Gameplay and Interactivity: Mechanics and Balance (Spring Submission)

For the spring submission, we had to create a demo of a 2D game in a group. There were 5 people in my group; myself, Irina, Warren, Ray and Tom. 

The first thing we did was decide on an art style. We all felt very strongly about Ollie Moss' work, and decided to try and emulate that as well as other similar styles and aesthetics. We went away and were supposed to gather some references and do some concepts to make sure we were all on the same page with art style. Mine are below. 

I really love the vibrant, saturated colours in the images in my moodboard and tried to copy that with these quick sketches.

After meeting up and confirming on the art direction, Tom told us what the game would be about and decided what everyone would do. He asked me to mostly help with coding but I enjoy character design the most, as did Irina, so we asked if we could help design the characters as we didn't get a lot of input anywhere else in the game. Here are some moodboards I created.

Since the game was a sci-fi futuristic setting, I looked at some hairstyles and looks for the main character. I thought it would be cool to have their eyes covered and the villains (see moodboard below) would have their mouths covered.

These are some images I found after searching for cyberpunk and futuristic clothes.

After this, I made some character silhouettes, then after input from friends and the group, I created a few more using the most popular aspects of the most popular designs.

I asked Tom which he liked the most, which was the first one, but I felt like the third one would be easiest to animate, as I was also tasked with the sprite sheet for the character animations.

Here is the sprite sheet for the run cycle and also the run cycle in action below that.

After this, I worked on the jump, kick, punch, damage and death sprites. I struggled with the death animation, though, so we left that one out. This was my first time ever animating anything and I found the run cycle to be much easier than the others because there is a lot of direct reference for that online. The kicks were pretty straight forward, but after that I started to feel more and more out of my depth. I'd like to practice animation more in the future.

After this, I tried to add these sprites to the character in our game and turn them into animations, and manipulating the animator in Unity so that it would know when to use which animations. While I got this to work in my test build (see below), I wasn't able to get it to work in the actual game, so I left this to Tom, who had taken charge of building our game. I thought that he would know what the problem was and he got some help from Ewan. It turned out that we needed to write some code to get the sprite component of the child of the player. In my test build, the player was a single game object, but in our main game build, the player consisted of a parent object and a child.

I had originally created a test build early on to test the pick up objects. At this stage, I thought I would be doing all of the pick ups, but Tom then gave the job of creating the sprites for these to Ray, so I just did the script. Still, I made some dummy pick ups before knowing this to test out the script. This is what it looked like, along with the hierarchy.

As you can see, I have a blue place holder character, a pick up item, a floor and a health bar. The health script and bar was something I was working on after the pick up script, but Tom decided to do that himself, so I stopped my version half way through working on it after I found out. The pick up is an empty parent game object containing the pick up itself (the white square) and the message that pops up and floats above it when the player gets close. I also made the entire thing float up and down using the animator. Here is the script I created for these pick ups.

I tried to make it as generic as possible and left some messages in there to make sure that Tom could understand what I had done. This script is a modified version of a script I did to pick up planks of wood in my winter submission game. I just adapted it to 2D and also made it much more simple. I had not done anything with 2D or key inputs before so it was a bit of a struggle but after some research I got it to work. The main issue I had is that I could get it to work when there was one pick up object in the scene but not when there were two or more. I fixed this by organising the picks ups into empty game objects (like shown earlier above) and attaching the script to these parents. In the final version of the game, this script was edited by people in the group other than me without my knowledge, so I'm unaware of who did it or what went into those additions.

***

This concludes my input into the game. There were a couple of scripts that Tom had some trouble with that I spent a lot of time trying to help with, but I could not figure them out either. I thought I was better at coding than I actually am, I realised during the production of this game, because my winter submission had quite a lot of code in it. However, these codes were quite repetitive and relatively simple so it was easier to find references online to help me with troubleshooting. This game was very complicated for me, with lots of different things going on. For the next group game we have to do, I will make sure to play to my strengths, which is the art side of things, so that I can help my team better. I also think I will try to find a team whose main focus is to create a solid game that looks good and works well, as opposed to a game that has a lot of complicated features for the sake of having them. A lot of the time during the production of this game I felt like more and more features were being added before even the foundations were completed and I found this very stressful and hard to follow. Quality is better than quantity. Considering we are students on a very tight schedule and lots of other projects to do, I feel like this is for the best, at least for me and my own progress.

There was a lot of miscommunication in the group. Tom, the self appointed group leader, decided things on his own several times without consulting the rest of us throughout the entire time we worked on the game. A lot of the time, I would be already working on something, either having being told by Tom to do it or I said I was doing it, but then he would either do it himself or give the work to someone else without telling me. He expressed that I was not working fast enough, but to me I was going at reasonable pace considering the time we had and managing our other projects. A lot of things happened without my knowledge, such as my script being edited instead of me being asked to edit it myself, as it was my script.

Also, from the beginning I felt like I had very little say in the group. Tom decided the game would have this or be about that and if anyone tried to add to it or disagreed with something, he either ignored it or said no. This was very frustrating for me. I was very unmotivated and ended up not being very passionate about the game, resulting in a less than ideal performance on my end. In future, I will try to not let my group members affect my performance and just get on with my own work. Also, I will try to speak up more when I really disagree with something, as a lot of the time I felt too anxious about sharing my concerns with my group. My poor attendance did not help the situation and likely made Tom feel like I was not taking the project seriously, so I will take action to solve the issues contributing to my attendance in future. Tom and I did have a conversation about all these things and they improved after, but shortly went back to bad communication. For example, a few days before our deadline, I was abruptly asked to attach the animations to the enemies, but I struggled and could not figure out how to do this and was left to deal with it on my own. In the end, I gave back to Tom what I could do and left it there.

Warren and Ray went missing half way through; we just rarely or never heard from them. This put a lot of strain on the group, especially Tom, who ended up doing a lot of their work for them and did so much for the game. It was really unfair. If this happens again in the future, I will try and advise my group to make the game a bit smaller to adapt to the loss of team members. What Tom had planned for our game was fine for 5 people, but for just 3 active members and two who were on and off, I felt it was too much. So in future, I think the priority is to cut the game down to its basic functions and then add to it as time allows. This way, the performance of the game does not have to suffer and the active group members wont have to bear the weight, which would then affect their own work on the game as well as work on other projects.

I did not manage my time very well in the second half of production with any of my projects. This was due to some personal health problems but mostly my own poor time management. Due to this, I was not able to complete the animations. At the time of submission, they are roughs. I had planned to turn them into vectors in Adobe Illustrator and add her clothes, but I ran out of time and left them rough to focus on my other projects. Also mentioned before, I really struggled with the animations and found the clothes to be too hard and therefore too time consuming for me to add. I found the animations very fun to work on and I am glad I was asked to do them because I learnt something new, however in future I will not let myself be in charge of something I have never done before as I do not think this is fair to the rest of the group. I did try my best in the little time I left myself, but of course if I had given myself more time I might have been able to do more. I will make sure I stay on top of all my work across the course so that it does not negatively affect me or my group members in future.

Although I had a lot of negative experiences with this game, I did learn a lot. I have gained experience in dealing with conflict with peers, which could easily happen in a real life work setting. I found a new confidence in creating simple code, using the language I had already learnt to piece together a uniquely made script, as opposed to copy and pasting one from the internet. This way, I feel like I understood more by making it myself. However, I also learnt that I need a lot more practice before I will be able to understand more complicated code. I am planning on working on a small personal game project over the summer to try and get better at code before the new academic year. I also learnt how to animate a convincing run cycle, a jump cycle, and a kick.

Anatomy: Muscles

For this homework assignment, we had to study the muscles of the body. Using this knowledge, we had to create two illustrations of the human body without skin (showing off the muscles) from the front view and the back view, then label the key muscles. 

I started by making some notes about the major muscle groups. Here is a selection of my notes. 

After this, using the reference image provided, I started to paint on top of the skeleton I did for a previous assignment, using it as a base. At this point I just wanted to block out the shapes so that I could visualise the muscle groups better. 

 After this, I started to paint over and refine the illustrations. Here is what I ended up with.

Here is the labelled version. 

I found this assignment very challenging because I had never studied the muscles in such detail before. I found it hard to paint in all the details. Still, I think my illustrations are clear enough for the major muscle groups to be seen. I learnt a lot, particularly that areas of the body which I thought would only have one muscle, for example the thigh, are actually made up of several. The muscles work with each other and are wrapped around or layered onto each other. One part I found very interesting was the arm. I found that the muscles in the arm interlock like links. I feel like this new knowledge will help me when drawing people and other humanoid creatures, much like how learning the skeleton did.

More Speed Painting Techniques

In this lesson, we were given an image that we had to do a speed painting study of. We were also shown the various layers of the image and were to use those to create our studies step by step. 

These are my steps. 

This is a bigger version of what I ended up with when the class finished. 

At first, I didn't enjoy this assignment at all. I struggled a lot with the girl in the background and also the colours and trees. However, after some time and some encouragement from Steve, I started to feel more confident and got used to the scene. I really like my study and I learnt quick ways of making trees but most importantly I learnt how to block in shapes whilst keeping values and hues in mind. 

Life Drawing

I did not attend many life drawing sessions this year. My attendance was appalling across the course, but life drawing in particular I avoided because it made me so uncomfortable to stand around in a circle for 2 hours drawing a naked person. I realise that as an adult at an art university, I should be able to attend these sessions without a problem. Unfortunately I am far too anxious for this sort of thing and it just isn't for me. I have heard about a life drawing society at the university that has clothed models, so I am going to take advantage of that when it starts back up. I really do enjoy studying from life, so I don't want to let my personal issues to get in the way of that. 

Anyway, here are some of the studies that I got to do. The quality of the pictures are not very good as I took them in my house which doesn't have very good lighting. I tried to edit them in photoshop but I couldn't do so without distorting them so I have left them as is. 

From the above, I picked out my favourite two to look at closer.  I really like the way I have done her hair here, although the proportions are off.

The proportions in this one are a bit better but still not quite right.

I really love the study below. It is my opinion that this lovely model often looks quite grumpy and I think that I captured that well here.

Again, I love the way I drew the hair here, but my proportions are still off.

The proportions in the next one below are much better and her posture looks quite natural. The drapery is confusing, however.

I really enjoyed the session where we got to draw faces. I struggled at first, not feeling confident enough to make any bold marks. After some tuition from Tessa, I felt more at ease and loosened up a bit. The first face I drew turned out pretty well, though the nose is too sharp and the nostrils aren't defined. The last face is my favourite study from all the sessions I went to. It looks like a real person. I learnt to make light marks and build up on them for a more realistic effect. I also paid more close attention to her bone structure and how all the facial features work with each other.

Like I said in the beginning, I really want to seek out this life drawing society at the university so that I can practice more comfortably and get to the level I should be at already like if I had attended all the sessions. It will help me greatly because I mostly draw humans and it will also help with 3D modelling. I know that it is important to see muscle definition, so I will also ask some of my willing friends to pose for me over the summer as I would be much more comfortable with this. 

Speed Painting Study

This lesson was about developing our eyes. We were given a copy of a digital painting and had to do a study of it, judging the proportions, colours and values. Also, we had to work quickly and learn to block out a painting by colours and build on that instead of drawing each detail first. 

I started by adding the green to the black background layer, then on the painting layer above, I blocked out some greys for the hair and top and some skin colour for her head and body. I didn't want to use too many different values and colours here because I wanted to get the overall idea of the image down first. 

Once I had done this, I added the lighter and darker values on the face and hair, also trying not to focus too much on any specific area and keeping up a good speed. I tried to work in a way where each part was as developed as the rest and build on it.

Here I started to really paint and refine all the details, also on the rest of the body. I also added the white highlighted areas and added some shine like in the original image.

I had a lot of fun with this speed painting. I spent about 2 hours on it and stopped there because the point of the task was to practice painting faster. I will definitely practice this more so that I can get quicker at laying the foundations down for my own paintings. Due to me stopping at 2 hours, though, some parts are not as detailed as the others. For example, the ear is not very refined, but the nose is. I also spent a lot more time on the head than the torso. Next time I'll make sure to treat all areas equally. Also, although my colours are very close to the original, I think some areas are not as saturated. With more practice, I'll get better at picking colours using just my eyes. Overall I am really happy with this outcome and have learnt to trust what I am doing early on and not start drawing details to imply form, instead relying on the shapes I am making. By doing this, I was able to just get on with it, instead of fussing around with details in the early stages, which would have taken me even longer to finish in the end.

Anatomy: Skeleton

For this assignment, we had to study the human skeleton, specifically looking at the major bones and the different types of joints those bones have. 

We were given a link to a video by Proko about the 6 types of joints. I learnt that he was specifically talking about synovial joints. These are the most common and most movable types of joints in the body. They are hinge, pivot, ball and socket, ellipsoid, saddle, and plane joints. I watched this video a few times, the last time pausing it in places to make some detailed notes (below). 

As part of the brief, we had to draw or paint the skeleton in the front, back and side views, and make two labelled copies; one with the bones pointed out and one naming the joints. 

I used my notes and began blocking in some basic shapes to start with, refining the image as I went along. I used a head guide on the left to make sure the skeleton was 8 heads tall, which we learnt in a previous class is the average height of an adult male. 

After this, I copy and pasted the image and flipped it so that I could use it as the back view, and began painting over it, changing the background back to white.

 Above is my final image and below are the two labelled versions we had to make; one with major bones and one with major joints.

I learnt a lot during this assignment. I've never studied a skeleton before and originally thought it would be a lot harder to draw one. However, after studying it and first drawing all the bones separately, I found it a lot easier and more enjoyable than I thought. It was very interesting finding out about the different joints. For example, I had no idea that the elbow had two joints that were in charge of two completely different types of movement. I really feel like this extra knowledge will help me during my own illustrations of people and humanoid creatures because I will be able to tell what the limitations of the characters' movements are. I will have a better idea of how an arm might look if I know that the radius should be crossing over the ulna. 

I only did the front and back view as I struggled with the side view a lot and within the time I left myself, I felt it better to leave it. In future, I'll improve on my time management so that I can get things done thoroughly and on time. 

Form Using 4 Values

In this lesson we looked at creating form using only 4 values. We were given a silhouette of a droid with 3 more colour swatches for the lit surfaces, the lit vertical surfaces and the lineart, which could also be used for the darkest shadows. Using these, we had to paint in the droid, using the provided finished droid as a reference. 

 First I blocked in the lit surfaces to give it some depth and to act as a guide for the rest of the values.

 Then I blocked in the lit vertical surfaces.

Finally I added in some lines and shadows using the lineart colour, then refined it and made the edges neater. I also added a glow around the two lights on the droid, like in the reference image. Here is my final version.

 After this, we were to duplicate and resize the droid, using the perspective guide provided and adjusting the values through the levels to create the illusion of atmospheric perspective. This is when something is further away from the eye, so the values have less range and appear lighter. It's also harder to make out details. A good example of this is looking at an expansive grassy field with hills during the day. The grass and trees closest to the eye will appear green, but the further away they get, the more blue they are and lighter they are.

Here is what I ended up with.

I am quite happy with the way I showed the atmospheric perspective. Since there was no colour in the background, the only thing I did to each droid was adjust the levels so that the details were harder to see as they go further away and they appear lighter. I also made the little lights less intense in each droid, with the last one not having any light at all.

The droid itself could be better. The lines are not as neat as the reference image. Next time, I will need to be more patient and keep my hand more steady. Still, it definitely has form and looks like a 3D image, so I am content at having learnt the technique well.