GAG 1.0 Q4 2013

Hi, we're hosting the first GAG event for Game enthusiasts to come demo and play-test their games. Not a developer? Just come and have fun!!

@ The Open Window - LAB & Bootcamp studios 19/11/13, starts 18:00-LATE.

Digital Painting Presentation

All Animation & Game Design Students, please join us for a Digital Painting presentation by Renier vd Westhuizen on the Saturday, 5 May from 10:00 - 14:00.

Renier vd Westhuizen  (Storyboard)

No Game Design Week 7

The week 7 class will be postponed. I will need more time to prepare the Unity elements for you. We'll be able to finalize our presentations in the 4 hour session during week 8. Please bring all your work to class and make sure all your animation models and textures are prepared.

You're welcome to drop by and get a crit on your character animation or if you have any questions. I'll be in my office.

nDo, modular level design, PhilipK

Updated: 15 October 2010 - Bottom of post

So if you're at all interested in quick texturing and easily generating normal maps, cavity maps and friends from your photos or paintings, you've probably installed CrazyBump (available at the school, educational license) and xNormal (which, although it's mainly used for 3D geometry bakes, also comes with Photoshop plugins and is freeware).

nDo has been released. It's a set of Photoshop actions that allow you to generate normal maps from your images, as well as creating a sculpt layer for you to "sculpt" your normals in Photoshop. There's no realtime preview (a la CrazyBump), but other than that, it's really powerful, and means you can create your maps without leaving Photoshop.

Also, it's free.

Game Industry Mentor

"My name is Aaron Canaday and I work as an environment artist for BioWare Austin, and as you can guess, a large majority of my guests for the show are pulled from the amazingly talented friends I have at that studio."

Take a look on the Game Industry Mentor site.

There's a folder on the student share with some of the ones I've downloaded. Recommended listening if you're keen to get into the game industry. (And while you're at it, join polycount and/or GameArtisans and interact with the multitude of industry professionals who frequent those boards.

Unreal Tournament III

...oops, I mean Game Design Module 3. Download brief here.

Game Design Deadline

The deadline for uploading your characters into the shared folder on Dropbox is Saturday, before end of class - see previous posts for details.

Class starts at 15:00.

No progress marks will be given to those who fail to submit on time. Don't rely on the TOW internet connection either... you know how it goes. 

Please remember your area layouts, texture libraries and asset lists you had for homework. 

Game Design Models Update

Please upload your latest Game character (emdl) & textures (jpeg) to the communal Dropbox folder.
You'll need to create a Dropbox account in order to collaborate. Also make sure that your e-mail details are up to date on the Open Window DB - you should be getting an e-mail from me shortly.

Please compress everything into a zip archive (with your initials & surname i.e. "PJ_Koekemoer.zip") , for bandwidth sake. 


You'll also find an updated version of the Level model with scale reference, as well as a Walk-through breakdown of the level in the shared folder. Thank you.

- No class this Saturday, see you on Tuesday.

Game design environment workflow example

As i mentioned in the class, the work flow I suggested is to be able to quickly see what the level will look like in the game. I wanted to post a simple example to show the idea, and i hope this gives a little more insight to why it will be helpful.

Step 1 (shown below): Draw on the level layout (your numbered block), from a top down view. What i am drawing is what would work in the level, from a gameplay/level design perspective.


Step 2 : Block the level layout using ONLY primitives, I did not spend time modeling anything. This allows me to redo the level layouts 100 times until satisfied. 


Step 3 (shown below) : Paint on top of a "player view" (note : mine is not an in game view on purpose).


Step 4 : Complete the list of per asset, per level, per area objects for full level asset list.

Some comments on why and what, most of them are on the image itself. Other than that, i wanted the exit to be most prominent in the level, so they know where the way out is. I also wanted to give them cover from the zombies as it is an earlier/easier part of the level. All lighting and placement is intentional, very specific to gameplay being fun and worthwhile, rather than artistically good but defunct as a level.

References

Reading reference

Obviously incredibly important is a good handful of references and reading material on the subject. Here are some for the level design part, more about reading and planning than artistic and visuals here :

l4d blog - design terms

Creating multiplayer maps for Singularity

Singularity - large scale concepts and level planning

Visual reference

Finding hundreds of images for reference of subway is not hard. Even really cool ones from games, l4d has a subway level, max payne had one and im sure you can think of a whole lot more. Find them, read them, study them.

One guy i can link to, a member of the polycount community, has a really good example on his website www.envart.com .

Cool, questions welcome! And the more reference you have the better. Post links to reference in the comments for others to use as well.

Module 2 - Animation & Game Design 2

2nd year students: Please download the briefs for module 2.

Animation 2 - Module 2

Game Design 2 - Module 2

(right click > save link as...)

Game Design Project

Download the Asset list here.

We are collaborating with TUKS's programming/development team, where we will be in charge for creating all the graphic content for the game.  The project will run for the remainder of the year and will entail everything from interface design, level design, props, character setup and animation... and everything in between.

The Harvest - Luma Arcade

Out of interest, mainly for the Game Design students, Luma Arcade (Luma's game development department) is working on The Harvest, a game built on XNA that'll run on Xbox 360, Windows PC and Windows Phone 7.