So I did some tweaking to the factory character that I made, but this time I aded a gun.

I don't know if we are even going to add it, but if we do then we have something to work with.



I also made a really simple factory to place at the end of the level so that people can see where are going to go "next". We just won't have a next level for this prototype.



That's all for now, I will post another entry if there is other stuff I end up working on before the presentation tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

So yesterday after the professors went around the room critiquing out games, it was clear that I needed to make some much needed changes to the background. A lot of people couldn't tell that the blue in our background was actually water and not the sky.

So I had to go in and tweak it just a little and I added some islands that I made in illustrator (btw, my skills in Illustrator are definitely getting better) and not it looks way better.

Here is an example:


Compared to how it was before, it looks much more like a beach now.

I still have some stuff I need to do before we present tomorrow. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So I finally finished the last character for our game. I think this one looks much better than my last 2, I can at least say that after this I know Illustrator just a little bit better.

Here is what I did:



I think the first one looks better, but I don't know if people might think that the character has his knee caps really high, so I brought those things down a bit. But I don't know if it helps since he looks a little square now.

I still have to add a gun to the guy to finish him. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So I'm not very good at 2D art as I've mentioned before, but I sure as hell have improved over the last week or so.

After finishing the background, I started to work on our main character and the sprite sheet for the actions.

It's not very complicated, but when you don't really know what you are doing it makes it really hard to get anything done.

So here it is:


I still have to make 2 more sprite sheets, hopefully the next ones won't take me 7 hours to complete. :(

Thanks for reading.

So I finally finished the background for our first level.

Here is a section of the background I made:


Now that the background is done, I have to create a mask for them and I still have a ton of other stuff I need to work on. Troy is going to help me create assets, but I also have to make sure that these next few days I don't slack and that I try to get as much work done. That probably means that I will have to spend a few hours after work in the MGS lab. :(

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So since Monday, I've been working on the background for our game.

It has been taking me longer that I thought it would, but I can honestly say that my Photoshop skills are improving.

I think that I'm about 75% done with the background, and I hope to finish it today before class is over.

I will try to put the background up once I'm done.

Thanks for reading.

So we just got done with the first week of the MGS program, and it looks like the work is just starting. 

So I didn't really do much over the break, I actually feel kind of bad because there isn't much for me to blog about anymore. Most of the art stuff is done now, but I did work on some screen capturing over the break.

The only thing, is that Cam Studio sucks. I can either take video that looks really crappy but that everything moves the way it should, or I can use a better codec but nothing moves in the video.

So we are thinking of getting a copy of Fraps to do the screen capturing.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So today we had to present our game to some people from EA and other large companies to get some input for our game from professionals in the gaming industry.

Overall they really liked our games, all three of them. They had some really constructive for our game, most of which I can't remember at the moment.

A lot of it has got to do with the Tech side, and very little, if any, with the Art side.

Things have really slowed down for the Art side, we have a few things that we still need to do, but very minor. I haven't posted anything for the last week and a half, mainly because I haven't done anything for the team.

I should've been working on the trailer, but my Machinima class has taken a lot of my time in the last week.

Over the spring break, I hope that I will be able to work on the trailer and so some screen capturing.

Thats all for now, thanks for reading.

So as we get near to the finish line of this great project, things are starting to slowdown for the art team. We still need to make a few more assets for the game, but they aren't super important and we don't know if theres going to be time to add them in. So in the meantime I will record shorter bits of gameplay for the trailer, since we will be making two trailers in total.

Charlie was telling me that we will need to make a trailer that will be in-game and one that is the short "promotional" trailer. We still don't know how hard it's going to be to make those two trailers, but we have to get started on them because we don't want the deadline to creep up on us.

We didn't really do much in class today, mostly because about half the group was missing. But we did get to talk about a few things concerning the final boss battle for the game. We got some things worked out, and now Felix just need to talk to the rest of the programmers to see how its going to work.

I will try to review another game since I don't really have much to do for this sprint. We need to have some consistent activity on our App Hub account if we want other people to review our game in the next week or so. So far, not many people have reviewed game (at least not that I know about) so hopefully I will be able to help out the team this way.

One last thing, next Tuesday is the Major Expo at the Union Building and I will be there representing the Film side of our team. We will be showing off our game to people that come to the expo to hopefully get them interested in the EAE program if they haven't already declared a major with the university. I'm not really sure who else is going to be there with me from the Tech side, but hopefully I won't be there alone.

Thats all for now, thanks for reading.

So I started to work on the trailer over the weekend. I managed to get visual studio installed on my laptop and I compiled the code to play the game on my laptop. Charlie suggested I use Cam Studio to do some screen capturing of me playing the game.

I started recording some stuff and everything seemed to be working well. But then after 15 minutes of playing, I tried to see how it looked and the file was corrupted and Cam Studio crashed on me.

Now we are thinking about using Fraps instead. One of our teammates has an unrestricted version of fraps and we will probably just use his.

I also reviewed another game last night. I'm trying to get us enough activity so that when we submit our game for play testing next week, we will have enough activity that we won't just be shut down because we don't participate in the community enough.

I'm also done making a few textures for the asteroids and I will give them to Charlie tonight so that he can review them.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

So Charlie said that it would be a good idea to start working on our game trailer. At the moment I'm playing around with Cam Studio for screen capturing.

But before I can start on the trailer, I need to finish the textures that I made for my asteroids. This is because the way that Mudbox makes textures won't work with what we have in mind.

The programmers made it so that the size and the texture of the asteroid will be random, which means that the texture won't match the other asteroids if they get one of mine. So I have to come up with something else. I will try to have that done over the weekend.

Then I will try to get really good at the game so that I can start recording cool scenes from the game to put in the trailer.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

So today is the day that we are suppose to be at Beta. And we are, sort of.

The tech guys say that there is still a few things that need to be tweaked (ex: the capital ship ai). So at this point we are really close, but not really there. But the game is playable at this moment. Some of the stuff might not be there, but it feels like a game now.

Rodger played the game, and he was very happy with how far we have come in just a few weeks. At the beginning of the semester, they actually wanted to cut our game because they didn't think that we could actually take what we had at the end of last semester and turn it into a game.

I also got to play our game for the first time today. I've been able to see some of the tech guys play it before, but never by myself. It felt really cool to actually see it with my own eyes.

Over this last weekend, I worked on a few asteroids to make them look just right. I was trying to add a normal map to each so that we could get some detail, but James told me to not worry about that. That the asteroids aren't really going to be all that important so just do a color texture and thats it.

So I've managed to complete two asteroids, and I'm currently working on another one. Since my Photoshop skills aren't that good, I've had to so the textures using Mudbox. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I think I'm doing a better job now.

Now that I have Maya on my laptop, I'll see if I actually have time to get around to posting renders of all the work that I've done.

That's all, thanks for reading.

Last class time, Charlie told me of a more efficient way to make asteroids within Maya. So I'm in the process of making different kinds of asteroids for the game. They are going to be different size and shape.

So we have till the end of this week to finish our game because we need to start Beta testing next week.

Yesterday I finished the first fighter that I made at the beginning of last semester. I tweaked a few things, but overall it looks the same. I also attached a few guns to the ship along with a few locators.

I also made an asteroid. I tried to make one in Maya, but I couldn't get it to look right. So I made it with 3ds Max and exported it in fbx format. Then I brought it into Maya to edit it. And then I ran into a problem.

3ds Max had made the model using only triangles, so I had to spend between 1 and 2 hours deleting edges to make everything quads.

It looks great now, but it's probably too high of a resolution. I don't know if I'll have to make it again or not.

During class, we didn't really do much. We did talk about another of the games that is also in the process of going into beta. But I won't go into that.

We mainly talked about what needs to be done to get to full beta.

In the art side of stuff, we need to finish a few things. We need to tweak some ships, make a tone more asteroids. And some other last minute stuff.

While on the note of asteroids, Charlie told me of a way that is much more effective at creating asteroids than what I did. We are trying to get them to look good, but at the same time stay as low poly as possible. Charlie wants me to stay below 200 faces at all possible.

I will give it a try tomorrow night while I'm in the lab, and see how that goes.

That's it, thanks for reading.