This week has been a rather productive one, by the end of last week we realized we had to cut down some of the features we previously wanted. The programmers had been getting behind their schedual a bit and so we removed some features and Daniel our lead design / producer wrote a list of the most necessary things we had to have for GGC. These changes did not affect the graphical part a lot, some very small elements were removed but nothing major to us.
So first of all we started out with a quality time meeting with Jonatan and Lina where they took a look at what we had and gave us some pointers. One especially good idea is that we should have some kind of landmarks place in the different zones of the map. This is to give the players an easy way to communicate and update each other, for example; “Two champions are moving south of the broken log”. I looked through the Dota2 map and i couldn’t really find any landmarks like this, i’m not sure if it’s intended to be that way or if they didn’t think about it at all when they first designed the map. The more i’ve been thinking about this the more i like the idea of having a lot of these “special landmarks” that people can name themselves.
This week i had the other to graphical artists go though the different steps of our texturing guide to see if they understood and would get similiar results as me.
1.Create a highpoly (Large details!!)
2. Bake AO(Ambient occlusion)
3. Set basecolor and place the AO ontop as a multiply layer
4. Bake an object-space normal map, bring this in to photoshop and open the channels. Try turning them on and off until you find one you like with the light coming from above the model. When you find the channel that you like the best, delete the other two and bring this in to your .PSD of your diffuse and place this on the top rest. Set it to multiply at about 40%.
5. Bake a crazybump diffuse of your normal, bring it in to photoshop and remove all midtones and darker tones, only keeping the most intense highlights. When this is done, place it on top of your Point Light and AO maps with layermode colordodge at 50%. This is to give the character those extreme highlights and therefor creating more volume. Bring up Hue/saturation and check colorize, use this along with color balance in order to give the highlights a color that is somewhere close to the basecolor (except lighter ofcourse).
6. Normal layer; paint details such as markings or other information, keep in mind that too small details will probably not show and are more likely to create a messy appearance.
7. When this is done, make a copy of AO, object space normal and Diffuse, merge them in to one and set them to a complementary color as a multiply layer at 60%. When you feel satisfied with the previous steps, select all layers, make a copy of them and merge them. Set the new merged layer to overlay, go to filter>other>highpass and set the radius to 3,3 pixels and press OK.
This is what it looks like at the moment but i’ll probably work more with it after GGC is done and we start working towards the real game that we intend to make later on.
I’m getting rather used to this now and it gives me quick results after the highpoly of the model is done. Shown below is our games boss character currently called “Mr.Snappy” which obviously won’t be his final name. Right now I’m just trying to find the right colors on him, I’ve tried a wide variety of colorschemes and I think I’ll be going for something more neutral on this guy with areas of more saturated colors to create some focus on his head for example.
So I’ve been working on this guy during this week as well as a logo for our game part from this I spent a day writing down every single task we have left while estimating how long time each of them would take. I did this to get a better overview on what we have to do, how long it will take and look at how much time we have left. With this we realized we might have to work some weekends and possibly work some overtime during weeks but I’m confident we’ll make it.
So, the first iteration of the logo as you can see below is something all of us graphical artists had part in. Amanda came up with the idea for the layout which I worked from. I started out just trying to sketch this up in photoshop but I realized that it would take a lot of time to finish it this way. I opened up 3ds max instead and created a base of how I wanted it, after that I brough it in to Mudbox and really worked out all the details of it. What I wanted to show with this is that our game will have three factions, one of them is more organic, one is more robotlike and one is rough and simple. The upper part of our logo has the biggest part since I wanted to show that humans at this day in our game is the biggest race. They have more land and inhabitants than any of the other two. This thing about three races is something we’ll implement later on however, for GGC we’ll settle with one.
Above is the finished result and i’m quite happy with it so far but i’m going to do something more creative with incorporating the text with the actual image. As i mentioned earlier this sprung from a 3DSmax model and some work in Zbrush, this is what the 3DSmax base looked like:
To sum things up we have a couple of intense weeks of work ahead of us up to GGC but as i mentioned earlier i am confident that we’ll make it, the team has been working so good this week. We had a gametesting yesterday and even though our latest version of the game didn’t work due to a spawn bug of our forest creeps people seemed to have fun and really get the idea. I talked to some about what our vision for our game is and they were really keen to see the final result. We received a lot of good feedback which we went through with the group after the alphatesting session. For example that you shouldn’t drag to walk with the mouse since it gives less precision, that you should right-click to walk instead of left-click etc. We saw a clear pattern though, people that had played MOBA’s(Multiplayer online battle arena) before was really annoyed with the left-click to walk thing while those who hadn’t played any moba didn’t bother at all. After we had gone through the feedback we had a look at the game “Blood line champions”, especially at their combat system and decided that we liked it a lot and would take a closer look at it and get inspired to create our own in a similiar way since it offers that level of intensity that we’re seeking.
Last but not least i made a first draft of our GGC shirts and i think they’ll turn out really good with some more work.
Over and out, Henrik.