That Blog About Senior Team

With Senior Show looming over the horizon (Oh God... it's this Friday?!), we've managed to get a final list of all of the touch-up and remaining work we have, and are tackling them one by one.  

This past week I worked on our final cutscene, created some UI elements for the how-to-play screen, and touched up our poster.

I also hand-made some buttons representing each corresponding controller button to the actions!  It took me a few hours... but I'm rather happy about how they turned out.  I brought in our "EB" font to tie into our style.

For the last week and a half, I've been working on the final cutscene images.  It's been a fun week, that's for sure! And there's still tweaking to be done.  As the final date is looming ahead, our team is collaborating very well and not collapsing under pressure.  This has been a great learning experience and I am excited to be pulling this project to a close soon!!

Level 4 - Flo finds the blueprints

Level 5 - Flo emerges

During a fun-filled week at GDC, I found it quite difficult to get any amount of work completed.  I managed to get some sketches done for the cutscene where Flo works on Eb, and complete the scene where Flo finds the gauntlets down in their father's office.

Week 11 - Cutscenes

This week I worked with the grayscale portraits of the characters to make them game-ready for the UI. I colored them and handed them off to Sam to incorporate in the UI.

I then worked with Jovan to go over the next set of cutscenes images required. Among them was the scene where Flo finds the gauntlets in their father’s office, and distributes them to herself and Eb.

The next set of images revolves around Flo finding the blueprints for Eb, then diligently working on him to bring him to life in the stead of her father.

Here I was trying to play around with angles and which I felt would be more dynamic.  The emphasis is to be on her face, so I felt the second one would help to zoom in on her expression.

This week I focused on creating the first set of cutscene images, revolving around the part of the story where the father is resisting the military.  I clocked many hours on this (around 15 to be exact), making sure to keep everything on separate layers for later compiling into After Effects to create the final cutscene.

While I am mostly satisfied with them, I see much room for improvement.  It was difficult to get a consistent style going between all of these, and I hope to tie it into the rest of the images.

The next thing I worked on were the portraits that will appear in-game as part of the UI.

These past two weeks, I have been working on the sort of style I want to use in our cutscenes, as they are going to be a very important part of the storytelling in our game.

I have also been texturing many large assets, including the generator and receptacle.

Below is the receptacle:

And this is the generator.  The first image is an iteration on what I wanted the backside to look like.

Below is what I went with.

I also created a texture for the Lunar Labs crate that will be scattered throughout the levels.  We originally had a crate made of wood, but felt that something more futuristic would fit better with the design of our environment.

As part of this past 2 week sprint, I created Eb & Flo's textures, and helped to redesign the gauntlets and give them their textures.  I wanted them to stand out a bit more from the characters, so I gave them emissive & specular maps, which I have not done for the other textures in game.

Here are the concepts for the gauntlets, which turned more into bracers than large gloves.

And here they are on the characters (Eb's, anyway):

Flo's is basically the same--I changed her light/diamond color to a bright pink, and the spec map has a slight green tint.

I also worked on one of the cut scene stills, where Eb & Flo are stopped by a door closing in front of them.  This was a lot of fun to play around with stylistically--and hopefully I can maintain this style throughout the rest of the cut scene images.  The door is unfinished until we decide what we are redesigning it as.

This week I focused on the textures for Eb & Flo.  This was my first attempt at creating textures for human characters, so the entire process was much of an experiment where I spent a lot of the time making sure they fit well with the UVs.

Flo was the first of the two.  I laid out a general flat color for her, and separated each part of her texture into groups and layers in Photoshop.  My process was very back and forth--I would make several strokes in Photoshop and check back on the model to make sure it was going in the right direction.

And Eb.  He gave me a lot of problems, and I had several people look in to give me a second opinion on his face.  

After being handed off the stairs, vents and lights from Sam, I tackled their textures.  This post will consist of many screenshots and the texture maps themselves.  In the process of creating these textures, I tackled several problems (including fixing some UVs), and iterated on the way I went about painting the textures to make sure they were consistent.  This has been a learning process for sure--it is the first time creating so many assets for one game and keeping them in the same style.

Above is the texture for the stairs and the result on the model.  It was interesting not doing this piece altogether--I was given the stairs first, and discovered later that the entire model wasn't handed to me.

Above is one texture for the vents.  I made use of reusing pieces of the texture.

Above are the lights, both for the wall and ceiling.

And the ceiling light's texture.

This week I focused on texturing the modular stairs, as well as voice acting with the team.  I took Sam's models and spent several hours going through iterations and problem solving the type of texture I wanted to apply.

I perused through CGTextures and a few other sources to get an idea of what they could look like; what would make the most sense in this kind of an environment:

From those, I started painting the stairs. I did not want to use actual photos in the textures, as part of our art direction emphasized hand-painted textures.  With that in mind, I ended up with this:

And the texture for the railings:

And a couple of screenshots showing it on the model:

After narrowing down our art direction to a concrete/metal look to match narrative & design, I delved in and painted a potential scene for one of the larger platform rooms.  Here is a little step by step process:

I also worked alongside Jovan this week to discuss further iteration on character design.  The gloves will be updated design-wise to match Eb & Flo--next week, on top of more texturing, I will be adding some more concepts for those.  I started doodling up a turn-around sheet for Eb as well:

Along with this I have been working on the modular wall and floor textures, trying to problem-solve how they might piece together in the environment.

And displayed on the model:

The second week of the semester was dedicated to doing a little more research and coming up with some concept art on three styles for the environment. 

Sam and I both sought out references for underground bunkers, science labs and things of that sort to help us define what a 'human rat maze' might look like.  I tackled painting some of the hallways and rooms in the styles we looked at.  One of them involved having rocks, giving it a sort of dug-out without much clean-up look.

Above: This would be one of the main rooms (missing fillers, mostly painted to show the rocky style).  Our game takes place in the middle east, so this was a possible idea to try and pull that into our game more visually, with possible sand creeping in through crevices, etc.

Above: Here is the same room, but using concrete and metals, giving it a more manufacturing facility/lab look.

Above: One concept of the hallways, using the sandstone, clay, rocky look.

Above: Another concept of the hallway, using the concrete/metal look, using also the original cool color palette.

Above: Concept for one of the storm doors (main doors that lead out into the rooms).  I played with using the black & yellow warning stripes to give a feel of being in a testing facility.

Moving on to next week I will be working closely with our narrative designer and lead artist to nail down a bit more on the environment, and begin the creation of textures for major environmental modular assets.

So with the new year comes my last semester here at Champlain.  That thought in itself is exciting and scary.  Although my team and game last semester did not make the cut (we were pretty close, however), I felt I gained a lot of great connections and a nice addition to my portfolio, and possibly a game to continue with in the future!

In any case, I am excited to be a part of the team Four Eyes Productions and partake in their game called Eb and Flo, an exciting platformer following two teenagers on a rather interesting adventure.

My part on the team is the 2d artist, taking care of everything from concept sketches to finalized textures for assets and characters.  At first Eb and Flo were designed from 10 year olds, so one of my first tasks was to recreate Eb and Flo from my imagination as 17 year olds.  Here they are, not completely in their entirety, but almost there:

Among the process of figuring out what Shrines was, I had to figure out what our UI might look like.  What started as a rough overlay on our first map became a more solidified idea of what not only fit with the style of Shrines but was akin to many other games like it. 

Rob came up with a few ideas for the placement of certain elements of our UI, and I toyed with the overall look.

This first image is a quick paint-over (with Rob's placeholder icons for the god's abilities).  On the left is where the portrait of the god would have gone, and on the right is the player's unit count.  The bar in the middle is the 'mana bar', which allows the player to see how much mana they have available to use.

I updated the unit icon (right) to a cartoony version of the unit.  It changes depending on the color/team the player is.

I wanted to portray our playful gamestyle in the the art, even in the UI, and I tried to accomplish this with the wistful paint strokes and colors.

Here are a couple examples of the God of Storm's powers as buttons: Fog and Hurricane, and the Goddess of Festivities' Festival and Intoxicate.

Much later I updated the UI with more finalized elements:

In the next four posts I am going to sum up what the last month and a half has been like for Slug Team in this iterative process.

Picking up from post #6, I mentioned that I explored some possibilities for a theme involving the Mayan/Central American structures while still relating it to the game play.

After feedback from teachers and peers, I decided that I wanted to continue down the route of simple, lo-poly structures (the reasoning for this is because the view of our map is pulled out to such an extent that a lot of details would be lost), and play with contrasting & saturated colors to pull in the eye and attention of the player.

Here are some sketches that I furthered this idea along with:

An overview of the map.  Adding a slight glow to the shrines I felt not only helped to push a magical feel, but to make them more pronounced.

Up-close image of the shrines, contrasting against the bright greens of the environment.

In lieu of the stage 2 challenge, I met with Joann and laid out the work that I had done thus far.  I showed her the hi-poly model of the unit I created in Zbrush and she expressed concern for it being too detailed for this sort of a game, which I took heavily into consideration and started back at the drawing board with some new units that kept the same influence of Mayan/Central American sculptures but fit better with a cartoony, toy-like style.

Here is the model I had created in Zbrush:

So, I went back to the drawing board and came up with some sketches that might work better with our style:

(heavily influenced by this guy!) -- Li'l Mayan Rock Guy