Week 4-5

Week 4-5

Test Animations in Blender and Rig Familiarity:

I haven't done animations in Blender for 2 years, so I spent some time familiarising myself with blender.

I also needed to start familiarising myself with how Alex does his rigging, and with test animations I can give feedback on various issues to do with weight painting and textural stretching etc. As well as learning its limitations in terms of animating and movement. 

Mucking around with IK hierarchy from the spear going to the hand, to assist with later retargeting in engine.

Game Concept Ideas:

Game Name: Shifter

3rd person action adventure fighter, with fast paced running/movement mixed with combat. Potential for some really fun level design and puzzle elements

Basic Mechanic/gameplay: You have the power to change the direction of gravity, but only on yourself and small-medium objects or enemies you touch. To clarify, this is not just up, down, left, and right, but also forwards and backwards. So a long corridor, could suddenly become a very long drop downwards if you wanted to slide/fall quickly down it. Or alternatively you could easily send an enemy to their death with the same technique.

I’m working on some pre-vis examples of how gameplay could work, as it's a difficult concept to convey in words or pictures.

But potential gameplay things include dodging attacks by running on walls, running on the roof, dodging backwards or forwards quickly by shifting gravity so you’re suddenly falling backwards or forwards then shifting it back to normal.

The shifting will probably have some kind of resource bar/timer.

As far as setting goes, I was imagining something futuristic but still fitting our low poly style, something with a tron-like aesthetic. But for obvious reasons we want most or all of the levels to be indoors, but we can go for some very crazy level designs and puzzle rooms to make full use of the core mechanic.

Ignoring the star wars lightsabers and all, but the architecture style is something cool we could work with, and it's obviously low poly, but it has a very cool futuristic aesthetic to it

Character: I was imagining a human or humanoid character, there’s some fun potential to have them be part human part machine (could explain their shifting ability) but this could also be done with magic or some other concept depending on the world setting.

Enemies could be anything from machines/robots, to other humans etc etc.

Pre-Vis Video of Potential Gameplay:

I mucked around with this is Blender, doing a quick pre-vis of what gameplay could look like. In particular we would want to work with the Camera animation to help use its perspective changes to show which direction gravity is for the character at give times.

Continuation of ideas for our original game:

Going off what we were told in the critique last week, they really seemed to like the idea of lava, and didn’t think we were properly utilising it. They also made a good point that we have a lot of programmers, and if we’re going for a low poly art style, we should pour a lot of our resources and research into the programming aspect.

Character Change: the character is now literally made of living magma/lava. So she is no longer ‘solid’ and is much more flexible and flowey in her movements (think elastic girl (the mum) from the Incredibles. Mixed with Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy and/or Zac from League of Legends

Potential abilities:

Her arms and legs are her weapons, with a body literally made of lava, she can morph an arm into a shield or a sword or a spear, or a lava whip etc etc.

Grappel/grab with lava arm.

Literally grows upwards to reach new place. The extra leg growth is discarded and becomes rocks that fall away and character returns to natural size.

Some kind of  jump?

Lava spin, she leaps upwards and spins, flailing molten hot lava limbs around briefly like a spinning top damaging everything around her.

Magma throw, grows a half condensed piece of magma rock into her hand and throws it.

I also think we can go for a lot of environmental killing/manipulation, if she is the Core/Heart of the mountain, she should be able to literally grab or melt chunks of walls,, melt rocks together to create bridges.

Lava is her friend, Water is her enemy.

Week 2-3

Concept Refinement and Ideas:

As our group was formed around just a simple game mechanic, of a first person hack and slash, after our first meeting we decided to have every group member brainstorm some ideas for an environment and setting, including enemy designs, character design ideas and other potential game mechanics:

Potential Game Name: Molten

Environment: Inside the heart of a slightly dormant volcano, including caves and lava tunnels; most volcanoes have a ‘plumbing’ system of the main vent and of side vents, as well as multiple magma chambers. When active these are filled with magma, but when dormant they can become a twisting labyrinth of tunnels and caves, with the occasional magma lake. This allows for an awesome looking environment, with a distinct style and lighting design that still works within our scope and in Low Poly.

Enemies:

• Small Rock/stone goblins
• Dark stone/obsidian Spider/crawler, something quadrupedal or more.
• Larve Magma Golem, plenty of opportunity for interesting low poly designs, spiked back, Club as an arm. Interesting texturing opportunity as well, with cracked glowing skin etc.

Player:

• Normalish humanoid, not really fussy on her design but upgrades herself with molten rock limbs/body parts, similar to what alex had as her boots last week. These upgrades give her better/improved abilities like jumping/running/kicking.
• An upgraded arm that can clobber/punch enemies, but it can also Imbue objects with ‘molten power’ this includes weapons, or even special sections of the walls to light up darker areas, or she could just have her arm glow a bit brighter as a torch-like source that is actually part of her body (see more details in Gameplay) this Imbuing power can be recharged from enemies, or other environmental sources.
• Upgraded arm could also shoot out live lava as a kind of grappling hook
• Fully obsidian weapons, solves our problem of multiple spears lying around, as obsidian stalagmites/stalactites can be grabbed and snapped off as weapons. I think the idea of perhaps being able to store an extra spear or two on her back may help with this design problem as well.

Gameplay:

• When A weapon is Imbued by Molten Power, it only lasts for a short time, but the weapon does increased damage and perhaps can’t get stuck in enemies, as its ‘melts’ through them or something like that.
• The Labyrinth like tunnels and caves are usually lit up by remnants of Lava or molten cracked rock areas in the walls/ceiling/floors where light is seeping through. Lots of design opportunities with this; it could light up where you’ve been like a Breadcrumb trail to show where you’ve been.
• Dark Areas, caverns or tunnels and caves where there is little or no light, these areas require the use of Imbuing power, either into the character’s arm, or into the walls to get them to light up. There is scary potential for the Obsidian Spiders in these dark areas, we can work with the minimal lighting to create some scary encounters.
• If we get far enough with the basic game mechanics, there is also some potential for some light 3D jumping puzzles with rock pillars over magma lakes. This is where the upgraded boots/legs for jumping, or the upgraded arm as a grappling hook could come into play. Failing that, some very basic jumping over dangerous lava areas, or treacherous bridges can make for interesting fight encounters with strategies like knocking enemies off into the lava, as well as the increased difficulty of fighting while also navigating jumps between pillars etc.
• There is also some potential for further environment based killing, traps or areas where sudden upshoots of Lava, or cracked floors that fall out and become pits. That can be triggered by walking over them, these can kill either the player or enemies, so some strategies may involve leading enemies into them etc.