06/05/2015 - 13/05/2015

Last week we had to present our game however we had a problem with the connection to the server that never happened before! The good thing about this is the fact that now the programmers of our team (Wade, Gerald and Harley) created a server that works offline.

All textures that I create I count with nice personalized Photoshop brushes to help me to shape the texture in the way I want because draw this by using the pencil tool is not my thing. This is the ray roof that I created last week:

Hay roof with some color variation

This lovely roof was my inspiration

Another thing was the creation of a UV map for Mackenzie's mushroom creation:

Mackenzie's mushroom creation model

Top of the mushroom - Process of creating the texture from a UV map

Base of the mushroom - Can you see a Bob Marley feeling in the middle of the process ;)

I came from a designer background however I never designed anything for games until this semester. Every time I create some new texture I post on our closed group on Facebook and I receive feedback from the other members of the group. Most of the time they like the options that I post or sometimes I have to change or redo the whole texture again. This process of posting on Facebook is working pretty good and Mackenzie also posts her work in there and we can comment.

We have total freedom of speech in the group. Everybody is very receptive to criticism and the communication between us works pretty well.

Today in the Desk critique session was more about the visual part appeal that is missing in our game. I believe that the most important thing in a game is to make it fun and functional and our team was pretty focused on that. Now we're in the process of "beautify" the Archmage. When the teacher asked my opinion about "what is missing in the game" I could only agree with the shading part that is missing. By agreeing with them it doesn't mean that I don't have opinion about it because I think the game is in development process and make all spells, actions and interactions to work and also make it fun to play are the most important things. Every step is being taken and everybody in the group is working hard. I'm personally very tired. The last two weeks for me are being the busiest ones because the other units require a lot of my time also. I used to play League of Legends everyday and in this two weeks I couldn't play at all because in the end of the day all I want is to sleep! =/ Maybe that's why I couldn't "think outside the box" this morning and come up with a better answer. Anyway, this is not a diary, let me show you some GUI elements I'm working on and I'm very excited with it!

Of course this is not the final version. I'm thinking about using stones and old metal style (or wooden style instead) in the frame of each element. Here is the first idea I had for the health (green) and mana (blue) bars:

Health/mana bar in a sword style... nahh

Reflecting with Wade about the idea of having a hand holding a sword and inside of the hand have the avatar of the character we figured out that this is totally out of context for our game. Why? Because mages doesn't use swords =) Sometimes I have this ideas that I think is pretty cool but is not really appropriate like for example, I had the idea of putting the experience bar in the top of a mage hat, more experience, more the hat is filled with the green content, like that:

Experience bar in a mage hat... nahh

The idea sounded good at the beginning but than we realized that the experience bar is not something that needs too much attention for the player and this type of display takes too much space in the screen, so then I'll create a simple horizontal bar instead. This is the GUI concept from our game:

GUI concept

I started by changing the health and mana bars:

Left: empty bar | Right: Full bar

Empty bar after Photoshop (the round on the left will have the character's face)

Health and mana content for the bar after Photoshop it

Wade implemented this bar on the game:

The sad face is because the first attempt of playing with shades wasn't successful

but he said that is not fitting with the rest of the game so I'll create another one.

Changing the subject, I had one cool idea to make the game even more fun and I talked to Wade about it and he seemed to like it. To give some feeling of reward to the person who's caring the biggest number of orbs, a kind of glowing crown should appear above the character. Also a sound will come out and say "- You are the mage king!". If somebody else achieve a higher number of orbs a sound will come saying "-New king's empire!", something like that. This will encourage the player to collect even more orbs. Each team will have one king because the enemy king will be the most hunted mage in the game. The person who became a king will have goose bumps to know that he's the main target so he'll have to be careful and count with the help of his team to go back to base, put the orbs in the right place and win the game! This will encourage the use of the spells on him because their team will want to protect him resulting in teamwork. =]

22/04/2015 - 29/04/2015

All of our team is busy doing things for the game so our meeting last week was to make sure everyone is aware of they need to do. And this week we realized that we have a lot of things to do in a short period of time. Our desk critique was very helpful and I have the feeling that the time is running faster lately! The good thing is that we're on track. Despite for this semester we need to present a prototype we need to make sure to show that we're able to do a real functional game. Textures: I'm constantly asking to Mackenzie for some cartoony ideas and feedback 'cause I always tend to the realistic type of art and I always keep adding too much details on it.

My grass ideas! Click to zoom!

Flat wood color variations

This week some of my textures were applied to the Mackenzie's 3D assets. Me and Mackenzie are working together 'cause she's doing the modeling of the objects in the game so after I create some texture I send to her and she gives me feedback about it. She's doing a pretty decent job and here are some examples of her assets with textures:

Right now I have this huge list of textures to create, someone bring me coffee =)

List of textures that Mackenzie gave to me:
￫ Dirt texture
￫ Tree leaves texture
￫ Tree trunk texture
￫ Mushroom trunk texture
￫ Mushroom top texture

List that Wade gave to me:
￫ Health and mana bars independent backgrounds / empty and full
￫ Empty portions background
￫ 3 portions - agility (yellow) - health (green) - mana (blue)
￫ Game time (middle) 3 parts and orbs place (left and right)
￫ Spells bar background (vertical) - 4 squares
￫ Spell outline and a glowing one
￫ Chat bar background - Send button - Scroll bar (vertical) and scrollbar handle
￫ Friends health bar (full and empty) background and circle for portrait

Another news it that Archamge now has a website domain yay! As soon as I have some time I'll start to put some things in there: www.archmage-game.com

The Recursive Arts team are:
Wade Lewis - Programmer/designer
Gerard Ryan - Programmer
Harley Lindaman - Programmer
Mackenzie Bruce - 3D environment artist
Zachary Hawula - Level and game designer
Kyle Jaculli - Character and environment artist
Beatriz Marques (Me =]) - 2D artist and graphic designer

08/04/2015 - 15/04/2015 Break with work

We had our weekly meeting online this time because Gerald broke his feet!

Wade speaking, weekly meeting - April 6

During the uni break I worked on creating a wood texture which I realized to be so much more harder than the wall! My first two attempts end up looking more childish than catoony and I spent hours trying to fix it but it didn't work. But I got the expected result in my third attempt to do it!

Woods together

Experimenting different brown tones, last ones are the "right ones"

Wood color variations, upper mid is the original one

We now have a room booked until the end of this semester for our weekly meeting in D block! I love the "D" so much... =D

Wade speaking, weekly meeting - April 13 - Gerald with crutches!

After the wood I started to work on stone textures:

Lets rock o/

Small detail variation

The final result just runned with too much details and according to the feedback I had from the desk critique session I need to follow the concept art and work together with the other artists to be in the "same page" and don't look different from what really it should be and according to the feedback from Wade I should make it more simple.

End up too much for a stone!

So this is the list for textures development for this week (in priority order):

￫ Grass
￫ Basic metal - silver and dark cast iron with scratches
￫ Rock - more basic
￫ Wood - natural tree wood and chunk
￫ Roof - thatched and straw material
￫ Stone
￫ Cast iron

That's all folks!

01/04/2015

Archmage is now more structured than ever! We have the "green light" to fly high and I have too many stuff to do. In our weekly meeting on Monday we played a game called "find a room for meeting at QUT". After finally unlock this achievement we could work in the Game Design Document, including the time we will spend to create each one´s Assets. I'm the texture lady so this is my table.

I think I'm going to spend more time than that D:

In this table, what is in green it is what I will be working for this semester prototype, however it may change according to what Mackenzie come up with. Now that I am learning about the UV maps on my 3D animation unit I also have plans to work in the character's texture because I am exited to apply what I learned. And yes we now have a final version for the first wall! I mean, it's not a wall anymore... this is going to be the floor.

Color variations with less grout

More grayish tone tiled

Blue tone tiled

And this is just the beginning!

25/03/2015

We almost couldn't find a place at QUT for our weekly meeting 'cause all the rooms were taken! Then we luckily found one last place at "S Block". We simulate on the white board how the game will actually work.

Mocking the game

In this week desk critique session we discussed points for the next week's presentation such as if the Archmage is a viable game, which kind of public we want to reach. And I finally finished the logo for our group =D

Recursive Arts

How's the wall going?

I started all over again and this was the process:

What is that white thing =/

But this is not the final version 'cause Wade asked me to tile the bricks different, kinda like this:

So then I changed from this:

Click the wall to zoom it!

to this:

And so on... progressions are made!

18/03/2015

It is good to be in a group that each member is interested in what they are doing. We are synchronized and doing our best to make the Archmage an incredible game. However this excitement will not transform the Archmage in an incredible game if we are not focused on concepts and how things will really work. So that was the feedback from our first desk critique session.

Group using Ventrilo

We set up a name for our group in the last meeting. After some wonderful suggestions we decided to go for Recursive Arts and I want to develop a logo for us. What about the wall? First thing is that I´m enjoying to create the textures for the game. Secondly, the wall ended up too much dark and any attempt to lighten the colors was making all the details disappear.

♫ All in all you're just another brick in the wall

Anyway I'll start all over again using lighten colors because this dark wall end up contradicting the cartoonish theme of the game. Our eyes are glowing, glorious days are coming! Archmage yet to come! Yayyy

04/03/2015 - 11/03/2015 Good news!

The good news is that the leader of the Archmage group added me on Facebook after seeing my LinkedIn profile and I'm in the group that I admired so much! All the group members are very talented and I confess that I was insecure about being in this group not because of my skills but because I'm not a native English speaker and this make me a little insecure. We're now using a web application/tool for scrum/task tracking called Trello, Ventrilo as an easy way to contact someone every time they are doing something related to the game. We have a closed group on Facebook to communicate and we also post in this group everything we do for the game to collect ideas and approval. I like to use Git as a version control tool for projects but in this group we are going to use SourceTree to organize the Archmage repositories and have everybody in the group participating of the development of the game actively. Every Monday we have face meetings. We had 2 meetings already and all members were in attendance. The first meeting everyone was introduced to each other, we set up the teacher's feedback to remake the presentation at Wednesday, set up coding standards, art pipeline, etc. The second meeting everyone showed what they did and more work was delivered. I showed to them my idea of tree improvement from Mackenzie's work:

and a mage's staff vectorization of Wade's handed draw draft (He's the leader of the group):

Everyone in the group is working in something related to the game. I'm currently working in a texture for a wall. I'm pretty excited about the result because I'm developing a texture from zero. One brick took me aproximally 2 hours, I hope the others take less time. It needs some adjustments and corrections but roughly is this:

Making a brick...Pink Floyd feelings?!

In the first post I mentioned that the idea of the game supposed be colorful (and it is) and you may ask "so why you made a brick so dark"? The answer is that the game will have covered areas and this brick is not the final result, it's the first version.

25/02/14 - Presentations

The presentations were based on the student’s game ideas. Many of them are already working on a project or want to develop a previous idea. Some of the presentations I found interesting and others need some adjustment to be "saleable". Most of them seemed not to be very open to critique which is unfortunate as the criticism was given to improve the quality of the game. I personally have some ideas about what I want to implement in a game such as AI but I don´t have the context so I would prefer to contribute to somebody else’s idea and do my best to make some expressive collaborations. I'm looking forward to be a part of a group. I found the first presentation very interesting, the group is called TBD Games and the game is called Archmage which is a third person shooter game with colorful design. It may sound like an ordinary idea but I can sense a promising future for it!