Monday 29 November 2010

Possible Painting Idea [02]

I like this one better, mostly because I had a photo of the skeleton of a bird to take reference from. Inspired by ROA. I can imagine this one on a floor, and the player having to get up high somehow to view it from above before being able to get in through the square.

Possible Painting Idea [01]

We have a presentation for tomorrow, and I wasn't sure what to draw for the painting example... So I drew Tim's Tagger dude coming out of the wall.


On the left is the image from straight on, on the right is the image when viewed from the left side of the image. When the image is activated the player will have to jump "through" the circular/square portion of the image to enter the next level.

Saturday 27 November 2010

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Staircase and Door Frames

I completed a usable staircase today, so now the player can move between the floors freely. Will most likely pretty-up the staircase during the Production phase. I've also fitted door frames into position, but when I did I realised I'd made the upstairs rooms too tall compared to downstairs, so the door frames were too big for downstairs. That will be fairly simple to fix though, I'll just need to adjust the heights of the door frames and the upstairs to match those of downstairs.


Also started thinking about lighting for inside the house. May just [unrealistically] place point lights in strategic areas, or will use multiple dimmed directional lights. At the moment it's quite dim, I've just placed one point light in most of the rooms.


Haven't managed to pull together the script for the Level-access mechanic, but I have collected various scripts that could be handy to mash up and put together and written out a basic outline of what the scripts need to do.

Thursday 18 November 2010

Plan of Action!

Final Project

I've been feeling very unorganised lately and don't feel like I've been focusing much brain power on course work. So, today is going to be a full on organisation evening, where I'm going to gather up all the different bits and bobs to do with the final project, such as placing blog posts into the dev-diary, and gathering written work into the Concept Doc, so I can figure out how much time we've got left to do what.

Rapid Films

Jess and I managed to hand something in, unfortunately I can't figure out what the problem is with the exporting of the avi... it did the compressed version but all the colours were screwy and the animations didn't play, but the uncompressed version ended up being 3.3GB and wouldn't play... I don't know.

The next brief is to add to the story of a video the organisers created, in which each of them died an unorthodox death and there was a mysterious brown envelope involved.



Only rule is that entries must contain the brown envelope. The original rules were to have exactly 3 minutes 33 seconds with an unorthodox death and less than 25% dialogue, but the organisers changed it and pushed the deadline back to December 5th to try to get more people involved and not scare off those already around. Personally I didn't think the original limitations would have caused any of them any problems, but some people seemed put off for some reason.

Dissertation

Got some a couple of interesting links about Digital Natives and Immigrants recently [here's Part 1 and Part 2], which nudged the direction of my dissertation over again. Definitely going to have to rewrite my proposal now and change what's going to happen with my chapters. I'm hoping this will be the last time now for major direction changes, especially since the Digital Natives idea has brought the ideas in the dissertation closer to the essay I handed in last year. It gives another explanation as to why writing an essay would be difficult for students now.

Monday 15 November 2010

Upstairs?

Here's the initial layout for the upstairs of the house. As for access to upstairs, we were originally thinking of putting the staircase in the middle and knocking out a wall downstairs, but I'm wondering now if it might be better to put the staircase in the top left corner of the building..

Baby Steps

Tim here., I've been busy working on the 1st Puzzle level aka. Training Level. Simple map which will look at movement and painting. I also wanted to see what kind of atmosphere I could get from Unity. Still having problems with the actual Mechanics though So any programmers out there please help out.

Saturday 13 November 2010

Downstairs


Here's a quick printscreen of the ground floor of basic house model I've been putting together, based on the floor plans shown. Eventually there will be a staircase in place to allow the player access to rooms upstairs.





And an update on the Unity3D vs UDK question: We've switched back to the idea of using Unity3D. Much easier, so more brain power can be used on the puzzles :)

Saturday 6 November 2010

Lots to dooo

Dissertation

Had a help session on how to write a dissertation yesterday, was probably very helpful. I realised that if I write a minimum of 500 words per week [starting yesterday], then that will be 9000 words in the 18 weeks I have left [not including 2 weeks for proofreading the final draft and a week for printing and binding]. I'm still a bit iffy on the subject I'm writing about, but I think it will definitely be centred around the concept of fun and having fun and the effects of the need for fun on society.

Final Major Project [blog]

It's going alright, this week I'll be working on the house which will act like a hub for the levels, while Tim works on the levels and some character designs.



Rapidfilms

The animation seemed well received, I enjoyed how many laughs the "that's what she said" joke got. The next challenge is to create a 2-3 minute film by Thursday based on two characters, in the genre our groups picked out of the hat. Our genres were Horror and Scorsese styled gangster/crime.

It's probably going to be an animation from us again, but so far all I've actually drawn is this picture of De Niro's face:



The story I came up with is this:

A gangster is walking along a street. He's somewhat aged and world-weary. He passes a young pretty girl; he doesn't know her, but her face seems familiar. He wonders where has he seen her before. As the girl passes, she also seems to find his face familiar.

Flashback to a faded past, and the guy is much younger. He has been sent to kill the men of a rival family - the girl's. Shots fire everywhere. Blood falls everywhere.

Colour returns. The man's eyes widen as he realises who the girl is. He turns, a breeze blows by. She's not there.

Colour fades and we're back to the past again. The camera pans up towards the nearby window. The girl has been left alone, surrounded by the dark red of her brothers. The breeze blows by, the scent of blood filtering out through the night, attracting the attention of a dark figure. The dark figure, fangs glinting, dissolves into the darkness, and the scene fades to black.

The quiet echo of a scream is heard, as the camera pans across to a close up profile of the man's troubled face, still peering out at the dimly lit street before him. Out of the darkness behind him, the girl emerges, hate ablaze in her eyes.

Just as she is about to strike, the scene cuts swiftly to black.

The Hub-House

This week I'll be working on the abandoned house, which will be the "hub" of the strange puzzle-levels [Tim will be working on those].

The layout of the house will be loosely based on the layout of what used to be my grandparents' house; a detached three-bedroomed house with two floors, kitchen, living-room, bathroom and study, with access to loft spaces either side of the upstairs-bedroom.

Some sketched layouts of the place

The house itself was built in the Sixties, but for the game we may make the house older. The time period is yet to be decided, but here's a study of a nice little fireplace I found in some friends' terraced house in Newport.


Tuesday 2 November 2010

Some Art-Style Work

I did a little bit of playing with some watercolours and salt to see if I could get any nice colour/texture combinations:

And here's an image of what some graffiti on the wall might actually look like in-game: