Big Game Project; Week3

For this week I will write about the game concept as an overview where I begin with telling a little bit about the game, and go through how far we have developed through this project.

The game we aim to develop is a 3D adventure game where you play as a Djinn disguised as a man with big mustache, he wields magic to defeat his enemies in hunt for their abilities. The gameplay will consist of a small demo where you fight your way through a cave dispatching of evil minions to finally reach the boss for a final fight. We got our inspiration from games like “The legend of Zelda” and “Kingdom hearts”, it may seem to be a generic gameplay, but we concentrate on the way to execute the attacks and how to combine them. And hopefully this game will catch the interest of our players.

Last week I completed the Design Document where I asked the members to write down everything they wanted more detailed information about, and that turned out to be a good way to keep everyone on track with the design.

The programmers are working hard to get the controls and the enemy behaviours working, in comparison to last week they advanced a lot as they started to understand how to make use of Unreal Engine, they work hard to implement everything. They also implemented an extra checklist for themselves to break down the things they have to complete.

On the art side of the project All the animations for Qadher (boss) are done and also some extra animations for Mokhtar (Player), but we have problems with one character (a smaller enemy) that is that we can’t animate it in Motionbuilder as it has a custom rig attached to it, so our option is to animate it in 3ds Max but that hasn’t worked this far so we have to consult the teachers to find what’s wrong with it.

The level has a rough build sketch with the whole level set up, a lot of props are ready to be used (not textured). We have done a lot of test drives on the level and made notes for future editing as we aim to try delivering a sense of progression in a small story and at the same time present our features in. You can read more about the level if you folow this link to our Level designer blog (Andreas Calmius).

The lead artist also started working on a third enemy that will be inspired by the “Ghouls” portrayed in Arabic folklores, he works skillfully in his art and is almost finished with the concept art. Lead artist link (William Mayer) This week I didn’t have a lot of administrational work to do so I had the chance to help out with the animations, I worked on three different animations, both on the boss and Mokthar. I also received help from our 3D3 teacher Nataska to solve the problem with animating in place. The problem we had was that the programmers needed to use root-motion to make the character run in place which created a lot of problems in the engine where the character was running away from the main position and also the hips where locked in position and not moving at all. This was due to a problem in motionbuilder where the character placement was wrong, but I sat down and fixed these animations and now he runs naturally in the engine without the programmers needing to fix the issue.

The Spider character is our biggest problem right now, it can’t be done in motionbuilder so it has to be done in 3ds Max, so I took on this task and tried to get it done. I did not manage to get it done even though I skimmed through a lot of different tutorials, the problem seems to be that the rig together with the mesh won’t be animated, but I could make the mesh glide in to a final position. Something is missing or there is a bug problem, I will announce this problem with our tutors and see if they have a solution for it, but that will have to wait until Monday to meet up with them.

This is all for now, I will try to upload as much pictures as I can, and I may be able to get some GIFs in when I get the time.

Mokhtar (protagonist):