Atomic Garden Interactive

1 or 2... I experimented with some Post-processing layers. I think using film grain and vignette will really add to the atmosphere of the game, other effects I think I want to wait till I have a closer to finished product to test with before making a decision. I also think I want to keep the effects subtle so as to not be obnoxious so I'm going to try to use as few as possible .

Af fine map indeed Another bug I  encountered in my previous project was when using the PSX shader on large surfaces the warping became severe which was disorientating while playing. This is because the affine mapping that the shader does to emulate the affine mapping the PS1 did, approximates the positions of vertices in screen space meaning that if the vertex in question is far off-screen the approximation becomes more inaccurate meaning that if you subdivide the meshes into smaller triangles the effect is drastically diminished.

Trippy warning. During the development of my previous project, I encountered a bug with the PSX shader seen in the video above. When using fog the shader would break even when using linear fog which was advised with the shader. After a lot of messing around with settings, I found if I increased the fog start distance it fixed the bug.

The Pixel The textures in When the Sleeper Wakes ended up being blurry when I resized them. This was because when I resized the textures I accidentally left resample on which meant PS averaged the difference between pixels to break up the harsh lines of pixels. Which was the opposite of what I wanted.

*Insert Joke Title Here* While testing some of the different Unity Templates I discovered that due to a change in the way that unity handles shaders a few years ago the PSX shader doesn't work with either the universal render pipeline or the HDR pipeline. This means that I must use the built-in unity renderer if I want to use PSX. This isn't the biggest issue but does illustrate the problem of using older resources found online that they often aren't kept up to date with current standards.

Project Design Document Player Control You control a Character in this First Person Platformer game where WASD, Shift and Space makes the player Walk, Run and Jump . Basic Gameplay During the game, an Antagonist Ghost  chases from behind the player and the goal of the game is to Escape the Antagonist Ghost . Sound & Effects There will be sound effects, Footsteps and Ambient and particle effects, Smoke and Steam Clouds . Gameplay Mechanics As the game progresses, The Platform will get more complex making it more difficult for the player to progress . There will also be an Antagonist that will attempt to catch the player and send them back to the last checkpoint . User Interface The Lives will Decrease whenever the player is caught by the antagonist . At the start of the game, the title The Barbican will appear and the game will end when the player reaches the end and escapes . Other Features The Game will include multiple animations for both the player and the NPC...

Silent hill 2.0 Using Maya I created a selection of small scatter objects to fill my scene and tell a story through the environment. I really enjoyed creating these and while UVing the chairs, for instance, was like pulling teeth the overall experience was very enjoyable.

London Upsidedown I imported the blender file into Maya and duplicated and flipped it to create the greater overhang of the city that the text mentions. 

Careful not to inhale the glue flumes I joined the CAA (Computer Animation Arts) students for a session of kitbashing. I found this incredibly enjoyable and helpful. The act of just creating from reinterpreting the given objects and squashing stretching and cutting them into the shape you want was a dream. this also drastically improved my ability to control my as it solidified my understanding of muscle memory of the hotkeys and tools in Maya. Where I to iterate on this design I would increase the size of the tube section on top as currently its slightly under with regards to the proportions of the rest of the robot. But overall I'm satisfied with the result.  

Now in Orange I used the unity package Pro Builder I grey boxed out my level concept. By doing this I realised that the vertical nature of the level I had chosen would not work the way I wanted to. The sightlines from this level were severely obscured and the nature of being in buildings like this would mean I would need to create a whole bunch of objects I am not currently prepared to. So I will redraw my level.

Moody Boards I created a series of images to help conceptual the look and feel I want to capture from the text. Each image is inspired by some element of the text either a line or two or the greater setting of future London. The above image is inspired by ground-level London and the aesthetics of the streets and the below is the inspiration for the skyline and the horizon. This image is the 'overwhelming architecture' and 'aisle of Titanic buildings' from the text. I wanted to capture the emotion of looking up at towing buildings that loom over you in cities with skyscrapers. I was trying to create 'Gigantic globes of cool white light' hanging overhead. Combined with some of the other parts of the text it made me think of these street lights and stalactites. This image is 'a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky'. I tried to think of what London would have as a roof if it were to have one and this style of victoria glass and steel construction...

  Not drawn on actual thumbnails. I made a series of thumbnail drawing to get ideas and to practise creating original concepts. For the top drawing, I relied too much on the line function of photoshop so I tried to create without using straight lines in the later images. Even here I can see the improvement from the first image to the later one.

Blender GIS BlenderGIS GitHub I found this video about Blender GIS which allows you to easily import map data from google bing and OSM into Blender. This creates not only the basic shapes of buildings and the layout of the map but also things like the elevation. With this, I hope I can create a large cityscape the player can see from the place space without the need for me to go in and individually model a bunch of building then place them. this should both save me a bunch of time but also create a far more interesting horizon than I could create using simple cubes.  The Building come in without any textures or UVs so I'm going to have to find a way you texture them that is quick and makes sense but given the distance from the player and the high chance, ill add fog or some effect that obscures the players view that should be relatively easy to accomplish.

How to Make Retro-Style RPG Portraits Using AI This is a video about making pixelated portraits from pictures in the style of old RPGs like Daggerfall . I definitely want to try using this technique to create portraits to illustrate who is speaking in speech bubbles or textboxes, as I feel this would greatly help with player comprehension and be a quick and easy way to make a bunch of very visually striking images. I'm thinking of using pictures of Victorians rather than fantasy characters to see if that creates an interesting aesthetic difference from what is normally associated with pixel art.  

Do the Monster Mash! I photoshopped together a variety of images I was inspired by and this was the result. I love the overall feel of this image the textures it contains, the colours and the tones all do a great job of capturing the look of decay and retro-futurism. I'm going to section this image into smaller panels and construct thumbnails to give myself a jumping-off point for this project.

It's all a matter of perspective We did some perspective exercises by drawing a horizon line then adding a vanishing point. Connecting points to the vanishing point gives clear guides for creating perspective in the image.  To prevent distortion Simon suggested putting the vanishing points outside the borders of the image as this extra space would prevent you from getting to close to the vanishing point while still allowing you to fill the image completely. 

SO YOU GOTTA BOAST ABOUT IT! Getting the player to learn how to play your game is one of those challenges that every game designer faces. I decided to attempt to use the subtle method of giving the player no choice but to do the action and implying through affordance and context what to do without telling them what to do. For example at the beginning of the game the player spawns on the left against a wall. It follows then that they must move right. The player then falls into a pit. They must use the jump key to escape, then into another pit, same deal as the first except now they cant directly jump out as they have a jump off of the raised block because the wall is 3 blocks high. This teaches the player their limits without simply telling them. The pits are also just too long to jump over so a player cant accidentally miss this lesson. Next, the player enters a room where the ceiling slopes down nearly to the floor heavily implying crouching and affording them a small space to move th...

A place for everything and everything in its place. I made sure to keep a clean and clear file structure and naming convention for my project. This prevented me from losing any objects in the scene and allowed me to quickly fix bugs that came up as I could see exactly what I was looking at at a glance.

A man was eaten by a verb. That's what happened. Verb ate'im. When coming up with ideas for my game I tried to think of all the actions a player could take as different verbs. I would then construct sentences using those verbs to represent the puzzles of each stage. For example: The player first Climbs  up the platform, then Pushes the box onto the spikes. The player then Falls from the platform onto the box then Jumps to the Checkpoint. This clearly shows the different actions the player will take in the puzzle and allows me to see what each puzzle idea is actually asking the player to do and how much in between checkpoints. if the sentences get too long then I know I need to break them up with a checkpoint. or if they get too repetitive I know I will need to vary up or rearrange the challenges.  List of verbs in my game Jump Run Crouch Push Reset Dodge Climb Fall To be clear each verb doesn't necessarily correspond to a specific mechanic. The feeling a player gets wh...

The Spirit level isn't as fun as it sounds The way I designed the levels was I drew out my idea using the Tilemap and one tile. Then I added in any special features such as boxes and hazards using different colour tiles as place holders. This created the basic shape of the level and allowed me to tweak it quickly as well as have the character dropped into it to test things such as can the player make this jump. All without having to worry about aesthetics yet. I got this idea from grey boxing, used mostly in 3D games it blocks out the physical features of your level or map to allow you to see more clearly the spaces that you are developing. Then once I had made any revision I would go through and paint over with the correct tiles test the level again and finally replace the place holders with the real objects such as boxes and spike blocks. Finally adding backgrounds.