The initial idea was to create something based on star wars. I chose the X-wing pretty much because "It looked cool" and fairly simple to model. I gave it my best shot and came up with that. The fire effect is very poor however i had no idea how to use particle effects so it's just a trial run really.


I created this flag one day after thinking what to create next i thought i would have a go at making some form of material. I chose a cloth like material and turned it into a flag, for this project i followed a tutorial and made my own scenery being the moon. In this scenario the moon appears to have wind.



This is a very simple animation of my double lightsaber. I have made a short animation to show how the lightsaber would work if it was to be "Switched on"




This is the same sort of thing however it features my single lightsaber which was my first one to be made.

3D Studio Max

Over the past couple of years i have been producing various models in 3D studio max. This is all in practice for building up a portfolio of work and building up to the final piece (Making a games trailer).

The following images are work i have created either by myself or with the help/guidelines of a tutorial found via the internet. And some general tips from tutors with regards to texturing and animation.

In no particular order.


This is a glass with water and ice cubes in. Since the render seems to take so long (Nearly an hour) it's still not rendering to what i would like it to look like. This is my best render so far, i will keep playing with the settings to try figure it out. I followed a tutorial to make this and used a fair wide range of tools.

This is a very simple pencil model that i created from a tutorial in a few minutes.

I saw the tutorial for a ninja death star and just had to make one. So that's my attempt. If i were to improve it i think i would need some shiner looking textures to give it a real metalic look.


This is a very popular tutorial that shows how to create a cartoony looking enviroment and then add textures to make it look like it has snowed. It involves using the loft tool to create a path and the trees are formed from very simple cylinder and sphere tools.

This is my X-wing which was part of a unit to create something to do with star wars. In my next post you can see the animation i made after modelling.

This uzi is not fully finised however i have stopped working on it currently. This is for part of our main end of year project to create a games trailer and i chose to create an Uzi as this fits in with a shooting game. I added the bright green to it to give the effect of some form of futuristic alien killing gun.

This was an "hmm im bored what can i make next" moment. I looked about tutorials and saw a nice simple TV so thought i would create it and add my own texture and reflections.

Another cloth modifier attempt just like my flag. I had to play about quite a bit to get it to work but in the end it did. I started to create a scene for it also but got sidetracked when creating my X-wing. This uses basic Modifiers and Collision object settings.

I created my sword shortly after the lightsaber as it seemed quite an easy thing to make. I followed a step by step tutorial and got the shape and texturing. If i was to re create this i would try get alot more realistic looking textures and possibly someone or a biped holding it.

This lightsaber was one of my very first 3D studio max projects. This also fit into our unit to create a star wars themed model, but i couldn't use this as my final piece as it was way to simple. But a very nice way to start of modelling.

This is the start of my kitchen. Which originally started of as just the bagel you can see on the chopping board. It then evolved into a cabinet with a toaster andglasses.

And it evolved some more. I added walls and floors with windows and sky textures. An oven, dishwasher,washing machine And plenty more cupboards. Eventually i added a biped just to test out the walking features.

This is the lightsaber Rank 2. I wanted to improve the handle textures into some form of chrome. I did that then decided to add another end to it to create the famous double lightsaber featured in the film star wars.


This was another one of my very early projects, i found a bench tutorial and followed it to create this very simple park bench. Then added a couple of textures to give it a more realistic look.

This is my most recent project where we were asked to model a character head. We decided as a class that finding someones head of the internet was a bit boring and instead took pictures of a couple of class mates. The model turned out ok and did resemble my friend a little bit. I added a hair and fur modifier to jazz it up a little and ended up with some fairly nice looking blue hair.

Developing Drawing Skills

As part of this unit we need to draw some concept art. To practice drawing we all took the same picture and used lots of construction lines to aid the drawing. And then shaded it in for full effect. This helps in future drawings as i would be able to add construction lines and shade more efficiently. This is different to my previous drawing of the bar as that was done in Photoshop using a guideline to draw over, similar to tracing. The drawing below has been done totally freehand using no tracing at all.


I drew the picture above free hand using construction lines. and shaded it in according to the source picture.


In this picture i traced over a sheet full of emotional faces. There are all sorts of emotions displayed such as anger, happiness and sadness. I used pastels to colour in the picture on the right as i feel they have a better effect than using pencil colours.



This is a free hand drawing of the character Gohan from Dragonball Z. I made one copy and then traced over it to remove the smudges from rubbing out previous mistakes. My final copy turned out fairly well for a first year sketch.

Storyboard

This is my original storyboard i produced while doing a different unit. It's the plan for a games trailer for an FPS game like the one we are planning on making now. The main difference is that it is set in the middle east and takes after games like Call of Duty. It doesnt have aliens in it and is more of a real life scenario. Since then we have been asked to make a games trailer and we have changed the idea, it's still a shoot em up but instead has aliens and begins in a bar. This is the image you see below.




This is the storyboard for the current games trailer. It is only a short one to describe the general idea of the game, I did it in very little detail hence the stickfigures. I could use photoshop to enhance it but for now i will upload the rough sketch. I have enhanced one scene of the bar below the storyboard using a template of an existing bar.






This is a scene from the storyboard of our trailer. The bar is a main part of our game as this is where it all starts out and all hell breaks loose. I took the image below and put it in photoshop and used the zoom/brush tools to redraw the scene to give it a sketched look. This also makes it look slightly proffesional as this is what was required in the unit.

Merchandise

We came up with the idea of some merchandise for our game. I chose some of the most simple forms of merchandise. I stuck with the same kind of effect i used on my CD case with the font and green colours.


Mug


Mousemat


T-Shirt

Game Covers

We have just started producing ideas for game case covers. They are not yet all complete but here are my ideas so far.





The general idea of all the above photos was to include a pulse heartbeat line since the game is called Pulse. I implemented a zombie head because our game was about aliens and creep y monsters. The writing i used represents blood and gore and the background looks a bit like bloody tendons.

I changed my mind on these ideas and decided that it looked a bit to cheesy for a shooting game, unless we were aiming for this game to be brought out for the Nintendo Wii i needed to change the style.




I then opened up Photoshop and decided to go for the complete product. I feel the bright green represents infection and gore quite well. The text is spooky and shows the game isn't going to be funny. I've added the pegi symbol and our team logo to the case along with the Xbox 360 title. This leaves us open to creating more cases for other platforms like the PS3.

I will complete this post with the rest of my teams ideas for game covers once they are completed.

Ethical Issues - Libel/Acts

Libel

This is the law put in place to make sure you don’t miss represent something or someone. For example if a football player like David Beckham was put in a football game, but his character acted like an idiot and missed every kick and fell over all the time this wouldn’t be right. Another example of this is if it came on the news that Peter Sutcliffe said that he hadn’t ever paid his TV license in his life, this isn’t going to effect his reputation because he is known for being a mass murderer. However if this was said about the BBC boss Greg Dyke this could seriously effect his reputation and even loose him his job working for a famous TV company.

http://www.urban75.org/info/libel.html

Race Relations Act

The race relations act was put in place by the British parliament in 1976 to prevent racial discrimination. This is put in place to prevent discrimination against race, colour, education and work. This is basically to say no matter where you come from or what colour your skin is we should all be treated equally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Relations_Act

Obscene Publications Act

The obscene publications act has been in place since 1857 in Britain, since then there were two more acts put in place, one in 1959 and one in 1964. Only the 1959 and 1964 laws are still in place today. This law is about criminal obscenity, an example of this is in 2009 a man posted on the internet about the band Girls Aloud. He claimed they had been kidnapped, raped and murdered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscene_Publications_Act

Computer Misuse Act

The computer misuse act was put in place by the UK parliament in 1990. This act is what you would be convicted under if you used your PC for something illegal. A great example of this is R v Gold & Schifreen. These two people used their home PC’s and Modems in 1984/85 to obtain the password and login name of a BT employee which was 22222222 and the password being 1234.They were able to browse the BT files and even view the private messages of Prince Phillip. This sparked another conflict with BT and they were said to be not taking their security seriously enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Misuse_Act

Ethical Issues - Representation/Religion

Ethical Issues are becoming more serious every day. Games Developers have to be very careful when creating their content these days. Simple things such as saying “Oh my God” can be regarded as blasphemes.

Representation is also a serious issue when creating a game, an example of representation is where you would create something that exists in real life but your creation portrays the real life version into something that it’s not i.e. if you created the city of Leeds in your game but made everybody hillbillies that would be bad representation of what Leeds is really like.

Another issue that has to be taken into great consideration is how appropriate your game is for the audience that you have made it for. A game like grand theft auto couldn’t be created for children or teenagers under the age of 18 as it isn’t suitable. Also if you created a game revolved around religion you would have to be careful on whom you advertised it to and make sure that it isn’t too offensive.

Religion takes a huge part in making a game, Religion is a very touchy topic on what you can and can’t do because different religions believe in different things. An example of this would be Christians may find any reference to God or Jesus in a game offensive.

This image is a copy of an old picture of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress but instead includes Asian women in her black robes. Asian women aren’t allowed to show skin and this picture portrays them as sex objects.

Source :

Maryln Monroe

Persian Maryln Monroe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

+ PPT Presentation

Ethical Issues - Copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a law put in place by most governments to make sure the creator of the original work has the rights to decide who gets to use the content and benefit financially.

This is a very serious issue within the games industry because if you put something that doesn’t belong to you or that you haven’t bought or asked for the permission to use in your game, you could be sued for a lot of money. An example of this is a small town in India which created a replica of Hogwarts School in their town without asking for permission from the author of Harry Potter. JK Rowling sued the town for a fairly small amount of money in her eyes, but for the town it was a very large amount.

If you are going to create a game with lots of real life objects in them there is lots of copyright issues you have to come by. Games such as Formula One have to get permission from all the different car companies to use their names logos and car designs in the game. If they can’t get this permission they would have to create it as close as possible but change some detail i.e. If Ferrari refused to give permission to use their name in your game you would have to create your own and name it something like Farreri, by changing around the a and e it is no longer Ferrari and cannot be classed as copyrighted.

Source :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

+PPT Presentation

Job Roles

Each member of the group had to decide upon a job role. As we don't have anyone who can program and nobody knows what their true strengths are in modelling/animation we are just going to share at the jobs.

The roles we could of considered were:

Concept artist - Drawings to be sent of to modeller.

Modeller - Model from concept art ideas.

Animator - Animates models created from concept art.

Programmer - Programs AI's and Interface.

Game Influences

We had to look at other games on the market and look at how the creators influenced thier games. We looked at how they used different sounds and effects in the trailers to get across what the game was about. For example a shooting game isn't going to have happy people in it and fun music, it will be more serious and some form of spooky/upbeat music.

The games i looked at were:

Call of Duty 4

World of Warcraft

Medal of Honor:Pacific Assault

Two of theese trailers are FPS games and both trailers for start of with introducing the situation, almost like a mission brief. And then it shoots of into action scenes and some actual gameplay. The MMORPG game (Wow) starts of with a narrator and a shot of a character looking at the view of snowy mountains with his pet bear. It gives the impression that the character has a very long journey ahead of him and has alot to see.

The influence behind medal of honour pacific assault was based around the fight at Perl harbour. To create the game they would have looked at Perl harbour and re designed the game around it and modelled all the aeroplanes, boats and guns around the ones they would of used in those times.

They would have listened to radios and sounds from movies from those times and re created them for the game. This makes the game feel like it is set in that time and not just looks like it is.

Film Influences

We looked up alot of film influences to see which type of art styles they used and how they get thier films across. The films we chose were

Robocop
Judge Dread
Pitchblack
Chronicles of Riddick
Starship Troopers
Alien
Jason X
Doom

All theese films fit the common idea of our game in the sense that they have industrial scenes and aliens all along with the "Superhero" who saves the day. Alot of theese type of films start out the same way that our games trailer is going to. The start of the trailer is all peacefull/happy and the people have no idea what is about to hit them, then suddenly all hell breaks loose.

Game Name

The next stage of our planning was to create some CD covers. To do this we first needed to decide upon a name for the game itself

The names put forward for a class vote were :

Pulse
Genecide
Rapture
Fade


Pulse was the chosen name of our trailer as we felt it best represented an alien shoot em up.

Team Meeting Four

Team Meeting 4

Attending: Danny Missing: Jack

James Chris

Adam

Point of Discussion

Work completed: Team names

Logo

Narrative

Story boarding

Brain storm

Plot

Things to do: Update our blog regularly.

Gain copyright on our work and our ideas by sending a letter via post with the contents of our work.

Game name: Rapture

Genecide

Pulse – chosen

Fade

Photograph: Buildings (exterior and interior)

People, to then digitally manipulate in photoshop

Textures

Things to be looking at: Work on a cover design for our game (Pulse).

Figure out how to do our pulsating splash screen in

Flash (ask Mark or Rob for assistance).

Team Meeting Three

Minutes of meeting 3 – Start 9:45 14.01.2009

All present

Panda } Teapot Tanks

Chris } Exodus – Vote Winner

James } Team A - Ninja Vs. Pirate Production

Danny } Flying Donkey

Jack } Hadoken Studio’s

Infected Design

Blood Brothers

Team B - Mango Mango

Refraction Studio

EvilOution Studios - Vote Winner

I Have An Idea

Team A – Exodus Logo Selected, Sepia change suggested

Team B – Eviloution – Redesign all together happening

Team A – Changed mind with art style, Rococo to Industrial

Team A – Working on the plot now

As a group we discussed

• What influenced us
• Company Names
• Company Logo’s
• Improvements on voted logo
• Plot suggestions added
• Working on brain storm
• Work on plan, beginning, middle and end for next meeting
• Identify film/game influences
• Discussed our main characters past/life/influences
• Weapon Influences
• Story, Underdog or Superhero

Next meeting – 28^th of January 9:30 in SF04

Meeting Finished 10:10

Art Movments

We looked at a few art movements to decide what we were going to base our game on. We chose Rococco/Cyberpunk and more of an industrial look. We were going for something similar to the picture below.



Another example of an art movement would be graffiti. Many people see graffiti as vandalism buy when you take an artist like banksy it suddenly turns into art. Here are a couple of pictures to show you what type of work he does.

Company Names

After the planning had been completed we needed to decide on some company names.

The following names were put forward for a class vote:

Flying Donkey
Exodus
A Ninja vs Pirate Production
Teapot Tanks



Exodus being the winner.