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

Motion Capture

Motion Capture was pushed back by a couple of weeks due to a CryEngine workshop week that we had to do and because it was Industry week the following week. This provided me with some more time to get my characters weighted to a reasonable standard or to a standard to which I though they were OK, as I'm no professional it seemed what I had done would work and I was surprised with some of the ease especially with the second character. Because they had a similar shape and assets it was pretty much the case of doing it the same way I had done it for the first character. 

The main issue I found with the weighting would be that the values of the vertices would change on there own and would make life a living hell as I found myself constantly going over the model weighting the same areas over and over. In the end I just had to settle with what I had, however I won't really know how the weighting is until I get an Animation put on there. 

Now Confetti has built their own Motion Capture using 2 Kinects and using some motion capture software, it was definitely an interesting experience however I had trouble going from T pose into the action for the motion capture as that transition for some reason felt weird to me. Not only that but it felt kind of rushed which is understandable as we had only 2 hours to work with and a fair few people in the group.

It is going to be the case of booking out the Motion Capture and going after Confetti hours to use it and hopefully we'll have some good results. 

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

New Character

More 3D

Even though I was shown this way of weighting it is still proving to be quite difficult to actually get done and isn't as straight forward as I had hoped after using this technique. However I have been working on a second character. It was pretty simple to get this character done, because I already had the base mesh for when I created the second character it was just a case of sculpting into the armour pieces again.

I asked my friend who isn't going to use his FaceGen head in his work if I could use it for my second character and he said yes. From there I just applied his head to the model and attached the head so everything was pretty straight forward as I had already done it before with relative ease. Now its just the case of weighting both characters ready for the Motion Capture which I am looking forward to.

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

Weighting and FaceGen

From 2D to 3D

Over the past couple of weeks its been a slight transition back into the 3D work from the 2D as we come closer to the interim and I feel that I have covered enough ground with the 2D Game implementing the player, movement, scrolling backgrounds, enemy spawning and screen bounds. 

Even though I felt that those few elements of the game went relatively well, I had slight issues when it came to getting the enemy to spawn. It went through a phase where it didn't like a specific word within the code and I spent hours trying to figure out why it didn't work so it was one of those occasions where you leave and go back to it the next where and low and behold I managed to sort it out. It was just a case of copying some code from one class to another because along the way some of it had been removed.

So I'm pretty happy with what I have achieved so far with my 2D game but I must return to 3D aspect of the production because not only is 3D a subject that requires a lot of attention and time, there were other assignments coming along side these interims and major deadlines. So it is a case of trying to get as much done as soon as possible so that I don't fall behind.

I managed to get the get my character rigged as I was given some guidance when it came to getting the hands and fingers rigged correctly and ironically it was a simple and easy process. However the next hill to climb was and is weighting but this has been made easier with help from Mike White who provided us with a link to a video that showed a simple way of weighting using a tool. 

As well as finally figuring out how to rig and potentially weight my character I was able to apply the FaceGen head that I created of myself to my characters body which proved to be a very straight forward process and then I applied the hair which was provided by our Tutor.

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 character (On Going)
• Start work on second Character

All Things Code and Wonderful

Over these past few weeks my 3D work has somewhat been put on hold because I've pretty much been focusing on this 2D Game so the only time I do any work on 3D is in the allotted time during the week where I pretty much do the same thing and that's trying to rig my character, my main issue is trying to get the hands and fingers into the correct position however I have yet to figure it out. 

However the 2D Game has a slow and steady progress to it as I one of many on the course are not that confident and comfortable with coding even when watching a tutorial, but when I sit down and look at the code I can understand what it is doing. My main issues with it is actually remembering it to the point where I could repeat and write my own if it requires that little extra to make it work.

So far I have managed to get a menu, player with movement into the game by following tutorials from this YouTube channel.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEXxtHhSvUmz2qcZoWay9kw.

However the only problem I have with this channel even though they are short clips and they get straight to the point, it's very hard to take certain videos and mix them with others and for the majority of the videos the guy is working to create a specific game where as I wanted to create something different.

my concept for the game was for it to just have you move up and down on the left hand side of the screen and shoot at the enemy as they spawn and have them shoot back at you. my aim with this assignment was to produce what ever it was I could and I didn't want to create anything overly complicated.

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

Production time

So we've been back about a couple of weeks now and now it's time to really get the ball rolling as we have from now until after the Easter holidays we have to produce a 2D Game, Cut Scene and 3D Game. Now the 2D game doesn't essentially have to link to your game concept this assignment is to allow you to get to grips with using XNA and creating a small 2D Game. However I do intend to produce the 3D Game and Cut Scene around my game design and link them both together in order to use the models made for the Cut Scene into the 3D Game in order to make the process run a lot smoother.

In the two weeks that we have been back I have decided that I am going to switch from using the CryEngine to using the Unreal Engine as not only will it will give me experience in more Engines but not only that, our tutor has more experience in this Engine and can provide an invaluable insight into the ins and outs of the software. 

Originally we we're going to be shown how to import a Character and then it went to a Weapon both melee and projectile but then again returned to the Character and you can get the a weapon in but it will have to be from your own resources. So from this point we're going to get master class in UDK. Because I have some previous experience with UDK from my time on the BTEC Course I felt like it would be good to use UDK. But as we are getting this Master class in UDK we must meet a interim deadline for the 2D game by the second week in February, this is to encourage us to get the game out the way as soon as possible in order to allow more time on the 3D game.

In terms of the Cut Scene we have been researching and practising Biped integration and this week we were introduced to the Skin Weighting, now I didn't have fond memories when it came to weighting from my time on the BTEC course so this wasn't an area I believed I was going to get to grips with any time soon.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game