11_23_10- 11_29_10

well vacation from school, means more time to work.  Spent most of my time this week working on Slinks.  Specifically characters with Betina, and also level design.  Betina did the concept art for the slinks, and I modeled, textured and rigged the characters.  After that, I passed the file to Betina, so she could add some controls to the rig and animate the model.  I also spent a few days getting familiar with Unity 3D to make sure I understood the pipeline.  Here's some pics. of the progress.

High poly model used to bake normals to low poly.

Slink tower screen.

11_16_10 - 11_22_10

This week marked the start of our final cycle in the projects class.  The final rapid prototype had a few restraints.  Single Player, tells a story, and fantasy art.  We did a brainstorming session on Mon. and had some good idea, but nothing fleshed out yet.  Wed. after art class Betina and I worked on some of those ideas.  The idea we went back to was about space and a ship that crashed on an unknown planet.  What I was looking at was player's movement and interaction.  Something simple and fun.  Then an idea came to me, that as you find crew members from the crash, you stick together like a centipede.

I'm going to be working on the level design and environments on this project.  He's a few pic. of the game design. and how you move around this strange world.

11_09_10 - 11_15_10

This week on color caster, we did some play testing.  From the play testing we were able to identify some key issues in the current build of the prototype.  To understand these problems and the solutions that we came up with to solve these problems, you must know how the game is played.

Color caster is pong meets MS paint.  There is a marble or marbles in the center of the board.  Each marble changes colors and approaches a players goal line.  That player must hit the marble with the matching color to send it towards their opponent.  As the marble changes direction, it changes color!  Each player has a palette with the primary colors and an area to mix secondary colors.

Problems from the testing session- the paints were to close together, meaning-- that it was difficult for a player to grab a specific color.  Laura, and I tried to rearrange the position of the paints on the paint palette.  However, doing so, ended up leaving us with something that fixed the technical issue, but was pretty ugly.  That evening, I looked at other iconic art tools, and decided to try a paint try instead of a paint palette.  This gave more room for each color, and still fit with-in the visually language set by the art director.

The second issue was, it was very difficult to tell which colors were which.  Specifically, yellow from orange, and blue from purple.  This was more of a trial and error type fix.  Because, what looked good on HD LCD screen didn't look good on the SMART table, which uses a projection (washes out colors).  After a few tries, I got the colors right, by increasing the contracts and color saturation.  Here's a few pics. of the current build.

11_2_10 - 11_08_10

This week, I've been working on the game space, and a sprite sheet for Color Caster.