Wk14 Final Project Final Phase

I became very frustrated with this project. I almost had to start from scratch like I did when I had to re-create my entire maze last time...because Maya shut down on me and I ended up having to reapply all my textures, I wasn't able to add in as much as I would have liked, but I still managed to do a lot.

Wk14 Final Project Concept Phase

For my final project, I'm going to be doing one huge upgrade. I'm going to be making a bunch of changes to my maze. Some of these will include creating an outside environment, adding in stair cases and multiple levels. Making new designs for the walls (graffiti, cracked paint, missing bricks, chipped wood) and new designs for the tiles (missing/broken tiles), different door colors and designs, and maybe some more tables, clocks and other knickknacks. I'll also fix the lighting to give it more color and so that way it's not incredibly bright, Basically, for Tuesday, I want this thing to look, bigger, better, and more detailed.

Wk13 Upgrade Assignment Part 2 Final Phase

Click: New Logo Final

Wow, it's almost ridiculous how much cleaner my new logo looks as compared to the old mood board I had. I decided against the spread of the blue aura and left it in at the start instead. I fixed the little yellow splotches from the original image, created a spread of the stone texture/color onto the hands, I added the Midas touch at the bottom with the photo-shopped arm, a pulsating affect of blur on the aura and an extremely slight pulsating affect on the title, I also added in the music from my last project to keep the same theme with the game.

Wk13 Upgrade Assignment Part 2 Concept Phase

This week I want to upgrade my Game Logo using my old mood board assignment. I guess you can say I'm doing a crossover upgrade. Basically, I really disliked the logo I came up with for my game, but I didn't want to start completely from scratch in creating a new one. I really liked the mood board image I had created but there were some flaws with it that I'm going to upgrade in order to make this new assignment. What I'm going to try and do is change around the statue texture on the hands because it looks pretty messed up, I want to add in an aura around the hands where he is absorbing the statue and add an animation for the spread of the blue energy and rock texture/color. If I can, I also want to add in an animation that turns the word Midas to Gold when a finger touches it. I'm thinking about using one of the hands from the Sistine Chapel image to do that...

Wk12 Upgrade Assignment Part 1 Final Phase

Click: Original Touch Title Screen
Click: Improved Touch Title Screen

For this weeks project I tried to fix a few things. I edited the layer masks so that the hand transitioned from each texture more smoothly without the showing of skin. I added in stars to the background by the suggestion of Mike Little from the other GDD110 class who also suggested to make the star lights flicker by changing their opacity, which I thought was a nice "touch" (pun intended) to the aesthetics of the title screen. I did away with the white blur that held all the menu options and replaced it with a grey/green tear/splotch that I felt looked a bit nicer. I added in a small flash of the blue aura around the hand each time it transformed to a new material and made the title have a very slight increase/decrease in blur over time. I also slowed down the entire clip which was suggested by Chris McDougall when I submitted my original final. The final thing I added was a featured music track on youtube to the background which I felt set a nice vibe for the game.

Wk12 Upgrade Assignment Part 1 Concept Phase

For this week I want to upgrade my title screen project. I tried looking at title screens that I didn't model mine after and the one that I came to like the most was the one from Darksiders. Coincidentally, it had a lot in common with my screen, but everything looked a bit better. For the transitions, I want to clean up the open spots on the hand that expose skin so that way the transition looks smoother. I want to increase the blur effect on the title to look more like that of the Darksiders title and add an effect to it to make it resonate a bit. I want to add something to the corners and empty black area of the screen, whether its small blurring effects for stars or some type of vine-like texture. The last thing I want to edit is the white blob I have by the selections, but I'm not sure what I want to do with it yet. If anyone has ideas for that, I would appreciate them.

Wk11 Maze Texturing Final Phase

I re-textured my walls completely, trashing out the brick walls from last week. I combined a blue brick wall texture that I edited slightly to look more seamless with a white-painted wall texture and a wooden barrier texture with a drop shadow to appear as though it was coming off the wall. I added in more alien blood to the walls as well and on the new door textures I added drop shadow to the sides to show the end of the wooden barriers and a bit of a feathered light around the edge of the door to appear as though there was light in the room behind it. The rust patterns on the doors I kept the same. I also decided to scrap my wooden ceilings and found a asbestos ceiling texture on CG textures that I liked a lot better. Using one of the paint brushes and the eye drop tool, I made water stains on some of the ceiling tile textures. The things I changed in my maze were that I added tables to replace some of the walls I had in the original which I used the same wooden texture as the barriers and the old wooden texture from my last maze to make the poles. I kept both the regular tiles and cracked tiles from my last maze and added in doors to some pathways so that way the walls were not left flat and open, to make it appear more realistic. The images show the full maze, one room with most of the textures and the ceiling over the dead ends and placement of water-stain ceiling tiles.

Wk11 Maze Texturing Concept Phase

 I decided that I want to change up the look of my maze a bit. I want my maze to have more of a hospital look to it, similar to the one in F.E.A.R. 2. I I think I'm going to get rid of the current walls and ceilings and turn them into plaster/painted walls with acoustical ceiling tiles. I want to keep the alien blood on the walls and the cracked tiles, but I'm going to try exploring the different textures in the substances pack and see if any of them work better. I think adding water damage to some of the acoustic tiles would look pretty nice.

The other big thing I want to change with my maze is to make rooms. I think I'm still going to keep my basic maze design just get rid of some of the walls and maybe add in a few tables or medical tools.

Wk10 Maze Modeling Final Phase

 My maze didn't render well from far away, so I took a few close up shots from inside the maze to better show the details. My lighting I spread out evenly through the maze (three lights on each side and one in the middle). I really like my work over all and the cracked tiles matched up with the blood stains add a nice touch.

Wk10 Maze Modeling Concept Phase

 For my Textures I decided to make them all square shapes, because that's the way my maze is designed. For the walls, I did 3 variations: standard brick, alien blood (in the spirit of Area 51), and door. For my floors I have standard and cracked tile version and I have my plain wooden ceiling as well.

Wk09 Maze Design Final Phase

I feel like my end result came out quite nicely. The halls have an extremely abstract look to them, which is exactly what I was going for. I added shadows along the bottom and tops of the walls, and a bit of a shadow fade to the right turn. The I added a black dust/shadow to and I gave the ceiling water marks.

Wk09 Maze Design Concept Phase

 The idea for this maze is to be confusing, not only in the layout of the maze, but the actual design of the maze as well. I wanted to make the story behind this maze have to do with the very beginning of the game. When Zosimos is escaping Area 51. I wanted to make it so he was "trapped" within the building, but it would look nothing like what anyone would envision Area 51 to look like. The floors would be made out of fine stone tile, the walls made by fine stone bricks on their sides and the ceiling out of dark wooden planks. The hallways should feel like an outdoorsy type look along with a hospital feel to it. The exit door will be the only thing that really stands out because of the bright yellow which represents caution.

Wk08 Building/Structure Final Phase

This was an incredibly long process. I have well over 10 hours put into it doing the individual pixels. I tried to blend in the molten lava with different shades of red and the lava spurting out of the top with orange and yellow. Overall I thought it came out very nicely.

Wk08 Building/Structure Concept Phase

I thought a lot about the different structures that would be in Touch and one that I thought would be unique to explore would be that of a volcano. I haven't decided where exactly I want the game to take place, but I know that one of Zoe's powers involves lava and where do you get lava? A volcano! I looked through multiple images until I found something I liked and ultimately ended up with this. The viewer can clearly see the traces of molten lava sliding down to the base of the volcano along with a fiery explosion coming out of the top. The other aspect I liked about this image was how close it was to the ground (or at least it looks that way). This could be one of many lava pits located throughout a level and it also looks like it'd be fun to experiment with the lighting of it.

Wk07 Game Prop Final Phase

I think that the final Mailbox came out pretty great. Surprisingly, the shadow/highlight work looked well without checkering it for the key area and smaller lines along the square figure. over all I thought the finished product cam out really nicely.

Wk07 Game Prop Concept Phase

Although my game is not set to be in pixel art because it has a heavy focus on texture (which isn't portrayed too well when it's pixelated), I chose to do a mailbox because I thought it would be a cool type of metal that my character would be able to experiment with in the game. I looked at a bunch of different mail boxes, but many were side photos that didn't show the drop box and front aspects of the mail box. I thought this image would be fun to pixelate and had a good selection of colors from the mood board that I could manipulate easily to cast some nice shadows and show a bit of sunlight.

Wk06 Logo Design Final Phase

Click: Logo First Attempt

I had a lot of difficulty making this logo. Instead of using a hand graphic that I found online, I decided to model my own hand for the logo. This proved to be particularly annoying because I did not have a good camera that could capture a decent image of my hand. It would always either come out too dark or with an intense glare. I ended up having to put a skin texture behind the image of my hand and use the darken feature to make my hand look more like a hand rather than a ghost. I tried creating a tree branch in illustrator but it proved to be a lot more challenging than I expected. I couldn't get certain lines to bend or match up in the ways I wanted to so I dropped illustrator and took an image of a black branch from online. Instead of using this image however, I recreated my own outline of it and took off some of the branch parts to make it my own. I then put on a tree bark texture to the branch. I intersected the pointer finger with the branch to form the T-shape and I used the same text type I used for my original title screen because I liked it so much. I then added in an animation affect to turn the finger into the wood.

Click: Logo Final

After talking to our Professor, I decided against this Logo. There was no way for me to incorporate it into my title screen, so instead I took a new approach. I made a somewhat intro to the game's title screen. I incorporated the branch from the previous logo attempt and it made things look a lot nicer.

Wk06 Logo Design Concept Phase

I started off my research searching random game logos and titles in Google. One of the ones that happened to pop up was Plants vs. Zombies one of my favorite XBLA games. Now the text used for this title is way too cartoonish to be anything like my game, but what I really loved about the title was the symbolism of the text. The word "Plants" is colored in green with little leaves sticking out at each end and is placed above some grass. The word "Zombies" is colored in a dull grey with rugged texture beneath the grass. The plants are the good guys in this game and the text seems to be triumphing over the zombie text in the title. The other thing is that plants are often associated with being above ground while zombies come from beneath the ground.

I decided to go through the collection of games I brought with me to college next, and I picked out two games that caught my eye: Halo 4 and Dead Space.  With Halo 4 I wanted to go back to the roots of the original Halo and looked up what the tile/logo looked like. I really liked the text which had this halo affect on it (which was one of the things I used in my title screen) The logo which is Halo's signature "O" with the dot in the middle which represents the halo rings in the game. You can see one of the rings sketched out behind the text as well. I liked this because it took an aspect of the game and brought it to the title.

Dead Space was my favorite game I got to look at. The text had a halo affect on it along with corrosion and holes to make the text look as though it was "dead". In the background there's a picture of a severed hand floating away in the stars

Symbolism, in-game aspects and proper representation of the text are all factors I wanted to bring to my logo, so I kept these in mind while doing sketching for my logo.

I tried to vary the logo designs for each one of my thumbnails. My favorites are 1, 5, and 7. 5 doesn't look very clean as a thumbnail but in my head it was the original design idea I had in mind. I chose to use my first thumbnail for my sketch because I wanted to see how it would look if I made it bigger. It feel like it came out looking quite nicely and it fits the criteria I was looking to portray.

Wk05 Title Screen Final Phase

 Click: Touch Title Screen Animation Final

In this animation, I really wanted to slow down the morphing process of the hand and touch up some of the graphics so the background looked nicer and the materials the hand was changing into looked more realistic. For the background, I added a light blue Gaussian Blur to the title and the area around the palm of the hand. I threw out the old metal texture and went with something new that looked fresh off a construction vehicle. The diamond and rock textures I had to lower the opacity and play with the colors a bit to get the design of the hand to be more distinct. In the old graphic, the diamond and rock textures completely overpowered those of the hand.

Wk05 Title Screen Concept Phase

I looked at a lot of title screens from old Sonic the Hedgehog games to brand new games like Saints Row 4. The common attribute I found with almost all of them was this dynamic background that had changing environments to preview what the game world looked like. I didn't want to see this aspect for my game's title screen because, unlike I had originally thought, I don't feel as sure with what environments I want to put into my game. I was looking at going for more of a minimalist title screen and so I turned to Skyrim. The only effect that Skyrim had with its title screen was the fog that grew and spread out from the bottom left corner. I decided to make my effect a little more detailed than that with having my hand change forms to the different materials you can absorb in the game. The change corresponds with whichever option the player has selected on the title screen.
I also liked how in Prototype 2 the environment on the title screen faded to black as it got closer to the edges. I created a smaller version of this with my options on my title screen.

Although I love the way the title screen came out, there are still a few aspects I want to change. I want to give the hand a slower transtion between each form and possibly put an aura around the hand and the title. Other than those changes, there are a few details I'd just want to clean up with the effects.