For this assignment we paired up with the Games Design course and we were assigned into groups. Our task was to create a playable game and prior to being assigned our groups we chose our preferred medium of 2d or 3d. My group had all chosen 3D as their preference which helped massively when it came to brainstorming ideas for what we wanted our game to be.

Initially my group decided to rule out anything we didn’t want to do as we found this the easier method of narrowing the idea field. We decided on no open world(which was in the module brief anyway), no racing games, no gun shooters, and no puzzles. I had pitched the idea of a boss battle arena similar to that of Elden ring, where a player enters the arena and its a boss fight. However, due to there being 3 animation students and a games design student wanting to model, we realised this was too narrow for dividing work evenly among us. We then pitched onto the idea of the Seven deadly sins, where each level would be based off one of the sins. When we pitched this to the tutors, they liked the idea but said that we needed a story behind the gameplay so the group all spent time thinking of how we could incorporate a storyline to the game. When it came to the following week we had decided on a Priest who was battling the seven deadly sins (levels) which each level completion would unlock a perk i.e. Attack, Dash, Double Jump. Once the levels were complete the player would reach an evil Pope boss at the end and use these perks to defeat him. Our feedback to this was that the game seemed overthought and that it would be hard to make unlockable perks link to the seven deadly sins. The games design tutor liked the idea of the game and said that if we just had environment levels with minion fights and the boss fight as a button masher it could be fun. With this advice, we discussed together and decided that a button masher sounded like fun and we looked into how we could adjust our idea to fit this.

 

 

 

Concept + Research:

 

I started by looking at realism body forms as I felt this would give me the anatomy understanding to simplify it down into a Saturday morning style. My group knew we wanted to keep this game light-hearted and humorous so after discussing my design ideas, we wanted a morbidly obese body with slightly exaggerated proportions. I then looked up gorillas, babies sitting and Bowser (Mario) for references. I thought that having him sitting would allow more focus on the attack and defence structure of the game rather than having to worry about animating legs. Due to deciding to go the full 3d route and not 2.5D, we needed to keep things more simplistic so we could get completed in time.

 

We all used Miro to update mood boards, spider diagrams etc and make sure everyone knew the structure.

I made a basic mood board of the groups ideas for the Evil Pope Boss. I also looked at the shape form of Mario characters as this was the style we were getting inspiration from so I wanted a better understanding of were round and sharp edges where used and on who.

 

 

Designed a rough sketch of basic shaped based off what I had gathered from my shape study of Mario. I felt like a Wario shape was well suited with more elongated arms similar to Mario and as his hands were his weapons, used DK’s sharp edge hands.

I then started to place line-work. I asked the group their thoughts, and we all collectively agreed that the head needed to be smaller as to push the exaggeration of his larger body portion.

I looked at different designs for colour and details. I decided as he was evil to add an anti-christ cross on his hat.

 

For our style guide I put together a basic shape build and rough size guide.

I also looked at environment design ideas and textures. I created my own little drawing of a material sphere with lava just for fun and reference!

 

After presenting our style guide I got feedback that the Pope looked too pure and to change the colour palette used. One of the members of the class who watched the presentation had mentioned the Schema Monks, so I looked it up and decided to use them as a bases for reference.

An addition concept sketch:

 

Final Concept:

I adjusted a few things when modelling the concept design. I decided to use a shawl instead of the collarette as it reduced the risk of clipping faces when animating. I also changed the texture design slightly but used similar colours. I added shoes to his feet instead of bare feet as when modelling the toes on the lower poly it was causing them to look boxy and rigid. Due to the model being all one mesh I struggled a lot separating the robe around the legs so added trousers to make that separation more seamless.

Modelling:

I really struggled with getting the shape of the model initially. I focus a lot on realism shapes and time and time again kept sculpting and just going too far with it. Plus I knew retopology would be a big time consumer and was just adding unnecessary steps to a simple design.

I restarted the model several times and eventually stuck with this one above. However, I modelled it with separate parts for the face and by trying to keep him low poly, the hands seemed very sharp edged and boxy. I rigged the model and realised I really wasn’t happy with it… so restarted.. again!(X10)

Final Model:

This time round I focused on keeping the model as one complete mesh for easier rigging. I also simplified down the feet and hands as having fingers/toes was just complicating things more than needed.

Due to starting this model quite late in the process I decided to scrap his mouth and add a moustache to make things easier and allow me to have him done in time.

Initially had a solidify modifier on the shawl but decided to take it down to a single plane to avoid face clipping when animating.

Texturing:

Staff Prop:

Concept

Modelling

Texturing

Texturing Assets:

Eoin from Games design modelled our environment and props so to help out I took on some of his props and textured them. I also had a few other assets such as a tree, rocks and structures but for some reason the Substance file wouldn’t allow me to save the file (after the material export) so I lost the texture file in SP and had forgotten to take screenshots of these at the time.

These were all the texture files and objects I completed –

 

Animating:

The armature applied well with Automatic weights, I only had to go in and adjust a few things around the head and face. I used parenting to parent the staff prop to the hand bone so that it would follow the hand movement. I watched a few tutorials on YouTube to see how the best method for the model and functionality. As the prop would not be anywhere but in a hand grasp I decided that parenting was the best to use.

 

I followed a tutorial on YouTube to rig the eyes.

https://youtu.be/0r6yjnxh9Qg?si=-78ulhPFOGlwtlhL

This worked well but I did come across issues when using the NLA editor as this YouTube tutorial had created a separate rig parented to the original and when I was storing animations, I didn’t realise I had to store the eye movement separately. So when playing the animations in NLA editor the eyeballs would move to a different stored movement if I hadn’t changed it over to match the correct one.

Test Renders:

 

I used NLA editor to create 5 animations that could be used in game for idle, attack and defeat. I blocked out the animations and then put in-betweens, but still felt they needed more fine tuning to I rendered these out just to see what needed adjusting and how the timing was and then went back and adjusted accordingly.

Final Animation Renders:

 

 

Composition:

On the week prior to submission, what remained of our group got into a discord call (Eoin, Josh and myself) and discussed the final composition of the game. Dillan hadn’t communicated where he was with the minion character and we lost our coder Brian so therefore we were not going to be able to get our game animations in. We decided at this point just to import our still models and take render images of scenes with both Josh’s main character and my own. It’s disappointing, as I really wanted to have a playable game at the end of this all but the remainder of our group were unable to do what was required for that. I had gotten my character working with the skelemesh and ready to bring over to UE but had issues getting it over. Instead of wasting time on that with the animations no longer being able to be seen in UE, I decided to look at my animations to make them smoother in Blender so that I could render out videos of that. I felt like this would be better presented in my portfolio at the end.

I did try looking at creating a facial rig but I could not get it to work no matter how many tutorial videos I watched and using the rigify node was not suited for the style of my characters features. Therefore, I just looked at refining the animation movements.

I also suggested to do a “game playthrough” with the UE bot just to show off the map, assets and give an idea of how the game would of been had we of been able to code our models and get it completed.

Game Scene Renders:

I took some render shots of the boss in the final temple area. The lighting is very low and I feel like there would need to be more light source coming into the scene had we of got the game playable and this is where the final battle took place. However, I do feel the dimly lit room adds character and is scene setting for the mood of the game.

 

 

Below are some scene shots I had taken due to my contribution to some asset textures within the scenes. I textured the trees, gravestones, rocks, rubble, crystals, lantern (lights) and chains used without. I feel like we could have possibly adjusted the brightness of the scene lighting slightly to allow a bit more of the texture details to come through but I think the world building and mood is depicted really well with the saturation of colour used.

 

 

Game Playthrough to show environment, UI & assets (With UE bot):

I created a screen record of a play through using the UE bot so that I could show what we had created. We did have a UI menu screen and full health depletion but it had corrupted the UE file in the prior save on Github and therefore the health bar only dropped to a certain point and I was unable to access the main menu screen due to this, which was a shame. I also spent time on a discord call with Josh to try and get his main priest character in as I was going to have him outside the temple to just show him off, but Josh was having issues with his textures and exporting the FBX correctly to get it into UE and therefore we decided that we wouldn’t have the time to rectify this. I created this just to show off the environment, textures and general idea of how the game should of played if we had managed to get it completed. Music was supplied by my boyfriends band.

 

Final Thoughts:

This was a VERY difficult assignment as our group just slowly started to drop out one by one until there was only Eoin(Games – created the UE environment and assets), Cheyanne(Games – created our UI), Josh(Animation – created our main priest character) and myself (Created the final boss Pope character and textured assets for the environment). Due to losing our coder, we were destined for failure from a few weeks prior to the deadline. It was really disheartening and I lost a lot of passion in getting this completed at all. My main focus was just to show off what we did have, as I feel like this game had the potential to be an amazing achievement had we of got it completed and playable. I really wish we would have had our group stay together as it would have been incredible to see what I had created and animated in the UE environment and functioning as he was intended to. I struggled a lot with trying to model the character in a simple shape style, and my final model was probably my 10th+ attempt at it. Over the summer I am going to go back to basics with my modelling and try to grasp skill in all styles as I always feel I overcomplicate my model and then start arriving at issues further in the process. I am happy with what I was able to do and I learnt a lot along the way, especially with using the NLA editor. I feel a little more confident with UE now too, but it is still a software I am so uncertain of and will also be looking at using and building my confidence up in over the summer months. It has been a very difficult few weeks on the run up to submission as the group lacked a lot of communication and I felt left in the dark with were we where and what was happening. I still would like to pursue games design in future, and I am going to have a lot to focus on over the next few months and try to soak in as much knowledge for next year!