Big Game Project – Week 2
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This week I worked on designing the gods for the temple. The temple will have in total 5 gods, each level is designed after a god, and also each god will have their own statue in the game. Also started planning out the visuals for each level and started sculpting on the gods this week. There was also our first internal testing of the game where the whole team sat down and played through the game. Designing the Gods I started this week sketching on levels for the water goddess, it was going slow and I felt unhappy with the sketches. Then I realized that I was going at it from the wrong way as I was trying to design the levels based on characters without knowing how the character will be like first. So I sat down and started sketching and planning the gods. I’ve taken parts from a narrative document with the initial ideas about the gods, the god’s personalities is based on this document. But some changes have been made to the gods due to the adding of a treasure chamber as the final room instead of the shadow level. But I’m going to include the original text as quotes in this post. Fire God “The god of fire provided the people with heat, jealous of the appreciation of water. The god went in ablaze, taking what he could with him by burning down the city.” This god is jealous of the attention the people gave the water goddess, so he’s taking his anger out on the weaker. The visuals of the fire god level have to convey a sense of destruction, jealousy and anger. The level also will have to visually ease in the player into the shadow level. The statute will have to have a sense of aggressiveness to it while still have elegance to it. The wall behind the fire god statue will show an image of the city, where the temple of light is placed on the top of the mountain.
Wind Goddess “The goddess of wind provided the people with a breeze on scorching days, was soon forgotten as the other gods removed their gifts. Left only with time the goddess slowly buried the city in sand, leaving it in darkness, to be lost forever.” Willing to protect the family and cover up their mistakes. The goddess of wind could be seen as a big sister, protecting her siblings. The level will be quite open and allow for more freedom of movement, but will also mix between the light atmosphere from the water level with the dark from the fire and shadow level. The statute will have to incorporate the freedom of movement and the sense of wind. So instead from going with the typical flowing thin lose hanging cloth from Greek statues, the wind goddess will have clothes that wouldn’t restrict movement and still have parts of the clothing and hair to give the sense of wind.
Water Goddess “The goddess of water provided the people with life but the people took it for granted, angering the goddess. This caused the draught leaving the people thirsty and hungry as the crops perished, there was no more water, to be found.” The water goddess is giving the player a false sense of security while they are learning the basics of the gameplay. The level will have some sun light coming in from holes in the celling. The light will hit the statue from above and together with dust particles reacting to the light will create a heavenly look to the level. When the level starts there will be no water in the level but as soon as the player have completed the puzzle water will start flowing again.
Sun God The Sun God statue is going to be placed in the central hub area as the temple is built mainly for telling the story of how he defeated the god of shadows. The reason the other gods are in the temple is because he didn’t defeat the god of shadows alone. What I wanted from this character to create this father figure. Having him to guide the other gods to stop fighting against each other and instead work together to defeat something none of them could defeat alone, the god of shadows. The level in the beginning will be quite dark, but as the player completes puzzles it will light up and come alive.
God of Shadows “The god of darkness forgotten by the gods, tormented every man, women and child left until there was no more. Then the god appeared to the other gods one by one, giving away false promises about endless worship and praise. The gods fooled by the god of darkness scheme ended up imprisoned, left fooled by their own greed.” The god of shadows is a trough out evil looking character, but he’s also intelligent and scheming. He will try to misdirect the player leading the player down the wrong path. His level will be covered in darkness and the player will have to use the mirrors to light up the area. The statue of the god will look scary and not human, as that’s how I see the people building this temple thinking , they would create a stature that help strike fear in the people. The reason they would build this room in the temple is to teach the next generation of the citizens to not commit evil acts, teach them not to become this god’s servant. The room also is meant to lock this god away.
Sculpting This week I decided to learn how to sculpt in 3d as to make me able to help with creating the highpoly models as we have only one person working on it. I decided to start of sculpting in the program Sculptris and then move the sculpture over to Zbrush for the final details and baking of normal and ambient occlusion maps. In the screenshots below you see a Work in progress sculpture in Sculptris of the God of Shadows I created a sketch of earlier this week.
Internal testing We have started testing the game internally, on the Friday we sat down and played through the game from start to finished and then discussed our experiences and if we felt we needed to change something. When I played through the game, I noticed that the ability to jump, grab ledges and ladders created a light Parkour element in the gameplay, but it also caused problems with the player being able to wall climb. The difficulty of the puzzles also needs some adjusting. I’m next week going to focus on finishing the level concepts for each level so we can start putting the levels together. |
