Personal GameJam

Our 2.5D game took form over the weekend, it was a 2-player co-op/competitive game. The aim is to have the most points collected by destroying blocks by the end of each level, or when one player has run out of lives. The further you make it, the more points you can build up... but there is also the chance to win with most points even if you lost all your lives! The choice is up to you...

I got some initial levels mocked up, built the main set of assets in Maya and implemented them into Unity3D. Unfortunately we couldn't get the collision working sufficiently to properly test the game or begin adding animated level sections, but below is a selection of screenshots to give you a good idea of the game:

48hr Game Making

My friend Chris and I have decided to try and build a game together in 48hrs. The game is a simple combination of Pong and Breakout. I will be creating the assets and building the game Unity3D and Chris will be providing all the scripting to make the game work. Below are my concept scribblings  for the bat and brick design before I begin working on them in 3D.

Aphelio Unnamed Project

I have been working as an intern with a large team of talented people since April. The Project was for an online browser game being made in Unity. My role has been as a 3D environment artist, modelling and texturing low-poly art assets for use in the game. Below are a few example shots of what I have been working on and the concept art I was referencing:

 Main arena

 

 Concept art by Toby Jones

Work belongs to Aphelio

Shooshi - WIP

Currently, my team and I are working on a mobile game entitled 'Shooshi'. Shooshi is a fast-paced arcade game designed for staggered release across the 3 current most integral phone-application marketplaces; Android, Apple and Windows. The Shooshi characters are mischievous, defective sushi that need to be eradicated before they take over!

We are building it in Unity3D since we are all quite competent users after working on Tamoanchan and Sparks.To put together the 2D game in a 3D engine we have been using the Smooth Moves to animate our sprites.

More information to follow as the project progresses!


Some early menu design concepts:

 

Low frame test animation:

Gameplay example screenshot:

Tamoanchan - Game City 2012

Tamoanchan was shown at Game City, Nottingham this year. The game went down very positively - even more so than at the Grad show - since it was available to a larger audience this time. We were all very pleased with the public response and are looking forward to working on the game further in the future!


In the meantime, the game was also voted to the finalist list of the Student Game category of TIGA2012! Fingers crossed, we are up against games such as QUBE by fellow Newport Alumi team, Toxic Games.

Further information and pictures from Game City and updates about the game can be found here:
Tamoanchan Game Facebook

University Dissertation

In my final year of University I wrote my dissertation on:

'The ‘paradox’ of women in the games industry and what this means for the future of gaming'

My dissertation attempts to unravel gender politics that swamp the video game industry and suggests that to grasp a more democratic gender audience, we need to make people aware that women are a rising demographic, and to make games more accessible to them we should look to gender equity within the circles of games industry and take advantage of the new things this might offer to game design of the future.

Below is a link to my dissertation:

Dissertation

Tamoanchan - Final Year Project

To bring together everything we had learnt in our time at university, we wanted to do something special that demonstrated all of our talents. We wanted to make a complete game; something to really stand out at the end of year Grad Show. The game would need to have a simple enough mechanic so that you could pick up a controller and jump straight into the game. We wanted to recreate that arcade feeling of early 2D platformer games where you would be fighting it out in the game as well as jostling about and having fun outside of the game... Tamoanchan was born.

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