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.

Visual Feedback

Today I did up a few elements for visual feedback and the HUD. This should be implemented for the next milestone of Zombies. With the visual feedback implemented it will make the game a lot more user friendly and enjoyable. Here are a few of the feedback images I did up.

HUD Layout with space for the radar:

Button Templates (There will be images of each objects instead of letters):


Soldier Selected Icon (will be at the base of the selected soldiers):

Move Here (When the user selects a location for the soldiers to move towards this icon will be placed):

Death (When the zombies or Soldiers die this will be placed):

At the moment I am happy with all the icons and HUD, except for the death icon. I think the death feedback should actually be a 3d object in the game to give it depth and then it could sink into the ground over time. We will just use this death image as a placeholder for now.

So that is what I have done for visual feedback for now. Please feel free to add any feedback or comments. Thanks for reading.

Zombies Milestone

So over the past week or so we have been working more on our Zombie game. We have made improvements with the code and the visuals. Everything seems to slowly be coming together.

We now have a full working and adjustable radar. The soldiers can now get through the walls but the zombies have to break it before they can go past. The AI has been improved as well. We now have multiple spawning points and a day/night system is in development. And I think that's it for the code at the moment.
As for visuals, we have started texturing buildings and assets. We are using texture palettes to do all the texturing, that way we can make a few variants of the same buildings and it wont look repeated (that's the plan). We also have animation for the zombies walk, only one at the moment but we are planning on having a number of different walks just for some difference so the zombies don't all just look the same.

Here is a screenshot:

Zombies Update

This is an update for the Zombies game I have been working on with a group of friends. We have actually added a few features since I last updated the blog so thought I'd get to it.
Changes:
1) zombies can break through walls
2) walls take time to build
3) AI is starting to come together a lot better
4) zombies move towards the target area (will be the HQ) unless soldiers get close to them and then they attack the soldiers
5) A radar has been implemented
So those are changes we managed to get done two weeks ago.

Here is a quick screen shot of all these changes:

Buildings Again

I did up a couple more buildings a few weeks ago and just didn't get around to putting them up on the blog. I decided I would put screenshots up for them today.

So here they are.

Building 01.

Building 02.

Various Assets for Zombies RTS

Over the last couple weeks I have been working on a few street/road assets for the Zombies RTS game I have been doing with a few friends. I haven't done as much as I would have liked to due to the fact that I have been doing some work for my personal portfolio as well (hopefully get a demo of my rough work up in the next week or so). Also managed to get a generic skeleton rig which will be used for the zombies and soldiers animation. I've been trying out some different animation techniques (including Mo-cap) and am really enjoying it.

Here are a couple screen grabs of what I have done so far.

Random Road Assets:

Bench:

Generic Character Rig:

And lastly here is a first attempt at Mo-cap. Its just a walk cycle.

Short video of Mo-cap attempt 1:

And that's it for now. Feel free to leave in comments and suggestions. Thanks for reading.