Peter Harries

Unplanned features, a concept that doesn't sit well with most game developers (producers I'm looking at you), and rightly so! Additional cost and bugs means they can be risky. After all, they are the very definition of feature creep. However, making games is a creative process. Things change during the course of development, inspiration strikes or something you've been experimenting with turns out to be a huge value add. Not all features are born equal, some are much more suited to being a last minute addition than others. What are the attributes of the perfect unplanned feature? How can we spot them and take advantage? Makes use of what's readily available If the feature can be created with elements from existing systems and assets it's immediately something that's worth at least considering. It's a "modder" approach, taking elements of the games that were created to do one thing and repurposing them to create a variation of a feature or even som...

10 years ago I started working in the games industry. Along the way I've picked up a few things that I wanted to record (for my own sake!) and share with you. 1. Understand the problem before chasing a solution Don't be tempted to start designing a solution when the problem is not fully explored and understood, take the time to focus on what you're trying to resolve. Make sure you understand what the solution needs to accomplish then formalize your findings, write them down. Develop goals. Present these to other team members, discuss and amend them as required. It's always better to debate the purpose of a feature than to debate a feature with no obvious purpose. 2. Don't pop an idea before it's fully inflated When a new idea or feature is proposed it's tempting to start immediately identifying flaws or concerns. Avoid writing ideas off or designing fixes based on these assumptions. Although these concerns are likely valid it's worthwhile giving the peop...

I have always been fascinated by long running multiplayer games that have strong communities form around them. Games like Counter Strike, WoW, Minecraft and more recently Fortnite. What follows is the first in a series of notes I have on how we can facilitate this as designers.  Unique Water Cooler Moments Why is this important? In these types of games we want to offer something new every play session. This keeps the experience fresh and exciting over a long period of time. For example; "I was almost dead AND out of ammo, but I snuck around the back and disarmed the bomb with only a few seconds left! - the other team had no idea, it was amazing!" This is a unique moment for that player. Similar situations may play out but it's unlikely to be identical. This is very different to single player games, where every players experience will be almost the same.  Water cooler moments are usually exciting and rewarding by virtue - you probably wouldn't tell somebody about somet...

A few days ago I agreed to take part in a DnD game. So this is a documentation of, well, how it went and whether I learn anything related to game design from the experience! I've heard stories of many a game developer participating in DnD (The id teams lengthy game mentioned in the book " Masters of doom " for example!) so I hope participating will give me an opportunity to participate in a different style of gaming that may even result in learning about game design from a different angle. So I grabbed my battleaxe and dove right in! The basics The first meeting was pretty light the GM (a seasoned DnD veteran and experienced game designer) gave us the run down of how things work, expanding on the details he had given to us on the Facebook event page. Our IRL (in real life) party consists of myself, a game development tools QA tester with zero experience points in my DnD stat. A producer who also has zero experience. A lead QA tester with previous DnD experience...

Last night Jase got in touch with me with some finished tree models, we decided to get the textures on and get them in engine. A maya shot, complete with texturing problem! No Alpha :( Alpha with dodgy edge :( wahd out textur and no lighting built :( Lighting built, almost there! And some grass! ------------------------------------------------------ and done :D Let us know what you think we love to get feedback! oh and we also have a website (although I've been told by my good friend Max Jensch that a single page with a couple of links on is not a website) sorry max! www.fatpancake.com

adding more props, decided to stick with the snow theme, also some shots of what the 2 Ollies have been up to! Preliminary character concepts by Ollie E Ollie L's modular archway ( @ OllieLudgrove ) Me experimenting with the archway! and some shots of how stuffs looking.

A shot from the deck of the ship. Started to add weather effects, the rain is a bit big, but it works, want to play around with it a bit but not a priority. Also not quite nailed the particle effects yet, want to have rain hammering down on the deck, I may do this through a post process volume that makes the camera look wet instead. Hopefully get a video of this up soon. Also need to do the textures. So UV unwrapping, which is the bane of my existence.

So the reason I've taken days to write this post..... So it all started with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdEFmxRmNE Done by the Yogcast guys, it was posted on a forum I visit pretty regularly and I spent a whole night watching the series all the way through. The next day I bought Minecraft... And so far I realy like it. Probably a bit too much! It's VERY addictive. Two of the guys I live with have been keeping up with the yogast videos and both of them have done the same as me and gone and got the game. So I'm building a castle. woop! I was at a lecture Dan Pincbeck (Dear Esther) gave the other day and he described Minecraft as "I am legend" meets Lego, which is pretty much spot on. It's a winning combination that works really well. You get dumped out in the wilderness on your own without much of an idea of what to do. (unless, like I did you watched some videos before buying it). Then it gets dark... Bad stuff happens when it get...

So this is what it's looking like! I want to use this in a submission for the Blitz open day and the deadline is the 10th. My disertation is needing a bit of work too :( So may leave it as it is for now. I will however keep working on this after the Blitz submission. The things I want to change are: - re-do the main body and tower textures, change them to 1024 maps. - add more geometrical detail to the edge of the roof of the main body, tower, porch and both extensions - tweak the geom on the edges of the pine end of the roof and the tower to get a better silhouette - create emissive textures for lamps and windows - create a smoke particle affect for the chimneys - work further into the roof textures, especially the edges. Get all the walls and roof. - add some weathering to the roof tiles.

So I managed to do some work today, I'm happy with the outcome. First time I've done something like this. I say outcome even though it's miles from finished! As it stands the mesh is Bad... Very Bad. Loads of un-needed topology and lacking llooaaddsss of details that I want to add. I want to go for a pretty low poly style and hopefully hand paint the textures so the end result will be Warcraft/torchlight-ish. Today my plan was to nail a base concept and I feel I've got that. Next I'll be playing with details and seeing if i can make it more interesting. Then I'll figure out a colour pallet and start texture work. I've given myself until the 10th! wish me luck!!

So I've been pretty quiet on here recently! Mostly due to the fact that a lot of the work I've been doing has been paper based design and dissertation work. Some of which is quite interesting and hopefully I'll get a chance to post about it on here. But I much prefer to post visual stuff when I can, gotta love pictures!! I'm back in Newport Gwent now after spending Christmas and New Year back in Pembrokeshire with the family which was great! Now I have to face the looming deadlines and get the work done for them! Which does include some modelling work so hopefully I'll be posting regularly throughout the process. The last of those deadlines is on the 13th after which we'll be jumping straight into Double Cross production! Which I'm really excited about! So January looks like it will be busy! Happy 2011 everyone!

All done, now to give it some detail! This is going to take a while!   And here's a quick UDK workspace worskapce shot for no particular reason.

A bit more progress on converting the building into modular static meshes. It's a pretty monotonous job, exporting a scaled down version of the building from UDK into maya then exporting it from maya back into UDK. But once thats done it means I'll be able to edit the buildings details and test in UDK realy quick, like I've done with the airship docks building. It's getting there!

The crane's hook swings in the wind ^_^ love little details like that!

This is my progress on the level so far. each building in white is a static mesh that has a Maya file and a .FBX file. The maya file can be edited so eventually these buildings will be detailed. I've started off by creating the smaller buildings as they will only have 1 maya file corresponding to them. However the taller buildings will be done modularly allowing me to use static meshes repeatedly. This will save me time and mean I can edit building size/height very quickly. This is already implemented on the two tallest towers. The very tallest you can even go inside and walk to the top. But this takes ages (lifts will be implemented! lol) to avoid the repetition being obvious I'm planning to use decals, props, texture variations and the occasional different modular mesh. For example a floor that has been damaged or has a different layout. Hopefully this will be enough to mask the obvious repetition. To get an idea of scale the red dot at the lower part of the city i...

Ta-da! www.doublexgame.co.uk (still under construction, hopefully live within the next few hours!) So things are shaping up quite nicely! At the top of the page you can see the logo I've put togeather for double cross, everyone seams to be happy with it, but like all things it's not concrete at could change in the future. So first I'll talk about the city I'm creating. I have it all mapped out in UDK and started to replace the BSP brush buildings with static meshes. I've tried to create a very narrow and cramped atmosphere when on ground level and dizzy heights when on top of buildings. I'm pleased with the results! I'm going to continue to drop static meshes into the environment. Next I have a piece of promo work I've created for the game. I'm hoping to be able to do a few more images like this to help promote the game. Hopefully there will be a future version that includes silouettes of our actual in game charcters. we do have a b...

Quick update of the map. This time it's all been done in UDK so a little less rough than maya. It's all to scale and you can actually walk through the buildings and wander around the city, although it's very boring at the moment. It's all done using BSP brushes but these will all be replaced with static meshes as soon as their done. Apart from the floor which will remzain BSP and be decorated with various static meshes. The numbers on the map correspond to a list of each building including a description, but I'm not going to show that just yet :p I've also included a screen shot looking up from just in front of building 8 towards the skyline. now i NEED sleep!!

This is a quick and dirty mockup I've done of the environmet for our game (now named DoubleX, as in double Cross!) it's ugly and rough but it does the job. It's purpose is to give me an idea of player proggression through the environment, whats in the environment itself and hopefully this will lead to being able to pin down game pacing and events within the game! This is a mega short post because I've got a load of stuff to do! but as soon as I can I will do a major update with all the stuff we have so far! /Ninja edit: a 3D view of the mockup minus the paintover!

  I've been trying to get our core game mechanic (or a rough version) working in UDK so we can start whiteboxing and testing our gameplay as soon as possible. This is what I've got so far. Picking up the shock rifle, makes the currently invisible blue sphere visible and spawns an enemy bot at a set location. This can be triggered multiple times, as other bots/ players pick up the weapon the mesh will become visible to them and another bot is spawned. This is when things start to get a bit mad. Picking up the rocket launcher does the same for the red mesh. Eventually I hope to have enemies in the level already and have them become visible when the player picks up a certain item. From what I can tell this will most likely be some sort of material effect using matinee but I'm still working on this! Here's a shot of our Kismet setup.

Here I was trying to work out an architecture style for the buildings in the city. The environment is on the side of a mountain so space would obviously be limited, so buildings would be built upwards to get as much real-estate from the area as possible. I was also thinking the city would be heavily involved in the mining industry because of it's location, so this has also influenced my design. The City will have been abandoned when the player enters it so this should show through in the environment. There would still be power within the city so several lights would still be working. But the fact that the city is borderline derelict needs to show through. I'm really happy with this as my first piece of concept work in colour :)