Game Development

Game Development

Intro

The development of the game and of any game I imagine begins with knowing the capabilities of the team. A team of eight was a rather large team in comparison to others and so gave us a desire to be ambitious. Once figuring out every ones preferred role and desired specialities it would give us an Idea of what we could realistically achieve. The roles decided upon were as followed :

Adon: Game Designer, concept artist and gui artist.

John: Game Designer, concept artist, coder

Alessio: Lead Coder

Matt: Lead Concept Artist

James: Lead Environment artist

Alex:  Character Artist, Environment Artist

Tom: Character Artist

Jack: Animator

 Roles were divided up in a way as to create an efficient work flow. Initially Matt was the only one to step forward as a concept artist however, in order to facilitate the 3 modellers concepts would need to be produced quicker than one person could do. To solve this Matt would be the lead Concept Artist governing myself and John as we assisted in doing concepts for environment and character. With 3 people working on concept art we aimed at giving the modellers references to work from as early as possible so that time was not wasted and they had sufficient time to model. With multiple character and environment artists it gave us the hope of creating something of a large scale and scope.

When it came to actually thinking about what it is we wanted to make a game centred around magic or a magic user was the initial line of thought. It is something that we all discussed as a team and contributed to. As we discussed it more we developed ideas of possible characters and narrative. We wanted our character to be a morally conflicted anti-hero type character. We came up with the idea that he had been locked away for war crimes or for become a threat to his superiors. After discussing it for a while we decided upon a base idea that you played a combat orientated mage who had been locked away by his own people out of fear of him. The prison in which the player would be kept and start the game in would stop you from using your powers. Your powers would be sealed away and the main objective would be to break out and unlock them in order to fight your former masters. With this rather vague idea in mind we looked at other already existing games that might have similar mechanics, story or characters that we might use for inspiration.

God of War

This game had a similar type of character design and feel to what we had discussed. The strong brutish type of male character that is seen in the God of war series was one of the many inspirations for the character. 

Elements of the story and the general aesthetic provided a lot of direction and inspiration as to what could be achieved. 

We looked at smite mainly from a game play point of view rather than aesthetic reason.To get an idea of what kind of spells and camera movement worked this was a good game to look at due to its third person view and variety of spells and abilities with in the game.  

Dark Souls

We looked at dark souls for inspiration in game play and way obstacles and enemies are placed in order to give a challenging experience.


Initial level design after discussions with team members and researching the layout of other similar games and after talking about the story of the game.

This is a basis of some of the elements that the game level can have but we will see how much we can get down. 

The story and game centres around a battle mage a mage trained for the purpose of war. Working for a guild of these warrior mages they would use any means to gain strength including dark forces that most other magic uses deem too unsafe to use. This Guild run power elder mages has its own agenda to take over the land and kingdom that employ them. They plan on doing this by using soul magic and binding souls of humans to golem like creatures they can control. The main character also seeks out his own agenda too, to get stronger than his superiors by using a dark power he had discovered and kept from them in fear of his increasing power guild intervened and locked him up as they continued with their plan of making these artificial golem warriors.

We decided that we wanted to give him a monk type look but to keep at strong brute appearance as well. These are some of the characters we looked at. Most of these characters use physical attacks in combat. We had already decided to use magic and ranged combat however these characters gave us the idea to use martial art like movements in the spell casting process. Looking at the animations these characters had gave us a foundation and idea of where to start with animating the character.

Initial character designs started off by listing the attributes we wanted him to have and the kind of background he might have. When talking about the story we toyed with the idea that he was a war criminal and magic user trained to fight in war like scenarios.  He would be a combat veteran and would portray the rough, battle hardened demeanour you might expect. Unlike a lot of magic users in game we did not want him to be a frail old wizard like character but to be capable physically as well.

Some of the Characteristics and elements that we thought that he should have that would comply with these ideas is battle scars, an aged look due to being in prison, some sort of branding or runes that would mark him as a prisoner or a magic user.

The kind of spells we want our character to use would be those meant for combat. Some of the ideas that we discussed in meetings was the different types or classes of spell he might use. Three types we established as a base. Offensive, Defensive and Mobility spells. These would be divided into 3 separate trees that the player would have to unlock as they progressed though the level. Offensive would be spells to damage the enemies like a fire ball or lightning type spell. Defensive would be to protect you from incoming attack like a stone wall or ice armour etc. And mobility would help you get around the map and avoid damage as well as place you in a position to do more damage. 

As he is locked in prison his clothing will be minimal. He will be chained up to restrict his physical movement but also to restrict his magical powers and this will be the basis of the progression system in the game to begin with. The bracers on the character’s arms will restrict his magical powers and will be powered by crystals found throughout prison that will unlock spells as you find them and break them. The collar on the neck will show the players health and will be a way of integrating ui elements with the player model. The bracers will have runes engraved in them that will glow and indicate the spells blocked. As you destroy the crystals around the level your bracers will change to indicate a new spell is available for use. Hopefully this will be possible and minimize the use of ui elements like in games such as dead space that uses the back of the suit to display health 

Further design of the bracer and some of the elements it should include. The initial idea is that this flat image would be the ui representation of when you unlock however this might be ambitious and will be subject to change. The different runes will each represent a spell or ability. For purposes of the slice of game produced there will be minimal skills unlocked but enough to demonstrate the progression feature of the game. 

Runes from the elder scrolls game series I looked at in order to get some ideas of what the runes on the bracers could look like. 

Rune designs done in photoshop ready to be used as alphas in zbrush to do details on the bracers and neck brace of the character. Each design will have a unique symbol that will correspond to a spell or ability.

Character Concept

Using all the different aspects and inspirations it was time to do a final design for the character so it could be modelled. 

Simple design of the character in proportion. This is the design of the body mainly and clothes the bracers would be designed more in depth as the ui develops and gets finilized

Colored design of the character. It follows the themes that were agreed open and reflects some of the narrative choices made.

Basic Model sheet of the body sizes and shape to be modeled








Large model sheet of the heard to get a better idea of the shape and details that might go on it.

Furthter GameDevelopment

Alot of the ideas from the initial one sheet have been changed due to rethinking what was possible and what time would allow. Alot of the problems arose from working in a large group and having communication issues between the different members. Tasks were set but the follow up was lacking and if i was to restart i would be more consistent with following up on individuals task instead of giving them a rough dead line. Alot of the time issues were due to deadlines not being specific enough or enforced enough.

UI Development

Some changes have been made from the initial ideas about ui and it is now necessary to display the health and the cooldowns for the spells you can use. In order to do this I will create simple health bars and cooldown icons in photoshop. The design will be simple and will match the runes that are on the back of the characters collar as originally these would indicate health.

A lot of games when it came to ui had standard health bars. A green bar used to show the value of the players health that would decrease when hit. I wanted to follow this simple model but to integrate the rune designs as started before. In order to do this I will make a bar that would represent the actual health and a border to contain it in to show where health use to be. 

The health bar will run vertically to match the pattern on the players prison shackles over 3 runes as the player is damaged the green in the health bar will  decrease. This is done by using a fill image and decreasing the value of the fill as damage is applied

As well as decreasing the health bar will change color to a red to indicate the players health is critically low. The code has been kept simple as it will need to be integrated into the main scene and character code later in this demo there is an automatic damage function that will decrease the health on the start of the scene to show the health bar working that will need to be removed as well.



The menus would be of simple design as well using the rune like shapes to form boarders and buttons to match the theme that the ui is taking. The buttons on the actual menu would be limited to continue which would take you to your last save point, new game start from the cut scene to the start of the level, controls explaining the movement and spells and exit to exit the game. The In game menu would be slightly different but basically the same.                                                  

The title screen would consist of the main menu and an image of the character that would fade in as you start. To give the title screen added effect i added a particle system in front of the canvas. The smokey particle effect gives an increase in atmosphere as well as the music found on freesound.org then edited to suit the theme of the game more.




Using unity 5's button system of using booleans to turn objects on and off it was just a matter of connecting the right buttons to turning on and off the right game objects.








In game look at all the different ui elements coming together. Health on the left and cooldowns for the 2 spells you start off with on the right. Ui development changed from initial designs due to many reason but i think this final look still complies with the minimalist design that we set out to achieve.





This is the image that will appear once you have died made from images similar to the main menu.