Conquest: Lugh's Animations

Here's a preview of some animations for Lugh:

2D game: escape from area 51

Tiernan O'Doherty
Artist

 creating art assets

I started by looking at what we wanted the game to be like. Alien and human aspects to my creations were on the top of my list. I used Photoshop in my process.I created various shapes and lines and merged the layers of those many, many objects together in their independent parts such as vents, glass wires and sheet metal. here is a ship and an elevator control panel that I've done.

During the process of building the ship i used a slight color variation for the nose of the engines. it gives it an energetic feel. Using wires and tubing I made the engine exhausts look both high and low tech,  the look needed to seem like an amalgamation of scrap cobbled together by an alien  robot and the end result really shows hoe well it comes together.

The panel was smaller and much more simple it was made not to look alien but look like a high tech panel that was obviously made by human hands. note the blinking lights on the right side of the panel and the large red dot on the other. these are classic characteristics in film and game of FBI equipment.Wires were also added so it looked indefinitely human.

The agent was the most time consuming needing a walk cycle and idle stance as shown. but once I had the idle stance done and dusted the rest followed easily.

2D Game Design - Planning

Planning

We started the development of the 2D game by first putting together our High Concept Document. We gathered inspiration from games such as Abe's Oddysee and Limbo and decided on a 2D puzzle platformer in the same vein.

Escape from Area 51 is a 2D sidescrolling stealth puzzle game where the player controls an alien who been captured and detained in the laboratory of Area 51 for further study. The objective of the game is for the player to escape the entire facility and return to his home world. The game is a twist on the usual humans escaping from aliens plot seen in many movies and TV shows.

Our aim is to have three fully functioning levels completed before the deadline.

• Level 1 - Science Labs
• Level 2 - Military Barracks
• Level 3 - Aircraft Hanger 

Production

Sounds of Area 51

Sound effects such as the lasers, computers and doors were created using Bfxr.net and sounds from public domains online which were later refined using reaper by applying EQ's compressors and other such effects. Bfxr.net is an online audio creation application that creates sounds randomly from preset categories. 

The music and ambient sounds were mostly create from scratch using a Midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) keyboard an reaper.

Art

All the art in the game was digitally drawn using Photoshop. The artists worked closely together to keep the theme unchanged from our original ideas. 

Coding

All the coding for our game was developed by Sean using Stencyl. 

2D Game Design - Problems Encountered/Evaluation

 Problems Encountered / Evaluation

From the point of view of audio production there where a lot of issues with using Reaper DAW. This is a great piece of software to use but there was an initial very steep learning curve. We could not get the most from the program until we neared the end of our audio design course that was being thought in parallel with the 2D game design project. One had to master a lot of new plug-ins that added extended MIDI functionality to Reaper. We had access to good hardware including Foley mics', studio mics' and midi keyboards.

From a programming point of view there was a very steep learning curve for the programmer and there wasn't a parallel programing course to complement the programmers stills. As the code-base grew the complexity of the game grew and resulted in the mind control mechanic, the enemy AI mechanic and the stealth mechanic had to be dropped.

From an artistic perspective it was initially difficult to formulate an art style but once this was decided, production of art assets was straight forward. Again there wasn't an art course run in parallel with the 2D game to help budding artists gain digital art techniques.
 

 

Escape from Area 51 - Update

Worked some more on the mechanics and brought in more of the art assets.  Aiming to get the levels designed, then go back and add in more details and obstacles.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/156460008/Escape%20from%20Area%2051-Beta.swf

3D Character Mesh

Here's a 3D Character mesh I've knocked up, that I intend to further model into a template for the Tuatha male characters.

Tweaking Foley Recordings

For one of the foley recording of a very small water fall, I wanted to make this sound a lot bigger than what it was. To add drama to the sound so I used the “ReaXComp” as shown in the image below, the compressor is set to the “SuperSmooth” 3 band preset. The gain of the compressor is set to -3dB.

Audio Processing - 3D Game Dialogue

I didn't have access to a million Euro sound recording studio so my surroundings did introduce some noise into the dialogue recordings. These offending frequencies are easily identified using the REAPERS spectrum analyser and then easily removed using the ReaFIR filter set to SUBTRACT, as show in the image.

 

3D Progression Chart

Hey everyone.  Here's the progression chart for the first chapter of our 3D game, Conquest: Rise of the Tuatha De Danann.

Programming Update - Escape from Area 51

We've made some good progress on our 2D game, Escape from Area 51.  The menu screens and tutorial levels are functioning pretty well, with the core mechanics of each coded in and simply in need of more finer tuning.  Much of it's still in the prototype stage, but we'll soon be replacing the placeholder assets with finished versions.  Feel free to try out what we've got so far.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/156460008/Escape%20from%20Area%2051.swf

Click to move integrated with A* path-finding

After another fix it Friday session we have now integrated click to move with A* path-finding.
We are now slicker than Diablo I. Code snippet shows the core functioality.

 void Start ()
{
    seeker = GetComponent<Seeker> ();  
}
    

void Update ()
{
    //Start a new path to the targetPosition, return the result to the OnPathComplete function
    seeker.StartPath (transform.position, target.position, OnPathComplete);     
}

Path-finding on elevated terrain

The ModFathers have been busy in the kitchen. We have baked a NavMesh for our test-terrain and the Combat system is working too. All in all a good day at the office. We're off to Verona to get MAD.

Unity AI Path Finding

The Unity 3D engine does not support path-finding but there is a plugin developed by Aron Grandberg that allows (near) full featured path-finding. It took a session or two to get used to the features of the new plugin but Aron has a very good tutorial on his website. In the image you can see the purple navigation mesh and the green line is the path the character will follow and also avoid obstacles. The character doesn't move yet as we have not got the click to move script to communicate with the path-finding script.