Category: Games

Final presentations for our Round 4 projects have ended.  This round we had to make a game that “told a story,” and my team decided to use Kinect as the platform.

You can see the game that my team produced in my portfolio under “Games: Building Virtual Worlds.”

My team decided to address a more serious topic with our game this round I think the result turned out well.

The brainstorm process was a bit slow again, but this time because we had too much to work with.  Daniel Aum had a great idea for a complex and very cinematic story but we didn’t have the resources to execute the whole thing.  Many thanks to Chris Klug who helped us streamline the story down to what it is now.  We ended up capturing the essence of the story we wanted to tell, and Daniel did a great job too in choosing a subject that was well-known enough that we didn’t have to waste time in-game setting up any of the back-story.

I really pushed myself this round, and I really enjoyed it.  This was the first time that I had modeled and rigged humans, and they turned out really well.   I even had a go at putting bones in the faces and animating the mouths and eyelids.  The buildings were really ambitious, too.  I didn’t have CityEngine or any other procedural city-generating software so I just made 3 different types of floors, 3 different types of roofs, and a generic door, and mixed and matched building heights, orientations and texture colors.  The amount of scene work I had to do gave me a lot more exposure to Unity3D than any previous round as well.

I have to thank and apologize to my texture artist, Dan-Ah.  I made so many models that she became back-logged I had to UVW unwrap most of them for her especially since she had to spend so much time texturing our two human characters.  This was an enlightening experience though and I found that certain ways of modeling are not as UVW unwrap friendly.  I think 3D modelers and texture artist should coordinate to understand the difficulty of each other’s roles and pipeline better between themselves.  Something that I know some other teams in the class have had difficulty with.

Final presentations for our Round 3 projects have ended. This round was a one week lightning round, where the theme was to make something “fun to do.” My team picked Kinect as the platform this time around.

You can see the game that my team produced in my portfolio under “Games: Building Virtual Worlds”.

This was a fun concept and we put together a scalable game rather quickly. Brainstorming was rather slow at first but I think most of the team latched on to the “ball pit” idea I had when we were able to prototype it quickly. Emmanuel added the “match three” mechanic and we had a game.

Brian did an amazing job creating a unified aesthetic this round; this was the first round where I had sketches from the texture artist of what the characters should look like and that I didn’t have to design them myself.

What most of the time was spent on was supporting our programmer Xing and getting our slightly more complicated than expected “match three” mechanic to work. Many thanks to Emmanuel in that area as well; he is a programmer, too, but had the role of sound designer for BVW, and really had an opportunity to shine this round.

Final presentations for our Round 2 projects have ended.  The theme this time was to design a game that even a naive guest could understand and use, and the platform my team got assigned was Kinect.

You can see the game that my team produced in my portfolio under “Games: Building Virtual Worlds.”

This was a very difficult round in terms of finalizing our game concept, but I really liked the result in the end.

Our group ran through multiple iterations of this game.  At first we made a music-creation game with pentatonic scale notes at various Kinect arm angles, and though it worked, we discovered quickly that it was still very hard to create a compelling piece of music unless one was a composer.  We also tried to have the various positions and gestures control random sounds on top of a base soundtrack, but we found that to be even more chaotic and dissonant at times.  All during this time, we were also trying to get random light and particle effects to occur with each of the different positions and gestures and this was just as difficult to read.

AT this point, we came away with a few key realizations:  We needed more game-like elements rather than simply “toy”-like effects; secondly, we needed to take the music out of the player’s control (being a musician is much harder than Guitar Hero had us believe); thirdly, we needed to unify the aesthetic/theme and scale back on all the excess nonsense.

What we finally settled on turned out particularly elegant.  You can see from the demo that it’s simply a “keep-it-up” game that encourages movement with “dance” and music as the background aesthetic.  In fact, the Kinect code tracks joint rotations without discriminating between dancing or spastic twitching.  It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.

As to my contributions as 3D modeler. I had the dancer silhouette done very early.  I really liked the subtle personality that the disco-clothes flares gave our avatar.  The band members in the back did not come to be until we finally settled on our third and last iteration of the game.  We already had the abstract texture bars but realized that we needed a little more to give the player some emotional attachment to keeping the bars up and I decided that band members might just help.  I really had a lot of fun giving them different and crazier animations as the levels went up and I think everyone else who watches the game enjoys them as well.

All-in-all, one of the best games all semester.  Arnold Blinn from Microsoft’s Kinect Fun Labs liked it a lot when he stopped by as well.  Great work, team!

Final presentations for our Round 1 projects have ended, and boy what a first round.  The theme this round was that the guest should be helping one character who is afraid of another character, and the platform that my team got assigned was HMD (Head Mounted Display).

You can see the game that my team produced in my portfolio under “Games: Building Virtual Worlds.”

This is the first time I’ve made a game like this, and have been “the” 3D modeler;  It was quite an experience.

The team decided to tell a feel good story about a boy in elementary school trying to get the courage to approach that “special” girl on the playground.  The context is Valentine’s day, and the guest interacts as the boy’s imaginary friend.

I played it extremely safe this round in terms of aesthetic style, but even so the game turned out really well.  John – the texture artist – and I agreed to do a very simple, crayon/stick-figure art style, which no only fit very well with our story but also kept the work load from getting out of hand for this first round of the semester.

I was really happy with this decision as it gave me a lot more opportunity to first mess with basic shapes for most objects as well as leaving only one set of non-basic objects to work on (the hands); moreover, with the saved time I had time to mess around more with animation and getting our characters to emote in subtle ways since they don’t ever actually talk.  If you pay attention, the boy and girl’s feet always point outwards when they are happy and inwards when they are sad/shy.  I really enjoyed making little animations like those; I think I am developing a sense that when animating a character, every part of the body should participate even if it is minor and subtle.

The team I worked with was great, too.  Our programmer developed an amazing gesture system to work around the fact that someone using the HMD is “tethered” and can’t actually move around or move their fingers.  Our texture artist is great with props and made us themed “imaginary friend” gloves for the final presentation (on Vimeo).  Our sound designer composed all the music himself and you can hear it change in complexity as the game progresses, with more layers being added.