Andrea Lalanda - Term 2

So we got together yesterday and worked on the story a little bit more. It's about Arl, a friendly Vegalien (vegan alien) who arrives on Earth and looks for new plants for his planet. Here's a diagram of the storyline: Then I made some sketches for Arl. We wanted him to be cute and small and simple. So big eyes and small body. We decided to go with the last one with the curl and scales, because it reminds a little bit of a plant. I'm gonna develop more concept art but he's gonna be green with red, orange and yellow scales, which are the possible chlorophil colours.  We're not sure about the suit yet, it is going to be simple as well. 

So this week I spent making concept art for the proposal. First I want to draw and paint the assets and then I'll start modelling stuff. New level design So I decided that I don't want to make my game endless and therefore random generated anymore. I will refine this a little bit more for the proposal so it's more clear what's happening but this would be the level. At the end there is a boss and then you get to the satellite. This is going to be way easier to program and this way my story makes sense as well, since the astronaut has a mission and a goal. Backgrounds My game is going to have 3 different backgrounds, they are gonna be set randomly each time the player starts the game (or for every level, which I won't have because we are only doing one). I had sooo much fun painting these, galaxies are SO EASY to paint and the results always look awesome and like they took ages to do (not true). Here are my references: Asteroids and co

In today's class we edited a video with green screen. The first thing is to cancel the green screen. For that I added a Keylight effect to the footage. Then use the screen colour dropper and click on the green colour. the green gets cancelled and turns black. Then I added an image underneath and as you can see, some parts are see-through because of the green values on those pixels. To fix that, go to Screen Matte mode instead of Final Result, which makes the image black and white. Everything green is now black and what is not green turns white. The grey values are in between, like the bottom part of the arm. I increased the whites and decreased the blacks with the Clip Black and Clip White sliders under Screen Matte . It looks better now, but now there's a harsh ugly black edge. We can fix that with the Screen Shrink/Grow and Screen Softness sliders. Now we can remove the green tones in the skin by clicking the Despill Bias dropper and

So today we made a very simple project in Unity to get us started. We created a cube ( right click > Create > 3D Object > Cube ) . And create a standard material and assign it to the new cube ( right click > New > material. Drag and drop the material on the object). It's important to keep the project clean, so create a folder for each thing (prefabs, materials, scripts, scenes...). Then create a floor (like the cube but choose a Plane instead). The controls are like in Maya so drag the cube up with the arrows. Assign a new material. Add a rigid body to the cube. This will add gravity and mass to the body, which will cause it to fall to the ground. Now that the cube is finished, we can transform into a prefab. Prefabs are copies of an object that have the exact same attributes. So you can create 100 exact cubes. Just drag the cube to the prefab folder. The objects will turn blue in the hierarchy. Then I built a maze (the most difficult maze

So here are some concepts for my astronaut. I started with a sketch and then developed the shading and outfit. This does not look very low poly, I wanted to do a "normal" concept art first and attempt to do a low poly version painting. But the actual 3D model is going to be low poly like in the pics below. I took inspirations from these pictures.

I attempted to do a flow chart in Power Point. For the proposal I'm gonna make the flow chart prettier and with the style of my game. The other tool to use is draw.io , which is okay, I used to use this for UML Diagrams. But it's not automatic like Power Point. So the game will obviously start in the Main Menu, which offers 3 possibilities: to play the game, to shop, which I haven't included in the chart, and to exit the game. Since this is a runner game, once you avoid a hazard or collect something or defeat an enemy, everything goes back to "play" and you can encounter these three options over and over again. I've also made a "level design", kind of, because I do not have an actual map, the user sees the same things all the time. The background I painted myself, I tried to find some tutorials to get tips on painting galaxies digitally but the only useful one I could find was this one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czhJfC1SuU0&

The first part of today's classed we used for talk about our ideas and maybe found other people we can work with for our project. So I'm teaming up with Glenn and Rebekka! And our story is about a little vegan alien that travels to Earth to analyze and find more plants for his ecosystem back home. He finds a very special seed and leaves it in the way because he is fascinated by some lights he finds in the park and people walking by almost step on the seed but he runs to save it and flies back to his planet in his spaceship. Or something like that. I will be designing the character, Glenn will design the spaceship and add some effects like rain and Rebekka will take care of the filming. This may vary as we go. Then we collected lots of references on Pinterest:  https://www.pinterest.nz/glennfredric/vegalien/ For the second part of the class we followed another tutorial for tracking and making a car explode. All the clips were provided by our tutor. So first make sure

Some of us got together on the weekend to help each other out and brainstorm gaming ideas. It was pretty helpful and fun. Gaming Title Some space related title Intended game systems, modes of play Side scroller. Low poly cute 3D style. (Endless?) Runner game. 1 player mode. The game gets harder and faster.  PC Target and intended entertainment software rating +10 or for everyone that enjoys challenging runner games and sci fi environments. According to the NZ classifications labels this would be G. A summary of the game's story, focusing on game play You control an Astronaut sent to space by the NASA, whose mission is to repair a satellite that has been damaged by an asteroid storm. To get to the satellite, the astronaut will have to avoid asteroids, comets and other space assets and defeat aliens along the way. Also, the astronaut's life is limited, since this is the available oxygen in his tank, which will decrease gradually.  He will have to collect li

So in the first class we saw a bunch of very cool cuts of classic and old school movies as an example for compositing and visual effects. It was very interesting to see, I really liked the "Terminator 2" one (the liquid metal effect), the " Eye of the Storm " and " Gloam " really caught my eye, I would love to do something like that! Then we followed a tutorial to do a very simple motion graphics animation. With a solid ( Right click > New > Solid ) we created a square. Open the layer clicking on the play button on the left and to animate the transform attributes of the square click on the little clock and move the timeline. Is the typical thing as in every animation software. The square also elongates and shrinks at the end. We achieve this by keyframing the scale attribute. Then we added Text which can also be animated the same as the solid. But we wanted the text to be visible after it goes to the left, as if it generated from the square. S

We got homework on our very first class. We have to do some research on three games that we like: an in NZ developed game, Indie and AAA. NZ Game: Extinction Squad Pik Pok games:  http://pikpok.com/ Join daredevil scientist Chuck Darwin's elite team of zoological defenders and embark on a globe-trotting adventure to rescue endangered animals from extinction. Dodos, gorillas, pandas, lions and more are GOING TO DIE unless you catch them with your official Extinction Squad trampoline and bounce them to safety. Miss and they will be nothing but bloody smears on the ground...and footnotes in the natural history books. Indie Game: Super Hot I found out about this game watching this reaction/gameplay video . I think the concept is very smart and it takes a bit of strategy to play. Also, although the visuals are really minimalistic, they're still very effective.  Here's the trailer:  A first-person virtual reality shooter in which time moves only when yo