Personal Work

I found this rig here and chose to use it as my game character for this semester until I rig up my own character. Here are a few animations I have worked on recently.

Walk Cycle:




Run Cycle:

Jump:

These are the playblasts of some of the animation cycles and actions I have been doing. This is my first attempt at making animations for games specifically, and I feel like it is a good starting point. Over time I hope to learn a lot more and increase my skills to a professional level. For this reason please feel free to add any comments or advise, it would be much appreciated.

Zombies Final Stage

It has been a while since I last updated everyone with what is going on with Zombies. Basically we have decided to go more in the direction of a Tower Defense style game-play with Real Time Strategy (RTS) elements.

The player has to defend hordes of zombies from getting to the base in the center of the city. The player has the choice to either freely move soldiers around the environment or use a soldier to build towers in certain places on the map. The game is over once the zombies destroy the base.

A few changes have been made to get the game to its current state. The first major change is the artificial intelligence (AI) of the units and zombies. We were having probably with the AI working properly in our environment. The zombies and units could not navigate through the city to get to the target locations. The method we were using was also extremely expensive framerate wise causing the game to slow down drastically. We solved this problem by implementing a node based movement system for the zombies. For the soldiers we decided to go the route of point and click, with the soldiers moving in a straight line from point A to point B. Although changing the way the soldiers moved around the environment made it slightly harder for the player we felt it was the best option. After implementing this new AI we saw an amazing improvement in the framerate, this gave us the option of having a lot more zombies on the screen.

Game Environment:

(The green circles are where nodes are located)

With the improvement in framerate due to the new AI system we were also able to create a much larger environment(can be seen above).

For our environment we wanted to create a large enough area for the player to defend against but at the same time keeping it small enough so not to make the game-play too easy for the player. With this in mind we thought of the best way to do this using as little resources as possible. We decided that we would use a few basic, generic models and texture palettes to get various looks from the same models.

Texture Palette 1:


Texture Palette 2:

With these texture palettes we managed to create many variations of buildings from the same models(shown below).

Building Variations:

Where Zombies is now I hear you ask?Well, I would say Zombies is still in a prototyping phase. We have the ground work there and working, it just has to be worked on and improved a bit more to make it a better game.

Zombies has turned out to be a massive challenge and headache. We encountered many problems and dealt with them accordingly. It has definitely been one hell of a learning experience.