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ombo

HEY guys hows it goin i haven’t updated in a while alright okay here’s whats happening

here’s a freaky tunnel i made! it’s built so that images or even video will connect perfectly to itself and not have obvious seams, wild right

also here’s a nice little pinwheel i made

...okay but here’s the real Egg of recent times, I’ve been working a skybox! it’s been 90% hell! my conclusion was, skyboxes are stupid. 6 square images mapped onto a cube, made to trick you into thinking you’re in a sphere? yeah that DOES sound hard and dumb! I suppose some people probably have camera rigs irl that let them take 6 pictures that fit together perfectly, in which case a skybox makes sense. but if you want to make your own sky, it’s really hard to make it look like it’s not a cube! so instead i made a big inverted sphere that we have programmed to follow the cameras perfectly. I spent so long on all this, I still don’t have a finished sky texture I’m happy with, but oh well.

also, I made a concept for the Sweaty Wincher, which we ended up using as the actual asset. He will probably stay 2d, since it works pretty well. but he’ll probably be a bit more colored and animated.

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goodnight

look at this nice watering can i made

he cry out him mouth and drools from them eyes and u can put your waters in that thirsty caterpillar mouth

anyway also i made night time happen 

it’s a post processing effect that replaces any value with one from this gradient:

but i can make certain things exempt from the effect, like these fireflies:

(refresh if gifs only loop once and u get sad and want to see them again sorry idk whats up)

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ahh

hey im back from GDC wow what a week!!! a really cool fun time wow that was a lot of free fancy wine and dancing oh boy

this week was a little rough! definitely a little harder to keep things running smoothly when 3 of u are in california, but things are all settling back into place now

beyond the usual design + art discussions that occur regularly, this is what i was able to accomplish after coming home:

it’s dade!! i like his head a lot, but i was very exhausted when i started the torso, so i don’t think this is final. still, having something feels a lot better than having nothing. he’s a bit of an eyesore too, i will probably have to stray from his original color pallet. 

Additionally, there is one more thing to consider:

do we trust him?

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This week, I set out for GDC, and wasn't able to make modeling progress bc I cannot afford a laptop in addition to my desktop computer. However, my phone died on my flight to San Francisco, and for 4 or 5 hours I did nothing but think about/ take notes on Ponds. For example, I thought out how to make the design and art of the mountain diorama work well with each direction and aspect of the game. I listed all possible particle systems we might want to include, and sorted them into only 2 or 3 different systems that would only need the textures switched to create the full list. I wrote a first draft of some NPC dialogue. And some notes about how the mountain and meadow have changed once night has fallen. I also made a lot of sketches and thoughts on how to improve our interaction UI, which is super important for obvious reasons. I could elaborate but I am so tired! I had a very interesting night and almost wasn't able to make it back to where I am sleeping. Thankfully I was helped by a nice man who has actually heard of Diaries, my published game being shown here! That's not why he helped me, I mean. Just a nice coincidence.

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Wango Dango! This week I did all sorts of little odds and ends! For example, I made drew a nice sprinkly water particle for his watering can interaction. Particles and other kinds of polish are going to be very very important for our game, so it’s not a bad idea to start a few of those things now.

For the first few weeks, Alexis didn’t need any concept art, and said as much himself. Now that he is moving onto bigger + weirder models, concepts are becoming worthwhile, so I’ve been producing some for him (and the rest of the team, concepts are useful for inspiring and grounding everybody)

Here is a concept of the desert, tying in the ground color + tree model alexis already has with some other elements. We didn’t want a boring “desert temple” kinda thing, instead we decided to have a clock tower in the middle of this nowhere.

Look! Cacti! how nice

This is a little friend who lives in the mountains. I came up with his backstory a while ago, but nobody seemed particularly interested, probably because i hadn’t given him a cool look yet! duh!! I kept calling him a “fairy” or “fae”, which he still sort of is, by the standard of some hella ancient beliefs. My team probably thought i meant a glittery winged little guy, which was my mistake completely. Anyway, this friend is the last of his kind to still be present in these mountains; a clan of them passed through, building strange and magical machines, but this one was unable to finish his overcomplicated design. Maybe if you’d like to help complete his invention, he’d finally be able to go catch up with them!

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what have you done

this week, I gave susan some proper colors of her own, and even a banjo, named Bernard. Say hello, Bernard!

I experimented greatly with his colors, but suspect I may return to them yet again. Which is quite alright, it’s very very easy to iterate on colors in our game, which is part of why our color balance has been so nice so far.

Currently our game uses unlit shaders, meaning lighting isn’t used at all, and every pixel on the screen is the exact same color as it is on the texture file. however, lighting can add a lot to a game, so i tried to see if I could find a shader that adds the nice definition and depth of lighting, but keeps the flat color style of our game. I squeezed unity’s default toon lit shader for all it was worth, and produced some promising images.

These are real nice, but still have a lot of limitations and flaws. for example, there are no true shadows, as you can see by how the windmill blades don’t shadow their tower (the ones on the ground are default). I decided that unity’s default shaders don’t offer us enough to be worth using. However, you can definitely see the potential of something like this shader, so I will search outside of unity’s default capabilities next week, having gotten a better idea of exactly what to search for.

Being an art director is very rewarding, but in some ways exhausting. Because I spend a lot of time answering questions, giving feedback or guidance, and discussing the visual direction for every aspect of the game, I have a bit less time to produce my own models, and I end up feeling like I’m not doing enough. However, I just have to remind myself that the other things I’m doing are a part of my job, and are important tasks that are valued by the rest of the team. I was even told as much by some of them at the end of the production 2 game we made together. I’m thankful yet again to be working with such nice and supportive people. I’m trying to get in the habit of logging hours for those things; when I’m giving someone feedback or help on something, those minutes contribute to their time logged on the task they’re working on, so there’s nothing unfair about me logging some time for that too.

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beep beep

This week I sculpted a general blockout of our new map. Because of the importance of verticality in this new design, I wanted a 3d representation as soon as possible, to help designers visualize their ideas properly and make sure the design and art direction were on the same track.

I also wanted to bring the blockout into unity to see how it felt from the player’s point of view, which i learned a lot from. There were many changes that needed to be made, and there were only going to be more as time went on, so we decided the best way to move forward from here was with unity’s terrain generation tools.

Matt and I had some discussions on character design, where we decided an older iteration of the banjo player, Susan, fit better than my more recent attempts. We then made some further design iterations on Dade and The Lard together.

Finally, I made a real live Susan!! Our first true npc model <3 Idk if that counted as part of this last sprint, or this new one; making sense of sprints and blog posts in my schedule has been giving me some trouble, which I’m trying to hammer into place after this week. Anyway, I spent a lot of time on my dear Susan. I went through many iterations of that torso before reaching the perfect, simple shape it is now. The colors are nice, but they’re really placeholder, I will be putting more thought into them later. I will probably take out the green, because it will blend in with the meadow she lives in, and I will likely make her other materials a bit more colorful.

(also i DID give matt a rig this week)

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BEE EGGS

This week, Alexis took a shot at making some test assets in our art style. His house model was very impressive and super cute, but there were many small notes I had that couldn’t be communicated through text, so we stayed late after a team meeting to fiddle around with it in Maya. I was very happy with his level of detail (not too much, and if it was, it was just because he was practicing; I would have done the same) and especially with his color choices. He made sure to break up a lot of straight lines, but sort of randomly, and I gave him examples of how it could be done with more intent. I showed him little tweaks like thickening some details to be more cohesive, and altered a few pieces to avoid too many right angles. Then I showed him how I texture & UV models on this project to fake stylized lighting. As I expected, Alexis picked it all up very quickly!

Alexis admittedly has little experience with this kind of art, and specializes in detailed, hard-surface models. He has always demonstrated he is a fast learner, but it’s hard to improve skills like color & shape if each piece you make takes so long to produce, and changes take so long to implement. We wanted him on our team because I was convinced that with our incredibly easy-to-produce art style, he would be able to focus on traditional design skills and would improve super fast. I’m happy to say that he is meeting, if not surpassing, expectations. Passing on something I’ve worked so hard on to someone else is very stressful, so it’s such a huge relief to be able to trust them.

Matt (B) & Devin both posed some challenging questions about our map layout this week, which I was defensively asserting wouldn’t be a problem if approached correctly. They proposed an interesting new layout, and after Devin, Levi & I discussed and redrew it many times, we came up with a great design we are probably going to move forward with. It could be true that I could have made the old layout work, but this new one saves me that work and is more interesting in many other ways. I look forward to redrawing the map concept when Levi & Devin hand me specifics they are happy with.

I also renamed & reorganized the art assets in the unity project, and laid out the workflow we should use for implementing them. Matt also wanted to start working this week, but I kept forgetting to send him a copy of my character rig. Sorry Matt :(

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My team has Grown

Hello everyone!! My final semester at Champlain has begun, and so has the second half of development for our senior game, There Might Be Ponds. We’re very proud of our work from last semester, and we’re ready to take it to the next level with the 5 new teammates we’ve added to our previously 4 person team. They are all very talented and friendly people :^)

I’m transitioning from the only artist, to lead artist, and will be working closely with my lovely friends Matt and Alexis. Matt’s focus will be animation, which is a godsend, because I enjoy that stuff but it’s very difficult to juggle with the rest of the art a game requires. Alexis’ will be environments, which i will still dabble in, because I had so much fun with it last semester. My main focus will be character art I suppose, but I hope my teammates both get a chance to make at least one, and I’m generally still more focused on the game as a whole than just the characters.

After working constantly for weeks on end, and then taking a break for a month, I sometimes cringe when looking at the game’s current state. Then I talk about our plans for the future, and think about how our art team has tripled in size, and I feel confident and inspired again. The last month of last semester was just working to meet a goal, but now we get to dream again.

One of the first things I’m going to do, personally, is take another whack at our lighting style. Last semester I decided flat lighting was the way to go; it’s easy & stylish. But I’ve learned a little more about ramp shaders, and now we have a nice big game & environment to test them with, and time to breath again, so it’s a great time to try some new things. The shading approach i’m considering could really add something the game is missing right now, while contributing to our current art style.

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The Garden

SO i haven’t actually described our environment in any great detail yet, besides my process for making it. let’s get into that now!

here was my first sketch of our map, based loosely on a (less colorful) version by our designer. This was just to give us some initial direction, but we ended up implementing a surprising amount of what’s here. the odd barn thing, which i was clearly uninspired by, is just about the only thing that didn’t make it in.

some explanation: you start in a more average, forest-y area, with some run down old gates and stone walls. you eventually find a giant gate that leads to The Garden, a weird and colorful place full of strange mismatched visitors!

there are purple streams, but obviously i can’t reveal if there are ponds or not. there might be.

I want to make the meadow a lot more flowery, is the main thing i get from this. the mountain and desert were only designed to be viewed from a distance, but next semester we can expand these areas into explorable places, which is super exciting!

also yes, the lightmill does spin <3

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VI

lets talk about CHARACTER ART

first, here’s some pics of our actual character model!! isn’t she lovely??

this design improved a lot on my previous sketches, where i often felt i had made her too old and lanky for my liking. also, I removed the buttons and rounded frills on the bottom, which felt unnecessary in this iteration. her “dress” is a little too plain here, though; later, i made it flare very slightly outward near the bottom, to make her torso silhouette more interesting. Also, I’m very happy with how some simple gradient textures, and a few UV tweaks, really brought her form to life.

QUESTION: are those her arms, or her scarf??

ANSWER: yes.

now, here’s something that i got really caught up in. when interacting with objects, the character disappears, and 2 cursors come up: red and blue, one for each hand. this is important for distinguishing them. However, both her hands? arms?? are red. I worried that this was an inconsistency that would bother people, including myself, and i tried to design a scarf that would be a different color on both sides. however, this meant either the clothes or the other arm would have to give up on being blue. below, you can see me trying to fix this perceived problem:

ultimately, i think 4 probably looked the best, but even then it was just overcomplicating things. The yellow sort of works, but not with the asymmetry. I sought a lot of feedback, and almost everyone concurred that my original design fit the mechanic just fine, and the red and blue cursors felt natural after seeing the red and blue outfit. I guess this was a case of me overthinking, but that’s nothing to regret! After pursuing other options and finding none superior, I was able to continue moving forward with even more confidence in my original design.

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V

check out these new trees:

as you can see, i added a nice fringe of squares to the pine tree! and i made a lovely spiral tree with nice colors, too. probably shouldn’t have used a grey background for this pic, oops

LET’S talk about terrain workflow, we were real proud of this. here’s the blockout of our entry forest that my designer + programmer made in unity, which they then exported and gave to me:

then i used it as reference and sort of “traced” it, building a nicer-looking terrain with roughly the same proportions. I’m glad we did this, because it’s hard to estimate player walking times + distances from just this model in Maya.

that ropey shape is a stream, by the way. i connected it properly later. We realized at this point we could just make the “walkable” area a separate piece in maya. We are using unity’s pathfinding mesh system instead of traditional collisions, and by marking this separate model “walkable” in game, saved ourselves a lot of work! also, we were able to spawn just grass on the walkable area, and spawn trees & such on the other section.

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senior game post #4 my dudes

here’s some more dang ol art:

these are pathways! as you can see it’s actually just a single sprite duplicated wherever i want, but it’s just wiggly enough that it looks like a seamless organic shape :D

that’s a placeholder version of the character model on there, pretty sloppy, but anything is better than running around our build as a huge capsule tbh

also here’s some cute little rocks! to make these pretty boys i just slap on a simple gradient texture, and project the UVs from a side view. then i detach any sky-facing shells (orange, below) and move them up on the gradient to make them lighter + and stand out

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hey whats up! this is another post about my senior game  🤘

THIS TIME: finding a hella nice art + rendering style

here was my first TEST TREE and some grass i doodled for it. It’s really cute but it doesn’t match the style of the tree very much, so i made that grass on the right. 

those pictures are with flat lighting; the gradients on the trees are just textures. I thought it would be worth trying the same design with lighting anyway, with and without shadows:

these hold some odd sort of appeal, but this was just rendering in maya, so I checked to see if it would still look right in the actual game.

Here I’ve recreated the same lighting styles in unity pretty closely, but the lit trees have still managed to lose some of their charm. I was always sort of leaning towards the first kind anyway, and game development will go quicker without having to worry about lights, so no worries.

here’s some other plants I made that week! I tested these with lighting too. They’re certainly not bad, but the flat lighting just continued to be more appealing.

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Character Design of TMBP

hello!! this is my second #capstone post, about all the concept art I’ve done so far for our senior game, There Might Be Ponds. 

this was the first pass at our protagonist! We wanted a character with long arms, who would use them to interact with the environment in interesting ways. I really wanted cute lil boots, also. I’m really happy with this design! she is my perfect adorable jelly-ghost-thing. However, one member of our team was concerned with the risk of making arms drag along the ground look nice, and after much deliberation, I eventually agreed. SO, she grew up a few years:

look!! she grew a torso! and her arms are still floppy. in the top right, they’re also… part of her scarf? scarf arms. scarms. we decided to try colors for that one:

we’re going to go with the rightmost one for now, but nothing’s final yet. In fact, the Scarf Arms might need to go, interesting as they are. our mechanic revolves around you using two arms to interact with things. even though some of us think the arms shouldn’t be visible in this mode, you should at least be able to look at the character in 3rd person and think “yes, I comprehend how they did that thing.”

ALSO, here are some sketches of some Interesing Pals you might encounter in There Might Be Ponds:

their names, in order, are Fishbowlhead, VIEWCUBE, zzzzxfzd’’’znvd~smdf (or “alex”), and finally, Burt. 

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hey, I’m going to be using this blog to make weekly-ish updates on my senior game!! gonna be tagging these #capstone.

for our initial concepts phase, we fleshed out and tested 3 ideas:

Moon Love, also known as Over The Moon, or originally Make Love to The Moon; Make The Moon Gay was our idea for a dating sim where you play as The Moon, and can date any planet in the solar system. Moons typically end up dating other moons, but they don’t interest you, and your childhood best friend The Earth encourages you to date outside your comfort zone. This is a story about massive spheres of rock and gas, but for the purpose of our game we would stylize the characters as human students at Milky Way High, in the Orion Belt Class. The Sun is the hot young professor, Mercury is the teacher’s pet, Jupiter the jock; we had good personality ideas that matched each of the planets. Here’s some quick sketches of some of our characters:

Ultimately we decided not to go with this game for our senior project, because making meaningful innovations in this genre is difficult. We still love the project, and might make a smaller version in our free time some day. I also kinda just want to make it into a comic, we’ll see.

Instructions Included was our second game, where the player uses a simple computer terminal to access various files and game-like applications, each of which actually connect to each other, and might represent something older than the technology used to access them. There was a lot of solid, interesting design in this game, but the art direction never became as interesting or scopable as our other games’ were.

Our final idea, which we’re moving forward with, is There Might Be Ponds. It was the best choice for many reasons; both our design and art style are innovative, but doable. We’ll be able to get it working & pretty relatively quickly, and can spend plenty of time really polishing it.

in Ponds, you are a young girl-thing exploring a strange liminal space that bears a resemblance to a garden, or forest, or park, or field. All of these. Other interesting characters are spread throughout the environment, and have problems you’ll be able to help them with before they can leave the garden. Here you are, sitting on a log and listen to this poor bloke blather on about something ^u^