Perry Devlin Capstone

Update

So, since the last blog post, there have been many changes. Frankly, most of the content that was being worked on throughout summer and the semester was put aside completely (for now) in order to better make way for the change of gameplay. Since this is shifting to a walking simulator, the need for different abilities drops to nearly zero. While I would love to add them back in at a later time (after I graduate, for example), I acknowledge that now is not the time to focus on them.

So, what have I been busy with?

ART

Art is the answer. The goal os to have a vertical slice done by the end of the semester, which is in two weeks. That means that I need a fully rendered, playable, and enjoyable area of my game. The area I chose is the area the player starts in, which is the Ancient Grounds.

The pictures above are some paint overs that I used to help me with the layout and look of the in-game area. The first two represent the Ancient Grounds, and the third is an early idea of what the village will be looking like.

Since I am focusing on the one area, I also make many assets to occupy the environment. The list of assets include many types of rocks/boulders, pillars, basalt structures, fire pits, and a guard wall (which is still in progress).

I also tried turning some of my materials from the Unity Standard shader to my custom toon shader, and this is the result:

The toon is certainly interesting. There are many parts about it that I do like, but there is a lack of detail that comes with it. The shading can look very clean and cool, and does brighten up the otherwise mono-chromatic landscape, but overall I think it doesn’t fit the game.

Overall, the progress has been a lot, but there is still so much to do that it feels significantly slower than reality. I still have sound, interaction, user interface, menus, and story elements to implement. Interaction and UI/menus have been started, and they are looking decent. I should have a sneak peek of those on my Instagram soon, so make sure to check it out!

Oh, also, I switched to first person view. This is (hopefully) just for the vertical slice, as I plan on working on the character model, rigging, animating, and movement over winter break when I have significantly more time. But, right now moving to first person takes my worries away from crisp movement and animations so I can focus on everything else that needs to be done.

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to check out my Instagram and portfolio!

Crazy Stuff Happening

Oh boy, has a lot happened since last month. Also, it has already been a month?! That’s really insane. Anyway, last post I mentioned that I was working on abilities and movement in general. I have been continuing with that a lot, and even have done a good amount of art and modeling. There have been a lot of bugs with the jumping and the frame/tick rate, which was a pain to deal with. Well, on to specifics:

Art

Starting with art this time! I recently got my hands on Substance Painter and ZBrush, so you best believe I have been using it. I absolutely love both, and I’ve put in a good amount of practice into them. Below are some things that I did:

This was a quick sword I made for the sole purpose of practicing with Substance Painter (first time). I had a great time with it.

The short-flamberge is going to be in my game, on the character, as a broken weapon that was used to defeat the evil that took place before the game. It’s a design that I’ve basically wanted to make for a very long time (with minor tweaks, of course).

Here are some heads sculpts I did:

This is my most recent sculpt (still in progress). I am looking at Dishonored a lot for style reference, without trying to copy it exactly.

While I’m only showing these three most recent heads (of seven heads I’ve done in ZBrush, and of eight head sculpts I’ve done ever), there is a very clear progression and improvement shown. The pictures go from last made to most recent, and I am making some great improvements over these three (mostly seen in the anatomy itself). I am absolutely enjoying learning more about this application.

I’ve also been trying different ways to sculpt. The two most recent were me sculpting a rough skull first, then adding some details from there. The nose and ears are separate objects that I sculpted on, and the rest is essentially built up in a similar way to actual sculpting (from what I know). I know it is early in my 3D modeling career, but this particular technique will probably be used for quite a while.

Design/Code

This is where the most work went, and most of the frustrations. I will try to be quick with this part, since it is so much.

The jump wasn’t getting called every time I pressed the jump button
- Many things were tried, but the thing that seemed to work (for now) was increasing the amount of time that fixed time was being called
The glide was having a similar problem, and seemed to be fixed along with the jump
The dash was changed completely. It is now a blink/teleport ability. Players aim (when mid-air, time slows) and a crosshair indicates where they will blink to if it is in range. There is also a particle effect to aid in conveyance
A playtesting level was made
Player slows down on different levels of inclines
Character no longer continues to run or turn against walls
Coyote-time was added for extra forgiveness on jumping off of ledges
Scope was increased along with the story, then promptly decreased significantly
- Went from two different timelines to essentially a walking simulator

Going off of the last point, I will mainly say that my entire game idea started off as a walking simulator. After all, I wanted to showcase my art skills paired with slight story-telling. It progressed to a rather complicated adventure platform, which was way out of scope for me. I aim to keep some platforming elements and my story, but go strongly back towards the “walking simulator” style of game that is more doable for me.

Well, that’s the rather shorthand version of everything that has happened since the last post!

Check out my Instagram and newly update website!

p.dev.art

Website

Prototyping

It has been a little bit since my last update. I have been going full force into code and design, planning out many aspects of the game and programming the players movement and abilities. In addition to this intense time, I moved in to college and that was an ordeal on its own.

Prototyping Movement

I built out an environment for the player to run around and interact with. There are things to climb, jump on, and run across. In addition to that, I added a couple of abilities in the form of pickups (all of them are tentative with the goal of testing them out in mind). I managed to create a super jump, glide, and dash. The dash is, by far, the most janky thing I have made up to this point. The glide feels really good at this early state, which is a good sign. It is, however, a little overpowered. The super jump is hard to aim, but paired with the glide, you can basically get past any obstacle in the prototype.

Some things about the abilities:

Super Jump
- Hold down left control (will be crouch button) for 0.75 seconds and press space to jump higher
- if running forward, super jump will provide extra forward momentum. The same goes for sprinting
Glide
- Provides some forward momentum that gradually increases (will be changed to velocity isn’t too much)
- Glide time limit of two seconds
Dash
- Shoots player forward based on where the model is facing
  - Goal is to change it to wherever the camera is facing
- Currently glides forward certain distance, but doesn’t really work on any slope
- Unlimited dashes on ground (will be changed)
- Max of two dashes midair

They are currently able to be used together. So if you dash while gliding, you will go very far. The same goes for gliding and super jumping. There obviously is balancing that needs to be done, but as of right now, it works in the simplest way.

Aside from abilities and movement, I recently finished the camera collision, which was giving me way too much trouble than it should have. I tried many different things and looked at many tutorials, but the one thing that worked was, unfortunately, getting code from someone else. Despite the blow to my confidence, it’s a good thing that it works! At least I tried a lot of different things, and still had to implement it into my code.

The next thing on the agenda would be foot IK’s. My goal is to have the classic elevation detection so the feet move to stay on the ground. Many, if not most, games have this, so it would be painfully obvious if my game didn’t have that.

Art

Unfortunately, I have not been able to get much art done lately. I have done some sketches and a single environment concept painting (I tried matte painting for the first time). The sketches cover environments and architecture, faces and hair, and also iconography for the village banner. I will show the matte painting and a few of the sketch pages:

Unfinished, but decent nonetheless

I apologize for the unprofessional pictures of the sketches; I didn’t have a scanner or good lighting.

Either way, you can see my process a little bit, and how I concept.

Plans

For the next few weeks, my schedule is looking like the following:

Concept art
- Environment
- Obstacle designs
More character designs
IK foot detection
Start vaulting and character step-up (onto different elevation)

Be sure to check out my Instagram to see more of the game that I couldn’t show here!

p.dev.art

Designing Through Obstacles

Hello again! Since the last update, which was eight days ago I believe, I have done a good amount of work.

Coding!

To start, the climbing system using IK movement kind of broke a little bit. I showed a video of it on my Instagram (p.dev.art), and while I ended up improving it after that post, it went downhill from there. I connected my player controller scripts to the climbing script which, to be fair, did work. I can now walk, run, and jump when not climbing, and then climb when I jump onto a wall or any surface that is steep enough. Of course, the movement still feels janky, but I expected nothing less from a couple weeks of work on it. By all means it is a very early working version of movement.

Since I tried many, many things with the scripts with no success, I reached out to the creator of the tutorials that I have been following. Unfortunately, he is out of his office for a while. So, on to different things!

Design!

I am aiming to have a small environment in Unity for the character to run around in by this upcoming Monday. It will have obstacles, things to climb on, and (hopefully) a mock-up of the first platforming puzzle. I also wish to have it reflect the theme of the desired game environment, as opposed to a random layout.

I began designing the world map as well, which is more difficult than I expected. It is fun, but will most likely take me more time than I thought it would. After all, this isn’t just a linear game I am hoping to make.

Art!

Besides rough world designs, this past week was rather light on art. I did some character posing and sketches of some small designs. Other than that, there wasn’t much.

Poses and messing around with sword positions
Cape designs around sword positions

Future!

For the next week, I wish to have a more finalized world layout, as well as some more platforming and climbing obstacles drawn out. World design is a big thing right now, and getting it more fleshed out will really help with Unity progress as well.

I really hope to progress a little bit more on the movement and climbing as well, but I most likely will have to either ignore that for now, or pretend like the animations aren’t completely broken.

I am still a little bit unsure of how I want these blog posts to be written, so it might be a little weird for the next few posts while I am figuring this all out. I hope everyone is enjoying this and stays tuned in for future posts!

Again, check me out on Instagram for more art: p.dev.art.

Welcome!

Welcome to my senior capstone BFA blog! This is where I will be posting updates on the development of my solo game. For this first post, I will be briefly explaining what I have done so far this summer, and of course I will explain my game a bit.

I have already done a fair share of work, with ideation, concepting, and some coding. Since I started, I have made multiple documents, which include: outlining the entire game, the environment it is set in, art styles, pickups, development schedule, and gameplay. The art I have done is centered around character armor concepts and environment thumbnails. Some of which I will show below:

My thoughts for this game are to make something that showcases what I am good at, in exactly the way that will do it best. I hope to show off my art skills, which encompass concept art, 3D modeling, and lighting. I also hope that my ideas, game design skills, and level design gets showcased. Besides showing off, I really want to learn a lot too. I am restarting the coding side of my brain after a long hiatus, as well as learning SideFX Houdini. My design skills will surely improve as well, in addition to all of my development and scheduling skills.

A sort of walking-simulator is the best bet, with platforming and light puzzle elements. Most likely, the platforming and puzzles will be combined into one. Gameplay-wise, specifically, it will be mostly linear paths apart from the two, maybe three, hub areas with branching paths from them. That way I can place challenges at each branching path and have the player use the abilities at each one.

There are a couple more gameplay elements that are core to the game that I won’t share just yet, but I will say one or two short things about the story. The game will start with the player awakening on a large piece of dead land, without remembering a lot of what happened. Looking around, it becomes very clear that there was a very large battle that happened here. The player must find out what actually happened by exploring and adventuring through a very broken land. Of course, there will be abilities and items, but I will say the progression and gameplay isn’t exactly traditional.

Quick interjection – some things I have worked on thus far:

Coding movement and climbing in Unity3D
Character/armor concepts
Environment concepts
Houdini research
Shader coding/research
Many game design documents + flow map
etc.

Like I said, I don’t really want to spoil too much in my first blog post. Instead, it should be a quick introduction and a way to show that I have actually started work on this massive undertaking. I will keep this site updated, especially during my school year! I can’t wait to have everyone who is interested along for this journey!