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Final presentations for our Round 5 projects have ended.  The theme this round was to make something for the BVW Show.

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

My team from Round 1 got back together again for this round, looking to capture some of our previous magic.  This time, we made an ambitious choice to combine multi-player strategy gaming with a show element, and struggled through quite a few iterations of the game but the final product is pretty solid.

Luckily we decided to approach this round with a “lightening round” idea and polish it as much as possible; unfortunately, though, our choice in mechanic slowed us down a lot.  Coming up with a compelling strategy game takes a lot of balancing between control, random elements, and interest curve.  Moreover, multiplayer meant that there was a lot more implementation that would have to be done.  In fact, we changed our idea a multitude of times between interims and didn’t have our final design until after the last interim before finals today.  We went through ideas such as a silent auction to see-saws to scales and pulleys before settling on a simple tug-of-war style mechanic.  In regards to implementation, we started with Unity Phone, which still wasn’t ideal for having a lot of players connected reliably so over the course of the first few weeks, Zero spent most of his time with the help of Emmanuel developing a new web-browser based interface that people could use through their smartphones.  Turns out that this worked much more reliably than using the phone servers.

As to my contribution; I really did get a lot of opportunity to polish this project the way that I wanted to.  At the beginning while we were still finalizing the mechanic and aesthetic style, I took the initiative to model a whole multitude of low-poly prizes (cars, blenders, TVs, sofas, etc.).  Though these did not end up taking a main role as I had hoped, I did get to include them in the background of the final build.  The final tug-of-war mechanic did allow me to have a lot of fun animating our little characters, and they have a variety of different animations for each emotion.  What I am most proud about though is the subtle fact that they wave and acknowledge the guest when they receive a new command.  As to the overall environment, most every subtle detail that I wanted are there:  There are cameramen around the set that just rotate slowly and even a lighting grid on top of the ceiling  where little simulated spotlights are hanging from.

I had a lot of fun polishing this project, and the team was great.

EDIT:  This world made it into the Final Show!

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!