Side Scroller- Post-Mortem

Now that the side scrolling game is finished I'm happy to say I'm be content with our levels final outcome. Our team worked really well together to which I would say our concept artist Georgina was the crucial key part of or team. With her amazing concepts she kept the style of the level consistent, and created a large amount of the designs which run through all the levels. It was a great experience to work with her as I could create assets directly based on her drawings and receive feedback quickly. 

A stage however I personally struggled with was the beginning stage of concepting. At first I felt useful as I could help gather references and assist with coming up with the levels core theme. Yet as we began to better work out the levels design I had to wait for the concept artist to finalize the design and often felt as though I had nothing to do. But even in this time I tried to help by creating level designs for platforming sections or how we could change the layout. But I was glad when we had the basic level design as the environment part of the team could start on the white box stage. 

We managed to complete the white box for our level quickly so I was able to start working on final assets almost immediately. I began by creating smaller assets like trees but then tried to assist with making the main base parts of our level the rocks. I honestly I have little knowledge of high poly modelling or using software like Zbrush and 3d Coat so I was automatically not suited to my role. My teammates were very useful however and showed me a rock creation plugin and by merging different ones together to create the shapes we needed and then editing them in Z brush we could create rocks easily. However I just ended up crumpling the mesh too much or not understanding how to morph the shape how I needed and ended up making the edges overlap. My teammates then moved me to work on the gears for the level. Even though we only had one person working on the rocks I think it was the best option as he managed to keep them all the same style and used a snow emitter on each one to create a unique snow covering. This was a big worry we had. What would be the best way to add snow to our level? We had consulted the lecturers and been told a variety of methods but by having snow meshes mixed with vertex painted snow it made a perfect snowy illusion.

At this point each of our team went off and created our designated assets whilst our concept artist worked on their designs. Domenico became in charge of placing the assets in engine when the engine team allowed us to edit our own levels. He created a snow brush to blend his snow blob meshes together and then was able to use this on other meshes which allowed us to avoid using snow in our diffuse as we could just add it in the engine. Later on however we had some engine issues as the files were saved on specific computers and we were unable to access them. This meant when we need to add the last few assets we were unable to, this then resulted in one of my lanterns being left out of the final version. 


If I was to tackle a similar project I think more planning should have been taken with the engine files so they would have been accessible to all team members not just the one. However only one person can work on the file at once so it might have been unavoidable. We also had some platforming issues that hadn't been ironed out by the design phase so I think we should have possibly considered adding more interesting ways to traverse the level. By the end of the project we also began to run out of ideas and not knowing what to do. All the main assets had been made and we were left with little to do. During this time I created a variety of lanterns to fill the level but we could have possibly concentrated on the bottom section of the level and refined that instead of making these smaller assets. 

To conclude I'm really happy with our outcome. I feel it fits the Cold theme perfectly and runs with the correct level theme to help tie it together with the other levels. It was a great experience to work with a concept artist and work from their designs. We could have spent longer placing assets in the level and finishing other areas of the level as we did have the time. I also would have liked to recreate the platforms into ones made from bamboo as I believe it would give a nice unique look. Yet I'm glad we were able to fully polish the top area of our level. This project has really inspired me to possibly try and make another side scrolling level in the future, 

Side Scroller- White boxing stage

Now that the main design of our level had been designed the environment artist stopped concepting and began blocking out the level. A white box scene had been started by one of our teammates. Yet for our first pass we just needed an white box consisting of block shapes.

By doing this the engine team could test our levels and give us feedback. And quickly we realized that that some of the platforming elements on the left hand side of the level would obstruct the view of the statues face. We then knew this side element of platforming would have to be adjusted. However at the time we kept it this way until we finalized a design.

This was our secondary white box. The engine team were able to place in moving platforms were the hands would be and make there movement activate when you touched the bell. Now that we all had a scale copy of the level we could begin to make assets. I was first assigned to try and help make modular rocks for the level. However not being the most knowledgeable on Zbrush and baking I soon ran into issues.

This was my first practice attempt at a rock and as you can see it wasn't very successful. I however continued but I seemed to not be making much progress.

This mess was my second high poly mesh and when I showed it my team mates and told them I was struggling they assigned me to work on other assets.
For the following week I worked on creating a variety of Gears for the bottom part of the level. I used a variety of gear tutorials learning that the teeth of the gears had to be the same sizes in order to fit together. This however allowed me to create the teeth separately and have them unwrapped easily by unwrapping the first and cloning them around the gear body. I also created frost style decals over the top of the gears in order to add unique details to each one.

With the gears created I then moved on to creating the trees for the scene. Our concept artist had made some silhouettes of trees which I then tried to recreate in 3d. 

This was my first texture pass to see how successfully it looked. But the tiling bark texture tiled too obviously and I wasn't truly happy with the alphas. 

With this new texture and with developments in engine to be able to draw snow onto meshes. This meant I did not need to include snow in the diffuse which made creating the tiling texture much easier. 

My next asset was the prayer wheels which also had a variety of designs created by our concept artist. We decided that the bottom right design would be the most successful.

The mesh was very simple to create with most of the assets being symmetrical or the came and so could be cloned around. 

When I showed the prayer wheels for the first time to my teammates our concept artist advised me to increase the size of the writing on the prayer wheels which was a scripture created by her of the worlds alphabet. This did make the prayer wheels much more interesting and readable. 

At this point most of the main parts of the level were in place so I began working on smaller light source assets,  These assets had also all been designed by our concept artist.

The different types of lanterns allowed us to have a variety of different light sources for different areas. We were also able to be quite inventive with the colour of the lights to add more interest to certain areas. I'm really pleased with how my assets turned out and that I was able to create a large variety of assets with different functions. If your wondering what they all look like in the level then stay tuned. 

Side Scroller- Design Stage

My latest project has been to work as a year group to create a side scrolling game consisting of 4 levels based around the themes of Hot, Happy, Cold and Scary. I was assigned to work as part of a smaller team on the level design of the Cold level. All parts of the team worked together for the initial stage with coming up with ideas and themes for the level. We created a pinterest board pinning any relevant and interesting imagery to help inspire us and come up with ideas.

I created three mood boards of the themes of snowy woods, aquarium, and semi-submerged factory. However with some of the engine team opposing water in the level I had to try and come up with ways to implement these ideas but avoid traversing through water as much as possible. So I began to try and come up with some level designs, using the C shape our level would be places within.

I tried to portray some of my ideas with very simple shapes in order to work quickly and to see if the shapes worked well. My idea was to have the character traverse along tundra/ snowy forest, reach a clearing and fall through the ice into a semi submerged factory. But at this point the themes of each level were taking a slightly more traditional take on things and the possibility of a submerged factory or aquarium was a little too futuristic. At the same time the concept artist of our group who had been working on the theme of an ice palace came up with our first main concept. 

 She incorporated tundra, ice palace, factory/machinery and ice cave into an inventive design. We were all happy with this first design and began to see if we could refine areas.

At this point we had a strong feeling of the elements we were happy with so I tried to design some platforming elements. Yet at this point we were still uncertain how much space we had to work with in engine and how complicated we needed the platforming elements to be. This explains my two concepts which range from simple to complicated platforming. Yet our concept artist once again rehashed the idea slightly as we had some criticism of the statue in the palace only being seen from the side. 

The new idea allowed for a variety of platforming elements and incorporated a variety of themes. The idea of the statue being a mechanical construct with platforming gears and cave and tundra areas was kept. She added the idea of the statue having moving hands which would be activated when a bell was rung, There was also a variety of areas to find collectibles which would allow you to unlock the next level Scary. 

I did a quick concept of how I imagined part of the cave area to be. I liked the idea of the platforms being made of bamboo which would allow for interesting scaffolding silhouettes. Bamboo would also fit well with our idea for the side scrolling levels story that the character is on a pilgrimage across the levels. 

This is the final design our concept artist created. A lot of these elements she went over and designed further but this main layout stayed consistent. It was at this point that we began to create physical assets and blocking out our whitebox.