3D Game and 2D Game

2D Game Link

3D Game Link

Back On Easy Mode

Well after having disastrous week it was welcoming to have a week of good fortune where nothing major went wrong only some small issues arouse that required only small changes. 

The biggest issue was getting a melee weapon in and being able to use it in a 3rd person aspect, as a result of about 3 days attempting to get certain scripts working and watch a fair few tutorials I ended up giving and making a projectile weapon for my game instead which took the form of a Medieval Hand Cannon however I am sure people will wonder what a Medieval guy is do running around shooting what looks like a shotgun but none the less it had to be done if I wanted to have a weapon within UDK and working.

Apart from this everything thing else seemed to go smoothly and had no really issues I managed to get the lighting in my environment to work well especially a long side the fire which I wanted it to look like the fire was lighting up the room and you can kind of get this when you run past one of the torches on the wall and you only light up significantly when you go by and I was very happy with this result. This production was overwhelmingly assisted by this YouTube Channel.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxTg122t0cnIsNPoRL-Dy0g

Overall I was very happy with what I had managed to achieve in such a short time and with the amount of failures that had to overcome the previous week. As a result I had managed to leave myself with enough time to add some final touches to my 2D Game which I required some help with from a fellow student who is more confident in this field and was able to add that little extra to my work to distinguish it from what I had handed in for the interim.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system (On Going)
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon
• Add Ai and add fire

Too Much Time Off

Originally I had planned to take the weekend off in order to relax as I had felt that the Cut Scene with all its failures took a toll on me and I needed to chill before the next leg of work. However what was meant to be a weekend turned into two weeks and I definitely suffered for it. I literally had a how week of failure where everything I did failed and then when I managed to fix that problem the fix then turned into another problem and this happened for the most the week.

It all started with the characters as they wouldn't import and originally I had thought it had something to do with the version of 3DS MAX and that being that is wasn't a 2012 version. However this would turn out to be wrong a long the way and after discussing with fellow students David and Sean we found out that it was something to do with my rigging which would soon come to be known as Blue Bones disease and as a result I had to re-rig my characters and weight them, which I thought was the end of the world at this point.

None the less I managed to do this over the space of one night and then I thought you had to create a texture map for the characters in order to get them textured which then proved to be useless as when I did it made the textures on the character to be all over the place and not as good as they once were. So in the end I decided to make a last minute decision and make 2 new characters which in the end failed because they didn't want to import into UDK and they didn't even have the Blue Bones disease. 

At this point I was on the brink of madness, luckily I had gone back and looked at my old characters and noticed that the normal map images had made it into UDK but not the diffuse and then realised that if I changed them to a format suited for UDK which I had to do anyway everything will be OK and luckily enough it did and I was back on cloud 9 again.

Due to some errors in the environment I made for the Cut Scene I was unable to use it and extend from it for the use in my 3D game so I had to make a whole new environment which I made completely in max. However using models from the environment such as the pillar's and caldron's.

I would come across my final hurdle at this point when trying to import my environment, now it would go into the content browser but it wouldn't allow me to drag and drop it into the viewport within UDK. This as a result required me to re-download UDK and luckily enough that solved my problem and after that I had to re-import everything and it all went it like a charm and I was finally relieved as something was finally going well without any issues.

Sadly because I took too much time off the 2D game had to moved back and I will try and add what I can to it at the end of the week if there is enough time, if not then I am hoping that what I submitted for the interim deadline will get me a pass as for now I'm currently focusing on the 3D.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system (On Going)
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon
• Add Ai and add fire

Archer Stoneheart Animation

Click here to watch Archer Stoneheart

Final Product

The Future is Uncertain

This week was the hand in week for the Cut Scene and it was a stressful week, it was a week of changing ideas and uncertainty. We managed to get the animations off the motion capture PC however when we applied them to the models they were all messed up, we had no idea why probably because we rushed them as we had little time to get them off and there was a fair few.

Over the weekend I created the environment, this is where my idea ended up changing because originally I wanted to create the castle from my Game Design Document but I think I was being a bit optimistic when I had that Idea. It was after watching an episode of Game of Thrones did I come to the idea of having my two guys just meet in a throne room where they would fight but due to my animations turning out all wrong I had no choice but to make it very simple.

Luckily our tutor had provided us with a folder of animations where I had obtained a walking animation from here I chose to make my Cut Scene very simple and from there it was just going to be two guys walking up to each other in a thrones room and they exchange some dialogue. Now the audio side pretty much got sidelined throughout the whole project because it was my belief that you couldn't really make an effective audio side when you're still developing the 3D side and because of the way the course was laid out the production of the 3D ran till the deadline and with certain aspects being where they were it wouldn't have been possible to get it done any sooner. 

That being said I managed to during the week prior to the deadline I managed to book out a computer with audio software and quickly produce a soundtrack which I made 1 minute long. With the intention of taking a section that liked depending on how long the animation turned out. The dialogue was a last minute decision especially on what I wanted to say, it was pretty much a last minute job with the audio.

The animations definitely caused a lot of heart ache not only did they not work properly but they effected the weighting of the characters and I found myself constantly having to re-weight them depending on the animation which I thought was highly annoying at the time. So in the end I just left the walking animation as the most complicated and weighted around that animation and for the rest I key framed.

However in the end I managed to put it all together even though the week before I wasn't feeling confident in its completion and even though so many things had gone wrong It turned out OK and I was pretty proud of what I had made especially for it being my first character/animation piece of work.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon

It's been a Motion Blur..

So this is going to be a short post to basically say that we managed to book out the motion capture and me some other students used it to record out motion capture and it seemed like it went very well. However not much else can really get done on this until we book it out again in order to get the motion capture of the machine so we can apply it to our models as well as completing another assignment for the up coming week.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Apply animations to the characters
• Create the environment 
• Render animation