Designing Characters and Locations

For this assignment skills learned from a lecture about adding characters and story to a game to create both one character, and one location of our own choice. The assignment is now finished and is ready to be handed in.

My character idea is a Latvian cat woman (still based in the world created in the Heroes and Villains assignment for creative thinking) who is the vice president of the company the villain (from the assignment mentioned above) owns. She can be quite forgetful but is a friendly and morally guided character.

The location is a city of which was bought out by the Business TonCat (ran by the villain). The primary location is the TonCat headquaters which is a very tall tower that stands out from the surrounding city. It contains many things, the primary purpose of the tower is to house 10,000 offices which have won multiple awards over the years for their user friendliness. The ground level of the tower is open to the public and is actually a shopping centre. It houses many shops which offer a wide range of goods. From Video games to food, everything is available here. Finally, the basement levels house small assembly plants which manufacture the electronic goods that TonCat is also known for.

This assignment was difficult as thinking up a character and their backstory is difficult. Including having to detail a location added to this. However, it was fun to create a story and invent new people and places, letting the imagination run wild.

Designing a level in UDK

For this assignment the class was told to create a multiplayer level (either Capture the Flag or Deathmatch) in the Unreal Development Kit (UDK).

I had trouble coming up with a good idea for the level, but in the end I based it on a symmetrical stadium which allows players to fall to their death on the sides. It has two levels of height, the lower path safer to travel but likely to have more players running around, and the higher path, which is more difficult to travel and use effectively, but less players will use.

Overall, I'm reworking the level and have somethings I need to improve on it. These are that I need to make the higher level more difficult to use (for example making platforms thinner), apply textures fully (I ran out of time the first time it was handed in), reconfigure paths for bots, to make paths smoother and finally to add more lights to increase the levels general aesthetic appeal.

Designing a vehicle part 2

This week for the vehicle design I've finished the main bulk of the drawing and colouring. I'm not going to work on the shading to give it a more 3d look. The driver is a rabbit, being an old friend of the owner of the limo, Winston (from the Heros and Villains assignmnet).

The limo is dark grey/black with orange highlights and has many comfort features expected in such an expensive vehicle.

The rabbit drives Winston around and also has access to the limo's features. There is no front door for him to get into the limo, so he must enter by a sliding door on the side of the limo.

The estimated selling price is said to be above £1,000,000.
Edit:

Here is the finished car. I added lighting and fixed the shade so it wasn't too dark. Unfortunately, the print is a lot darker. I enjoyed this as I've alsways had an interest in vehicles and getting to design my own was fun. Originally I was going to draw a Train Chainsaw (Basically a Train with a giant saw on the front) but then I though that it would be too complicated. I might try and sketch one up at some point though.

Here is the driver:

He is a rabbit because the vehicle fits into my animal based universe from the heroes and villains assignment. He's quite old but he is a skilled driver. It seems that he a little annoyed about something. I dodn't really like drawing him as I'm not too much of a fan of drawing characters. A lot of my characters seem to wear suits. I tried modelling this in 3D first just to get the perspective right. I'm likely going to use 3D for perspective in a lot of work.

Party Games: Mario Party

For a research assignment my group has been asked to create a timeline for social board games. This includes Mario Party, so I should get it out of the way now.

Mario Party is a video game series based on around a virtual board game. The players must compete with each other and must move around the board by rolling a dice (or multiple) and try to collect coins and stars to beat their opponents.

Here is an example of standard Mario Party Gameplay.

The main feature of Mario Party games is that every turn the players must take part in a mini-game. The winner(s) are rewarded with coins.

Here is an example of a 4 player mini game in the original Mario Party. It's called Hot Bob-omb. The players must throw the bomb to each other until one player has the bomb and it blows up in their face. The other 3 players win.

Mario Party games introduce new elements now and then. Mario Party 2 added items which can be used on a players turn. For example, a player could obtain a mushroom from an item mini-game and the use it next turn to roll 2 dice instead of just one. Mario Party 3 added a story mode and duel mode.

"Duel Mode introduces a new game mode to the Mario Party Series that has two players duking it out with partners. Players move around a board, much like the Battle Royale boards, trying to catch up with the other player and have their partner attack their opponent. Each player has 5 pieces of heart that serve as a life meter. Each partner has different stats in attack power and defense health along with a salary that must be paid every turn. Duel Maps do not feature a mini-game after every turn but they do feature a spot on the map that will start a mini-game once passed 5 times. The game is over once one of the players loses all of their heart pieces or the limit of turns are up. There are no items in Duel Map boards." (http://mariopartylegacy.com/marioparty3/modes/duelmode/)

So far, there have been 11 Mario Party Games ranging from the the first on Nintendo 64 in 1999 (1998 for Japan) up to Mario Party 9 on the Nintendo Wii in 2012.

Designing FPS Weapons

For the final tak of the year I need to design, model, texture (and show in a working game engine) a gun which would be suitable for use in current generation FPS (First Person Shooter) games.

I've decided to model a shotgun. It was an easy choice considereing I've already designed an assault rifle, pistol and bazooka for another course, creative thinking. Designing a shotgun allows me to come up with some new ideas.

For the general concept of how guns function I looked at the Principles of Firearms. This webpage names the components of a gun and describes their function. This is useful as this gives a list of what I need to include in the design.
http://rkba.org/guns/principles/definitions/gun-components.html

I also looked at an article on specifically how shotguns work and what defines them from other types of guns. This is essential to understand if I want to design a shotgun that looks like it could work.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/shotgun1.htm

Some interesting things I'm noting are:

1.The size of the barrel indicates the gauge number and therefore, the amount of recoil firing will have. The lower the gauge, the wider the barrel, the higher the recoil.

Here are two examples:

This is a 4 Gauge shotgun with a relatively wide barrel and will have lots of recoil.

 This is a 20 Gauge shotgun. As can be seen, it has a thinner and longer barrel than the 4 gauge one above. This will have less recoil, which is safer for the user, but doesn;t look as cool.

A 4 gauge shotgun may seem to have too much recoil but having a fair amount makes the gun look much more powerful when fired.

2. How will the shotgun be reloaded?
There are 4 main types of reloading a shotgun:
Break action - Where the shotgun 'breaks' open and allows the cartridges to be reloaded into the barrel manually.
Bolt action - a bolt on the shotgun is pulled to release the remains of the last cartridge and allow a new one to be loaded.
Pump action - probably the most famous form of reloading, this is where a fore-end (pump) is placed under the barrel, pumping back and forth once reloads the gun. It also has a recognisable sound.
Autoloaders - These function similarily to machine guns and will automatically reload with no input from the user.

To keep with my current theme of designing things to fit in with the world created by the Heroes and Villains assignment for creative thinking, similar colour schemes and designs will be used.






References:
Image of 4 Gauge shotgun
http://media.beta.photobucket.com/user/Sn1P3rM98/media/ks23.jpg.html?filters[term]=4%20gauge%20shotgun&filters[primary]=images#/user/Muskyhunter1/media/Hunting2008151.jpg.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=4%20gauge%20shotgun&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images&_suid=136059626497905193423193835687

Image of 20 gauge Shotgun

Vehicle Design

For this assignment we've been tasked with designing and drawing a vehicle with it's driver. My idea follows with the theme created by the Heroes and Villains assignment. It will serve as the limo of the main antagonist, Winston Kingston IV.

It's front grill is based of cars from the 1930's while windows are triangular and the rest of the car is based off of modern to futuristic design. The limo also has expandable wings and jet engines which take in air from various slots on the sides of the body and through the grill.

Details of what's inside will be revealed later, along with who will be lucke enough to drive it. Did I also mention that it has armour?

Bump mapped Barrel

This week we looked at bump maps (normal maps). We looked at using nDo for photoshop to create normal maps from images. Here are the normal maps of my barrel:

 

This is the normal map made of the barrel, the long way.

 

Here is a scratched metal normal map created with nDo in photoshop.

 

The grey barrel is the low polly model using the above normal maps, I'm going to practice creating normal maps from high poly models a bit more.