For our first assignment for this class, we joined up with the games design course in order to collaborate on making our own game. We were split into groups of roughly 11 or 12 people that were roughly half animation half games design. Our group had 11 people with 6 games design students and 5 animation students.

Once in our groups on that first Monday class, we split up our group into groups of 3 or 4 and came up with roughly 10 ideas per group so when we came back together as one big group, we had 30 ish ideas to whittle down to one. We initially whittled those ideas down to just 3 to then present to the lecturers. With lecturer feedback, we settled on our idea; a Little Nightmares inspired alien platformer.

From there, we discussed what year and where the game would be set which we decided was on the alien spaceship during the 80s. We also agreed to have weekly meetings to verbally check in, discuss where we were at with progress and talk about anything else that may have needed discussed that week.

We then discussed what possible prop models and character models we would need for our game. I personally took on designing and modelling our main villain of the game; the alien.

Alien concepts:

During the first couple weeks of this assignment, I worked on different concepts for the alien, always checking in with the group to make sure everyone was happy with how it looked. I started said concepting with a moodboard.

I made this moodboard from a variety of different types of alien looking creatures I found online. I tried to stick to ones that looked vaguely humanoid as I figured they would be slightly easier to model in the long run.

I then began drawing up some concepts, keeping the group feedback along the way in mind.

I started out with four very different looking aliens that I came up with with the moodboard I made in mind. I showed them to the group and they ultimately decided on no. 4s body but the heads from 2, 3 and 4 so I drew up those three possible combinations then showed the group once again. The group all agreed on the middle concept so I then drew up some different body types which the group decided on the middle tallest body type.

From there I started pushing the idea; adding a second head, a tentacle arm and differentiating the two heads so they were more obviously male and female as discussed by the group. I then added angler fish eyes atop their heads and a split tail which was then decided that the split tail wouldn’t work. It was returned to its single tail state and I changed up the clothes further till the group was 100% happy with how the alien looked overall.

After that stage of concepting was done, I moved onto colour testing.

I initially came up with the first set of colours before it was suggested that I should try out different colour combinations for further concepting. I tried out a total of four colour palettes and combinations before showing them to the group for feedback. With the feedback, the pink from 2 and a lighter version of the blue from 4 would be best with the clothing colour scheme from 2. Then, with feedback from lecturers the following week, I had some gradients to the aliens skin so that it matched a little more with the creature designs that Orna had made.

Alien models:

Once concepting was done and everyone had agreed and was happy with how the alien looked overall, I made a start on modelling the alien which took a week or so to do.

I began modelling with the aliens torso then the aliens dual heads. After some feedback from Henry during a presentation, the aliens torso was changed so that it looked like a more conjoined torso as opposed to two heads coming from the same torso. Throughout my modelling, I had made sure that the final concept of the alien I had made was behind the model as it helped me keep the proportions of the alien correct throughout the modelling stage.

I initially had the arms separate from the rest of the torso but I then ran into issues when trying to smooth out the connection at the shoulders. I therefore changed that, with help from Dan, so that the arms were extruded/target welded to the shoulders so that it was all one shape instead of three separate ones which worked much better.

I then modelled the skirt which was arguably the easiest part of the entire model. I initially followed the face shape and look of the heads that I had drawn up in the final concepts but after some feedback from the group and from Henry, I changed up the head shape some so that it looked more interesting from the side. For the eyes, I gave the male side more eyes while the female kept just two but she was given a nose unlike the male side. This was done, after feedback, in order to further differentiate the two heads and how they looked.

Once the overall model was done, I uved the model and got to work with texturing it. We were following how the game Roki textured their models which meant I made up the colour palette for the alien in Photoshop then brought it into Maya through the incandescence part of the lambert that was applied to the overall model. From there I simply moved the different faces so that they sat on top of their respective colours. I had some issues with one of the female fins not showing the right colours despite the faces sitting on the right colours. It was thankfully fixed by Dan so that both female fins looked the right colours as they were supposed to.

Once the alien model was fully complete, I passed it on to Dan so that he could make the rig for the alien so that it could be animated.

Animations:

After Dan was finished and happy with the alien rig, he sent the model and finished rig back to me in order to start animating the alien.

The above videos are all three final animations I made for the alien model. I’m not sure why the renders caused the textures to be somewhat transparent and I couldn’t work out what the issue was but the models are block colour within the game so I’m not overly worried.

The above videos are the final passes I made of the animations as they didn’t always look that smooth. I had had a strange issue with the animation not looping quite right but with help from Dan I was able to sort it out and now they run much more smoothly.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to bend/droop the angler fish like eyes the alien has on top of their head due to issues with the rig and how they were modelled but I think the animations look fine with them sticking up instead.

Aside from being unable to bend the angler fish like eyes, I had no other issues with the rig or animating it. I made sure to check in with my group and get feedback on the animations to make sure the others were happy with how they looked as well. It had been a while since I had last animated in 3D but I had an alright time doing so.

Additional props:

Once I was completely finished modelling and texturing the alien, I had a look at our asset list to see what I could help out with since I had time before the alien rig was complete to animate.

In terms of props, I modelled, uved and textured some hamster blocks, a hamster wheel, some test tubes and a conveyor belt.

I had a slightly difficult time with the textures of the hamster blocks in terms of getting it to look the way I had wanted; like the paint was chipping off the wooden block. After some trial and error, I finally got it looking as I wanted and managed to get it lined up right on the model just right so that the edges matched up and there was no visible seams. I decided on making the hamster wheel green so that it would stand out in contrast to the red of the base of the hamster cage itself so that its easier to identify by the player while in the hamster cage level.

The test tubes were given a greyish blue colour that would be lowered in opacity to make it look more transparent like regular test tubes are while the cork was given a generic cork texture so that it looked accurate to real test tubes. I gave the conveyor belt an easily repeated arrow texture as that is what the games design students had asked for as it will be a constantly moving model and a repeating pattern would make that movement smoother within the game.

Reflection:

In the beginning of this assignment, I had been excited to start working on it and have the opportunity to work on 2D animation within a game but once the games design guys, who had previously agreed to 2D, immediately and bluntly shut down that idea when we met in person, I was less enthused. There was slight compromise later on in terms of letting us have sprites and a comic book like intro to the game but it had already put a slight dampener on things for me at least. I was also a little disappointed my pitched idea wasn’t chosen but that’s sort of on me for not fleshing it out more beforehand.

There was always a divide of sorts between us and the games design guys as they always preferred to talk amongst themselves than include us animation ones in the conversation. This was made even more clear when it came to keeping everyone updated within the discord. Despite being asked on numerous occasions to put their progress in the respective parts of our discord server to keep everyone up to date, the games design guys never bothered to put their progress in. Except for Conor, he frequently put his UI progress into the discord.

When we had our progress presentations towards the start of this assignment, us animation students were learning about the games design guys progress the same time the lecturers were during those presentations as they genuinely rarely ever updated us on anything. We were never told of changes being made to the game or levels or asked our opinion, they simply made the changes after feedback from their lecturers. They never bother to tell us or keep us up to date on edits being made. On top of that, apart from the first Wednesday meeting, we never had full attendance in the meetings, it was rare that everyone turned up to the meetings. Especially the games design guys, they rarely all turned up to the meetings, only two or three did at any one time.

Despite the lack of communication throughout this assignment, the games design guys have actually pulled their weight and gotten their aspects of the assignment/game done on time and when needed. The bad communication from the games design guys has, in my opinion, made this assignment rather frustrating to work on which is a shame as I had been initially looking forward to it.

If I was to do this assignment all over again, I wouldn’t really change anything I did as I think I did well with my models and my animations. I think I also communicated and kept everyone up to date with my progress well. I’m quite proud of all the models I have made and textured, I wouldn’t change them. The only thing I’d hope for if the assignment was to be redone is a more communicative group of games design students.