Wednesday, 22 March 2017

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.



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