Tamoanchan is a 2-4 player game set on a floating arena made out of randomly spawned blocks. Players must strategically lift the blocks and push them towards their opponents in an attempt to knock them off before the time limit runs out. Only one can be victorious.
Our final year project was split into 2 halves, the conceptual stage and the developmental stage. During the first half I focused on organising the design document since this was the conceptual stage.
Design Document
Given our lack of programming knowledge we attempted to use UDK kismet to create a prototype, though were unable to find a way to make a multiplayer game set in a single screen arena. When it was apparent that this program wasn't for us we moved to Unity - a program we had worked with for our previous years project. For a short while we looked into programming the game ourselves [an almost impossible feat looking back on it now], but just before game development was about to begin I heard back from a friend who is a proficient programmer and was willing to help see this project through to the end.
Character Design by Daisy Spiers
Our game was finally on track! Once Daisy had begun creating orthographics for the four characters we split the modelling between the four artists. Each one of us would model a character ready for the game. I decided to model the Dragon character, which I did in Maya. His shape was very rounded with a huge stomach. His stylised design gave him an unspoken jolly personality and so before I begun I had already decided to consider the way he might be animated and that it would be nice if his belly would bounce. I made sure to loop edges around his stomach in consideration of the rigging and animation to make it easier to weight paint.
I was in charge of rigging 3 of the models: The Bird, The Panther and The Dragon. All 3 were pretty basic bi-ped rigs that I lay out individually for each model. I used IKs for all the leg movements and used controllers to organise individual singer movements as well as expressions for full hand clenches.
I parented the head feathers of The Bird to a single curve, I then attached an expression to these to give it 'bounce' and allowed them to move in a unified action. Though we weren't going to have characters speaking in our demo, I added a control for the beak to open and close in case it might be needed later.
For The Dragon, I made sure to add a joint for the belly-bouncing movement and also additional joints in the tail, in the event that it may want to be curved in the way presented in the earlier concepts.
Expressions were added to the control curves for the ears of The Panther allowing for individual movement and flexing of the ears in a more cat-like manner since this part of the body would be closest and most noticeable next to the camera during gameplay.
We got the game working in time for The Grad Show and it was a hit! In that sense I mean that it was popular with all ages and though hesitant to play with people they may not have met before, everyone was soon getting into the competitive atmosphere and were playing differently than we had seen before to outwit their opponents which was brilliant and exceeded our expectations.
This was the Alpha trailer that was submitted for the end of our project, there were some minor bugs still in the game at this point which were fixed in time for the grad show:
Production for Tamoanchan has temporarily been put on hold whilst we pursue other projects, though we fully intend to return to it in the future and update the models, animations and textures.
Credits:
Jamie Lewis - Animation, Modelling
Daisy Spiers - Concept artist, texturing
Craig Fox - Modelling, Rigging, Animation
Chris Cameron - Programmer
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