Class 68

Today I downloaded Particle Designer. I started by experimenting with its basic functions and colour effects. Particle Designers layout is pretty simple and easy to use to make generic looking effects. For example I started to work on a sparking effect.


After making the sparks I decided I would try something a little more complicated, however it didn't work out very well. I was trying to creating a stream of gore, or something to that effect. I started this by creating my own particle sprite. After making the sprite I out it into particle designer, and well it looks... not good.

So instead of doing gore right now, I will attempt to create smoke for Justin's fire effect. The smoke I made ended up looking really cool, sadly however its way too fast and probably won't be used in our game! Next class I think I will continue to work on Particle effects!


MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Class 67

Today I worked on particle effects with Justin. We started by just fooling around with this particle program trying to learn it's basic functions. We accidentally made a sun that actually looks really cool. The sun has a wiggle and fade effect to it, making it look really bright and real. I'm not quite sure how the particle program works, but I believe you just mess around with your settings gs and find something that looks good. Then you hit an import button and it probably just pastes the code out for you to use.
Anyways our sun particle looks pretty cool, we made it using the sphere particle. Next class I would like to continue to work and learn about how to make different particle effects with Justin. We also started to work on a very basic fire effect that we will improve in tomorrow.

Class 65 - Field Trip

Today I wasn't in class because I was out of school attending a field trip to Grandvile Island. But Justin called me and messaged me about the game. That's when we started to discuss his snow, which I strongly disagree with, not because I hate snow, but because then we would have to cover all our assets with snow. ANYWAYS. Justin decided to change my mind by telling me we will just call it ash, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

So now I have to come up with something to do for our game.
Tomorrow I will work on the particles with Justin, only if he wants me to.
If not I will work on level design stuff.

Class 64

Today I did some more work on some character sprites, by that I mean I finally made Howie his own character. Normally when making one of these characters I would use a template, but the template is sadly at my home computer, so I had to use the main character. So I started by putting two pictures of the main character side by side on two separate layers. I then started to create Howie. I decided to make his shirt after the one he sometimes wears that looks like a game controller.

I also started to work on the rest of the new weapons, so I started with the sniper rifle. This time around I tried to give it more shape. This method worked out significantly. This new rifle looks 100% better then the last one. I used a picture of what I believe to be a Swedish Mauser for reference. Using a reference picture was very handy, because it gave me a better sense of the shape of the rifle. The rifle I ended up creating doesn't necessarily resemble the Mauser, but it has some similarity's. Some of the similarity's would be the general colour and shape, plus those weird metal bands on the barrel that I can only imagine hold the woodwork of the gun together. So far this is my favorite weapon sprite I have created. Tomorrow I will work on exterior buildings, and buildings you can enter. Or work on more weapons and talk to Howie about his cool new recoil.  

Class 63

Today I made the shotgun sprite. This sprite has always been kind of challenging because its very simple which is super easy to do in pixels, but not quite what I want. So I changed it up by giving it a tiny little stock thing out the back. Also I added lines on the stock implying it has a grip, so its a pump shotgun now. I used this random picture of a sawed off double barrel shotgun for reference. It helped me get the generic shotgun shape, which is really hard to show at such a low pixel count.

 


Then I went and talked to Justin about what we are doing, I also asked Howie if he needed help with anything. Hes currently working on some HUD for our game, that will require little mini sprites. I'm looking forward to helping him with that. That's what I will do tomorrow if he has finished the coding on the HUD. We also decided to have the character always equipped with the machete. It cuts down on some of the coding Howard has to do, and makes more sense gameplay wise.

After talking to everyone I came back and decided I could make the Shotgun better then it is, so I decided to extend it making it longer, I did this because it was kind of short compared to every other gun. Like i'm pretty certain the pistol was longer. Anyways I made the barrel longer and added some strapped on shotgun shells to the side. You know, like you always see in movies and stuff. I also made the stock a little bit bigger, because extending the barrel would make it heavier and make it *EVEN* more impossible to shoot with one hand. So adding the stock adds a tiny bit more realism then no stock at all, in my mind anyways. Either way our main character is some badass terminator or some shit who can hold a shotgun with one hand and shoot stuff. Not what was necessarily intended, but whatever. Basically he means business, whoever he is. Which leads me to my next thing, we still need some kind of story for our game, our main character doesn't even have a name.


 In case you don't understand what I mean by looking at the new shotgun sprite, here is a picture of the actual thing.

Class 62

So today I attempted to make a blood pool with just a sprite, so far it looks pretty bad. So I think i'm going to let Justin figure this one out. His plan is to do some weird shader thing I don't really understand. But as long as it looks better then this GIF, I don't really care. Also well taking that GIF I noticed a bug in our game, the running animations don't seem to activate when i'm making GIF's.


So after looking at Justin's game I realized hes missing arms, I never actually made the new guns for the new character model, so that's what I did today after I finished up the stupid blood test. I started by redoing the very basic pistol, this time around I give it a more brownish tint, making it look older and more worn. 

I then started to create the AK47, but asked myself, why can you run around and hold an AK with one hand? You wait you can't. It would be way to heavy and hurt to shoot. So I decided to make the Ak47 into a compact SMG, however using one hand to hold a SMG is still not very realistic or practical, it makes more sense then an AK. The Submachine gun also has a brown rusty look to it, effectively making it fit with our new art direction., I started on it by taking the base shape of the pistol and just kind of working over top of it. Hopefully we can see these guns in game in the next few classes. As for tomorrow I will finish up my work on the Guns, I still have to make the Sniper Rifle and Shotgun.

Class 61

Today just required my help with water water reflections, so we went into the office and watched a tutorial on how to create reflections, however the terms in the tutorial didn't quite fit with our game, so we are going to attempt to create our own. Another problem with the water, is that is in fact water, and not blood. So we put it into our game hoping to just change the color and make it look like blood, but this just made it crash, a lot. So we gave up on that for now and finally imported some of my new sprites from home. It was at this moment the school went into practice lock down, so then everyone thought it was a good idea to crowd into the little office. Then we just continued to import sprites. So tomorrow I will start working on water (blood) again, but I'm going to try and just make it a sprite overlay thing rather then a shader. Justin isn't a fan of this idea but I'm going to try and see what it looks like to maybe change his mind.

Class 60

Today I was in class so I finished up the subway wall by adding some dirt and grime, this definitely adds to the atmosphere of the environment. My plan with the subway is to bring some more fear into our game, with creepy dark environments. I started by adding stains on the top of the picture by hand and then using a brush to create smudges at the bottom. I also changed the colour of the middle strip of tiles to create a better transition between the bottom and top half. Thankfully Photoshop allows the use of layers which gives great freedom when it comes to designing any kind of picture.

I also started on making a building for our character to enter, but I won't finish it tomorrow because Justin wants me to work on the basement filled with blood. Tomorrow hes going to start on making some kind of water (blood) physics. And I will design the basement walls and floor. 

Today I learned more about how to merge tiles together creating a successful image. Please note that i'm still using the old character sprite as reference for height, only because his height is the same as the new character.   

Class 59 - GORE WARNING

Today I wasn't in class so I worked on some sprites from home. Justin and I have talked and decided we want our game to be a little more, well scary. So I wanted to achieve this by having some horrific looking sprites in the game. We started by developing some more ideas for our enemies. We decided to call the, "Draggers", they are called Draggers because they drag people away and kill them, and well eat them, everybody's got to eat. Anyways going off on this we decided that they are not as dumb as conventional Zombies and that they are smart enough to use rope. The ability for our creatures to use rope has lead to some very scary pictures, like I mean I was almost disturbed making them. Anyhow you probably want to see what I have done for work, so here are some screenshots of what Draggers can and defiantly will do to people. Also tomorrow I will be in class, so I will continue my work on my subway wall stains, then possibly start on making some actual buildings for the player to enter. These pictures although completely disturbing actually help out my artistic skill. Its defiantly different from what I normally do, and it has expanded my knowledge a little bit about internal Human anatomy. Also on what my limits are for gore, before I never thought I had a boundary for disturbing, but I think I found it.
 

Now keep in mind, I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER, nor do I intend to be one. I also do not require any kind of therapy. Don't judge.
I also recreated that level concept adding in these corpses to spice it up, well not really "spice" it up, because - well dead bodies hanging upside down probably are nothing like spice, basically this has nothing to do with spice, why are we even talking about spice?

Please note my amazing reflections in the pool of blood.
(That's a pretty weird sentence, not going to lie.)

Class 58 - Subway Walls

Today I finished up my work with the Subway wall tile. I still plan on adding water stains to the image, but I will do this by creating a separate image meant to be placed over the wall like a tile sheet or trace paper. Doing that will allow us to have variation in level design. It will make re-using walls more practical, it should save on time and not look too repetitive in game.
I started by changing up the pattern of the old wall so it fits better together, so this is the image pasted 3 times in a row. Tiles are a hard thing to create because the goal of a tile is to not be, well a "tile", it has to have a certain flow. And I personally think I managed to achieve that with this wall.  
I then started to change the visuals of the wall once I found a suitable brick pattern. The first image was too white for a scary underground subway full of danger, so I changed some of the bottom tiles giving them a brown fade going up, I did this manually which isn't something I normally do. I also added a small pattern in the middle of the wall giving it more character.

But I then decided to change it further by altering the hue and saturation of the image. and we are left with this image.

Class 57 - Hard Tiles

Today I decided to make some more wall tiles, i'm going to do some very basic subway walls so we can have underground spots in our game. These underground areas are hopefully going to be the major parts of our game, like old subway tunnels and basements of old buildings. This is the picture I plan on using for reference for my new tile.


I  managed to get most of the subway wall done, but just like its basic shape and design. The tiles are proving to be very hard and very complicated to create. I have run into many problems trying to get them to fit inside the picture and mirror properly. Tomorrow I will continue to work on the wall and make it much better, and actually fit with our game. Currently the colours seem off and don't really work with each other, this is something I will attempt to fix next class, as well as add some of those water stain marks from the real picture. Hopefully I can successfully make a creepy subway for our game world.

Class 56 - Mistakes have been made

So I started the day normally, walked into class, sat down, turned my computer on. Then it hit me, before I start working on something new I should give Justin my brand new background, so I pulled it up. To my surprise it was the old background. So I shrugged that off and looked through my files thinking it was clearly a error I made well opening my files. That's when I noticed something wasn't right. My file is missing. All my work for the new background thats 5 times as big has somehow been deleted. This is when the depression hit me. So I got up told everyone the news and went and discussed parallax scrolling with Justin. We talked about just using the old
version which I still have a good copy of, so we tried some parallax scrolling with that picture, however Justin and I could not figure that out, so instead we talked about the direction of the games development and how we might be trying to be to ambitious. We all have great ideas, but most of them never reach the light of completion, instead they slow us down on what we need for he game, like basic mechanics.

On a more personal note we are experiencing some internal conflict, mostly and only with communicatiom with a certain individual. A lot of conflict has built up between them and everyone else. The problem we are having is that they don't communicate effectively with the rest of the group on what there doing and what they can do. So we are left with a mystery worker, they have also restricted us from seeing there blog, which leaves us in the dark. Today Justin and I tried to fix that gap in communication but it only led to to them becoming very defensive and hostile, verbally and physically.
So this is clearly becoming an obsticle in our development. Please note this was not written in here to be slanderous or vindictive, but as documentation of my personal learning expirence with working as a small team. I have learned from these expirences that everyone has a different way of doing things, and that we should have handled things more smoothly in the beginning of the course to successfully discuss who does what and how we do it.

Class 55

Today I wasn't in class, so I couldn't work on the mutant zombie thing like I planned. However I decided to work on the remaking the player character. The old sprite we had, well it didn't quite fit the game anymore, so I decided I would remake it into something a little better. And lets be honest, my old model had some kind of blood disease or something, his skin colour was just dreadfully awful. I started by changing the base shape of the characters body to a more realistic looking form. As you can see this character has some similarity's to the other character -
*cough* just the hair *cough*.

I then took my "Naked" character and designed his look. I wanted to draw off our original character but still give it a brand new look, obviously I had to keep his beard though, its the biggest tribute to what the game used to be. Anyways I decided to dull down the colour of his jacket and remove his back pack straps, replacing it with a singular sling strap. I also added some gloves and made his hair a little longer and shaggy. I dulled the colours down so it looks a little more fitting with the new atmosphere of our world.

I then started the incredibly long and fun process of animating the character to run. Just kidding its not fun at all, its actually the worst part of everything I have ever had to do on this game.
Which I still haven't finished by the way, so next time I get a chance I will try and finish it. But next class I will continue to work on the "Mutant" creature. Justin and I also agreed that as developers we should put ourselves in the game, but not being narcissistic we decided to make us dead. So just some dead body's laying around or something.

So I also started on that by creating just basic "Us" sprites, they are just reference sprites for now, but soon I will make dead versions. So far I managed to create Myself, Justin, and Simran, so next time I have some free time I will probably make Howie.

Justin Hunt


Jake Calogheros


Simran Sran


I also did a concept picture for what could be a very scary in-game location for our player to find. This concept was created for the purposes of future reference work. Hopefully I will be using it again some day.

Class 54

Today I finished the enlarged version of our background. Justin and I will hopefully manage to make it parallax scroll sometime this week. I was also criticized by Connor on my buildings several times, however he didn't quite understand the implications of our background and how it works because he is now an outsider to the "Drop Dead" project, which basically means I didn't listen to a word of his advice. His advice was to make different looking building by making them look like "L"shaped buildings, L shape being when you look down on it, however it wouldn't really work with parallax scrolling and could and mostly likely would cause visual disturbances in my brain. Looking back at our zombie sprite, I noticed I need to make some changes because I dont like the old style, and I feel it doesn't fit the background I created. I'm planning on making a whole different design, something more creepy and mutated.

- So I started to work on the new concept for our new zombie, or mutant, creature, person, thingy. Really whatever you wanna call it. So far i'm giving it more of a pink-fleshy colour instead of a grey washed out skin tone. Personally I think this design for the zombie looks much more fluid, and less static like a standing twig. I made it look more fluid by giving it a posture, a very bad one at that. I gave it a nice humpback and creepy curved inward arms, making it look almost animal like, which is what I was going for. I also made it look skinny and malnourished by making its rib cage larger and a different colour from its stomach, this successfully makes the creature look "bony". Tomorrow I will continue my work on this creature and hopefully start animating it right away.

Here's another picture of the new zombie, inside my old parallax scrolling background to better show off what it should look like in game.

Class 53

Today I worked on making the background bigger. I had to resize the background because Justin and I agreed that it didn't really fit well withen the game, however we never saw what it looked like parallax scrolling. So who knows, maybe it would have worked, but eithet way we now have a new background thats incredibly big. The way I made it bigger is I just took my old image and copied bits and pieces from it, I repeated the process until I had a whole screen of buildings that didn't look copied and pasted. Then I repeat that annoying process 2 more times making the 3 layers of buildings. I also began some minor work on adding the mountains to the background, this process is a little more complicated because I drew the mountains into the last picture, but drawing with a mouse if great distances doesn't turn out very well. So next class I will finish up the mountains and the sky and then hopefully it will be big enough for the game. Me and Howie also discussed his music, I told him about how he could make it more atmospheric and ambient by removing a recurring drum, it sounds good, but it just seemed to throw off the ambience a little, the drums where making it more of a "song" song rather then a ambient song.

Class 52

Today I finished up my visual work on the background, I just finished adding small details onto the background buildings, and I changed some of the colour around. I also expiremented with changing the mountains, but ultimately they look the best unchanged and plain. Justin and I are concerned that the image might not be long enough though, so tomorrow I might be salvaging the picture and creating a much longer background, I will take the different buildings and paste them at different heights and orientations to make the city bigger. ALSO Howard has been working on music, and it is really good. It fits perfectly with the atmosphere of the game that I was trying to convey with the art style of the background.

Class 51

Today I added some grass to the background using a Photoshop brush that, well looks like grass. The brush is pretty useful, because it randomly changes the colour based on the base colour you have selected. This makes creating believable grass easier, however it makes it hard to control the colours that get put into the picture, so I used adjust to alter the appearance of the grass and make it look a little more washed out and grey. In the second picture I used a copy of the building on the far left to paste over the unfinished buildings, which makes them look a bit better, however they need more details such as damage and other fun stuff like that. So tomorrow I will add damage and details to the buildings as well as work on the dull boring mountains. Also keep in mind that all these buildings are in different layers that I will have to separate to make them parallax scroll through our game. And when that parallax scroll is done, it will look super good!

Here is a picture of all my current background layers,

Class 50

Today I continued my work on the background, sadly I didn't manage to finish within the class time. However I developed our idea further, creating a very dark atmosphere. I learned more about Photoshop's lighting effects and used them to create our game world, and make it feel a little more alive. So I have three photos, the first is a picture of what I made today, without lighting and sky effects. The second is basic sky and lighting effects as well as the place holder buildings, which I have now placed behind the destroyed buildings. The third picture has it all, it has more complicated Photoshop lighting as well as my basic lighting. In the second pictures the colors look a little more washed out, thats because I made a layer to go over top of the whole image with a translucent shade of the sky, this gives off the illusion that the sky and the buildings actually belong to with each other.
Tomorrow  I will hopefully finish the background.