Characters and animations – Part 2, MakeHuman and Motionbuilder

Time to continue where we left off! We have the animations, now we just need some characters to put them on.
With the time we had for this project, and the amount of characters we wanted to have in the game it seemed unrealistic to try and make the characters ourselves. Fortunately, there is a great free software we could use to ease this process for us; MakeHuman.
With this software one could design a character to ones liking (including adding some […]

Characters and animations – Part 1, Motion capture

I have been wanting to write about this subject for a while, but had not gathered my thoughts around it enough until now since there is so many things I can say about it. I finally decided to split it into two parts, starting with motion capture.
In order to make our feel more alive we needed a lot of characters in our game. The characters we needed were split into three categories; Survivors, Rescue Workers and Civilians. The survivors are the […]

Eyes Align – Dialogue Changes

Balancing dialogue to be both interesting and a challenge, while also providing the player with many choices is quite a difficult venture.
The dialogue mechanic of the game was at the start meant to be something far more complex than what it turned out to be (see the blog post Eyes Align – Development Week 4 for more information); our huge ambitions were dashed upon the stones of reality.
So what happened exactly? Branching dialogue, using the hub and spokes approach […]

Last post!

Dear lord, it is time for the final post!
So – the last character in our game is the Raum, and just as with previous characters the Raum used to be a living person who was turned into a demon. This particular demon is inspired by the goatman, so it crouches and uses a ramming attack.
This is actually the character I am the least satisfied with, because of several reasons. It is supposed to have a hunchback, but after having […]

Eyes Align – Narrative Structure, How it Changed

In my opinion, the most difficult part to get right in any story is the middle: The story needs an introduction which grabs the reader’s, or player’s, attention and a fitting conclusion that either wraps up lose ends or creates new ones to keep the reader wanting more. The middle, however, serves as the majority of the script and fills out the world, the characters and the conflict.
At the start, the middle was loosely defined as a chain of events; […]

Making objects in blueprints

During the end of the production our game map was pretty empty. To add variation and lighting to the scene our graphical artists made a couple of assets to clutter the scene with. To make them more versatile I worked on them a bit in blueprints.

I made lamps that changes the emissive amount on the material together with the light sources. The pictured work light can also have it’s head mount adjusted so you can angle the lights. I made […]

Dynamic Time of Day

In the game you’re supposed to find survivors buried under the rubble of a bombed city and then dig them up. In order to meet deadlines, the game was designed with this feature abstracted to a press of a button and an ensuing cinematic sequence. In order to communicate to the player that time passes during this we decided to have a controllable day and night cycle. In order to save time we decided to use Unreal Engine’s built in […]

Visual Aid

For the player to easier see what they are doing we used a couple of visual aids. Early on we used a particle emitter emitting invisible particles that would spawn visible particles when colliding with the ground to show where you are focusing your listening.

This was hard to spot, not very cost effective and hard to control. I had looked in to how to project materials onto surfaces but had somehow missed deferred decals which does exactly that. Setting this […]

Asoth

Buckle up – another post without any relevant or particularly good images (because I wrote this post directly after the last one instead of weeks ago, like I should have…. *cough*)
So, this post will be about the second enemy character that was created; Asoth. The Asoth used to be mages, but, just like the Zagam from the previous post, an evil sorcerer brought them back to life as demons. Asoths are skeleton like, with big thorns growing from their shoulders. […]

Spectrometer Data

Originally I wanted the spectrometer data to be calculated in real time based on every sound that was played. While not impossible, decompressing audio in real time to do this would be inefficient. My next idea was to extract the spectrometer data externally and parse it in to the game. This would probably have been the optimal solution, but when talking to our tutor he advised against it and told us to fake it. And fake it I did.

So what […]

Week 5: From substance painter to 3D Coat

Hi, this week I’ve worked with the texturing of the Orc patient.
Earlier on tries have been made to make simple placeholder textures in substance painter, these attempts brought forth a problem that had to be solved. In substance painter there is no possibility to draw across different meshes without swapping between them in the hierarchy. This made it near impossible to draw a shaded and well defined texture and matching it up between meshes


Making a seem well textured […]

Zagam

So – moving on to the next character!
Let me introduce to you; Zagam! *intense music*
A rather unclear image of Zagam, but you get the idea. 
This is the first enemy that we produced, simply because our Lead Artist thought it was the most fun to model. The ‘race’ Zagam is created by the evil sorcerer that is terrorising the country, who wakes all killed men and turns them into Zagams, a creature of stone and fire who bulldozes everything it […]