So for this week, I've been working on a few different things.

I've been working on more textures and I have to redo some of the "rocks" that I made 2 weeks ago. This is because the rocks that we are using as reference are HUGE and the ones that I made look weird and tiny even if you scale them up.

Also, they want me to change the level design that I made last week. They want the arena to have lest debris so it doesn't look too much like a asteroid field.

Last, sterling wants me to make a simple HUD like this one. I only have to make a health box and a box that will go on each side.

I don't think that I will have all of this done by tomorrow's class, but I will try to get at least the HUD done. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So last time I made a texture for one of the rocks I created last week along with a simple normal map for some detail. I'm trying to go for a post apocalyptic look, but for right now I'm just trying to make quick textures in Mudbox for my models.


Jeff suggested that I look into geology and the different rock types that there are and try to go for a particular feel, instead of just doing random things. I will do some quick research into rock types and make at least another texture today an hopefully finish the other ones over the weekend.


Here are the renders of the stuff that I've made for far:

So since last time I wrote about the progress of my project, we have decided to change the name from Atmoz to Graviators since its a little more descriptive and I actually think that it sounds much better.

Previously the game was a flying game, and like I mentioned before it was going to change. So the game is now a falling jousting game. The premise is that there will be battles fought in the air, but the player and the enemy will be falling towards each other thanks to a "gravity well" like object.

They will be able to shoot at each other from afar,  while dodging incoming fire and obstacles. Once they get close to each other, the game will switch to something like "bullet time" and be able to hit one another and then keep moving away from each other, and after a short break it all repeats if there was not a winner on the first go.

We have decided to work on two arenas, one that is in some sort of long tube that will be an enclosed arena and one that is in an open area. I'm in charged of the open area arena.

I've been getting a lot of inspiration from the James Cameron Avatar movie and trying to do something like floating land masses. But we decided that we were also going to add debris from ancient buildings (ex: roman temples or buildings). The reason why I'm trying to do that is that I want the arena to be filled with more than just rocks, but also because I want it to be a post apocalyptic feel since this game is suppose to be in the future.

So far, I've done really rough models just taking spheres and using the lattice tool to deform them. I've done solid rocks, and some that have a tunnel that would allow the player to go through them. We plan on inserting power ups as a risk/reward option for the player that is more experienced.

I've also done a really quick sample level with the few models that I've done so far, since one of the engineers wanted something that they could use in Unity to start working. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So this week class was canceled since more than have of the student decided to go to GDC, as did I. So now I'm going to spend one week in San Francisco. Unfortunately, my funds were a little low so I couldn't afford the pass that lets me in from the start of the Conference. So the first few days that I've been in San Francisco, I've been trying to update my resume and my portfolio.

Then on Wednesday I was able to go into the Career Pavilion and I got the chance to talk to a lot of people from many different companies. If there is one thing that I've learned, is that it's not enough to just have a portfolio online, you have to bring something with you to show. Wether that maybe a paper version of your online portfolio or a tablet to show your portfolio on. Many places that I talked to wanted to see my work but I couldn't show them. Its also thought me that there are a lot of people out there trying to get into the industry just like me, so I have to dedicate more time to learning new tools and improving my skills.

Next year when I come back to GCD I'll be ready! Thanks for reading.

So today we finally learned which games the professors thought were good enough to move on to be our thesis project for the next 2 semesters.

Sadly, the game I pitched didn't make the cut. And I'm now in a team that will be making a 3D kinect game. The prototype that was made for last week's pitched showed a man flying around a city trying to get through rings in the sky. The player uses the kinect to control the movement of the character.

But its going to change, we are still brainstorming ideas because they thought that the game was way out of scope. But they thought that the prototype was good enough to show that it was doable.

We have 3 artist in the team, which is a good thing because we will need a ton of environmental art assets. We will decided on Monday what we want to do and will start to work. In the meantime, that is all.

Thanks for reading.

So far, the game seems to be coming together nicely. We had a practice presentation on Monday, and tonight we are going to have the real presentation where we get to pitch our prototypes to industry professionals for our thesis project.

So far, I've been doing a lot of concept art and trying to get a clear idea of what our main character would look like. Below is some concept art that I've done, I'm not the best 2D but I think that I've improved over the last few months while being on this Masters program.




The first picture is a drawing of Wall-E, we think what our main character to look somewhere in the middle between Wall-E and Rob from Smash Brothers. The second picture is what an enemy unit could potentially look like. The last one is of what our main character PerCy could look like.

I've done a simple model of the last sketch and I put some very simple animations for our game. Hopefully they will look ok, and everything goes ok.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So I need to remember to update my blog, I will make sure that it doesn't take a month for me to make another post.

Well, at the beginning of this semester we were told to come up with a game idea to submit for consideration as a possible thesis project. I came up with a game idea I decided to call AI Termination. I don't know how many students submitted a game pitch, but it was narrowed down to seven teams. I was very lucky and my game idea got picked to move on to the next stage.

Since the middle of January, we have been working on making a white boxed prototype for each of our games with Unity. We still have about two weeks before the prototype is done, but we need to make sure that our prototype is playable by next week since there will be some people from Microsoft coming to visit us.

Brandon, has been working on getting together some kind of central location where we can all put our ideas together to start making some sort of bible for the game. He has been working on this wiki and so far its coming along nicely as we work on developing a narrative.

Since I originally pitched the idea, the game has gone through big changes. The prototype that we are currently working on will focus heavily on combat. We are still trying to implement the combos that I spoke about in the original pitch. The game won't have any puzzles, but we will be keeping the time manipulation ability.

The game has also morphed into something like an arena like setting. We will try to have multiple maps, but the player will have to finish one map before moving on to the next. The map is actually very simple, below is an example of a map that I've been working on:


Now I'm working on making simple shapes for the different components of this simple map. They are mostly going to be cubes and cylinders for now, but that should be enough to get the idea across.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So today is the start of my second semester in grad school, and I'm really looking forward to all the stuff that we will be doing, but part of me isn't ready.

This week we are suppose to put together a game pitch, and submitted to be considered for a class project. We also have to learn as much as we can of Unity since we will be using Unity to prototype the games for the first month.

I don't really know much of about Unity, so I will have to look for good tutorials to learn how to do basic things on it.

That's really all there is for this week, thanks for reading.

So today marks the day that I'm finally done with my first semester of Graduate School, and it has been the busiest that I've ever been. I still have some homework to turn in, but classes are over and today we presented our last prototypes.

I'm really proud of what we accomplished, and I think that this was the best game that i was a part of the whole semester.

Everyone really liked what we did and, as usual, everyone was really impressed on what Dan was able to achieve mostly on his own (I mean in terms of coding).

There are a few things that I wish we couldn't had more time to work on the project, but we still did a very good job.

This will be the last entry for this semester, and i can't wait for the start of the next semester where we will have a chance to pitch a game idea and have 2 games picked for the class to work on over the course of the next 2 semester. I already have an idea which is similar to the game I pitched last year in my undergrad capstone class, but I've made some improvements this time around which I hope will be enough to make it interesting for people to want to vote for it.

We are all suppose to submit a game design document this weekend, so I will see if I can post something over winter break. That is all for the foreseeable future, thanks for reading.

So I'm done with everything that I need to do for Prototype 4, and I'm glad that its finally done. I had a ton of 3D assets for this project, and I think that they turned out.

It was a little challenging because I had to model a bunch of different object that I had done before. One thing twas that I had to make a whole level in a 3D model as well as a boat, a fish, and a bunch of other stuff. Here is a render of the final scene that I put together using a bunch of the assets that I made for the intro screen.


I think it came out decent at the end. I will try to make one more post after the presentation tomorrow. That's it for now, thanks for reading.

So over the weekend, I got my act together and I managed to complete all of the art necessary for our fishing game.

They may not look that complicated, but it took me a while to do all the art myself, its actually one of the things that I actually don't like about the program. In the teams that we are placed, its always one producer, two engineers, and one artist. I shouldn't complain since Sterling has made a lot of the art for the HUD, but I just don't like it because if it wasn't for him I wouldn't have been able to get everything done by this next thursday.

Now the only thing that I have to do by tomorrow night is putting together a little scene in maya off all the assets I created and then getting a little render for the title screen. Then if I'm lucky, I may animate the scene so that it moves. But Dan said that he was going to look into it a little and see if it would work since he also wants to add some special lighting to make it look like time is progressing in the title screen.

Hopefully I will finish everything on time, so that I can finally get some decent sleep. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

I'm not sure how the code for our game is coming along, but I'm now done modeling a fish for our game.

So today we got introduced to our next client and what we are expected to do over the last 4 weeks of the semester.

This project is going to focus on a new piece of hardware being developed at the University of Utah. Essentially is a new type of controller, much like the current Xbox 360 controller but different. We are still not sure how much we can write about it on our project blogs, so for now I won't go into details of what it is and how its different than current controllers. I'll just refer to it as "The Controller".

So inorder for the people developing The Controller to know what it can and can't do, they want us to develop a game that will focus on the new mechanism of The Controller. They want us to make the game to showcase all the cool features of The Controller and that it can make a game much more enjoyable thanks to the its cool new features.

Dan came up with cool idea, and we are calling it Feelin' Fishy. Its going to be a fishing game, but you aren't going to be able to see the fish under the water. There is going to be a way that we are going to let the player know when they have a bite and you will have to pull the fish to you.

For now, Dan is going to set up the framework for the game and I'm going to make some really simple models in Maya for place holder while I get caught up on my other classes. I will eventually have to make a skybox and whatnot, but that is not for at least another week.

That is all for now, thanks for reading.

I haven't done any blog entries for this project, and I feel kind of bad. But we did a great job.

So I haven't posted anything since we presented our 2nd prototype. The presentation went really well, thanks to Josh's awesome presentation skills.

We got some good feedback, like we needed to make sure that the circuits looked a little more complicated and that it had to make sense on how it all works. I thought that the layout I made would get the idea across that it was a bomb and that everything was connected, but I guess it needs to be a little more clear.

I still don't know if any of the prototypes that we showed will actually get deployed to the Mechanical Engineering students like we were told at the beginning of the project.

Since then, we've started on our next prototype. This time our client is the Utah Museum of Natural History. They just finished building a new building for the museum and they are in the process of getting all the exhibits ready for when they officially open their doors to the public. But they have one problem, one of the exhibits that they had wasn't working the way that they had hoped.

The exhibit is called Futures (or something like that) and it has to do with technology and the future of Utah. They want to have a short game in that exhibit that will teach the visitors about how Utah will be impacted by its doubling of the population in the next 40 years and what we will have to do to manage all of our resources.

The game that they have right now has all that information, but its too wordy, too long, and really confusing. So we were called to try and save the exhibit.

We have to incorporate as much information about water conservation into our game, but it has to be a short game (about 2-4 minute play) that will be fun and teach something to the visitor about the future of Utah.

My team this time consists of: Brandon Karratti as the producer, Jorge Elola & Pace Sims as engineers, and Christine Olinquevitch & I as artist.

I'm so happy that there is another artist in my team this time, it means that I won't fall behind like on the other 2 projects because there is too much art to do and I have to do all of it.

So for our game, Pace got the original idea of coming up with a game that you have to "shoot" your resources to parts of Utah that need it the most. While making sure that you keep everyone happy and keep track of your limited resourced. We hope that this will make it easy to understand and fun to play for children and adults.

We are going to make this game using flash, I'm still not sure how all the technical stuff will work but I can leave that stuff to Pace and Jorge to figure out. In the meantime, Christine and I have to come up with some placeholder art so that the engineers can start to put stuff in place since we only have 3 weeks before the museum opens.

If we succeed over the other team (there is only 2 teams working for the UMNH this time, everyone else is working for another client on a different project) we will have our game shown on the exhibit.

I will have to brush up on Flash, but I don't think that it will be too hard since Christine is a graphic design major (or something like that). :)

That's all for now, thanks for reading.