Peter Harries

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...

I've been busy doing lots of level design, kismet and documentation for this game I've suddenly found myself making. Then I got distracted by environment art which led me to making some snow. It's a particle affect in UDk set to spread quite a distance and I've doubled up a few of them. Hopefully it won't be too taxing on resources! I am pretty happy with it. Check out this video and have a look for yourself! There is a few of us making this game now and we decided we need some sort of name to go by, I've had the name "fat pancake" floating about in my head for a while and decided to go with that. Jase put together a logo and here we are! We even managed to get a website sorted, nothing much there yet but you can find it at 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.

Adding more assets and playing with colours. Spent most of today working on foliage! (and watching game of thrones!) I think I prefer the snowy version.

I'm quite tired so no big description. This is what I've been doing today! Early days yet. With  Ollie L  Making rocks.

It's been almost a year! Oops! So I'm going to do a series of posts about all the stuff that's happening at the moment and this is the first one! Game design stuff! Games, fuck yea! anyway, I've been trying to get a game project on the go again, based on the 1st person puzzler I was working on a year ago! With help from my housemates Ollie E (http://theenormousblogodile.blogspot.co.uk/) and Ollie L we've been redesigning the style, layout and general game with keeping the same mechanic. Here's a look at some whiteboxing screenshot and a  rough style screenshot. Early art style shot GOD RAYS! Spooky Fforest, hopefully we can keep this sort of feel on more final builds The area has changed from a swampy region to a more mountainous area, big drops instead of poison swamp. Overall shot of the whitebox, getting proportions and pacing nailed.

So here's a video of what I've done so far on my little puzzle / adventure game. There's are a few game play bugs that need working out, especially the checkpoint system. I also need to get some characters in there but as I suck at character modelling. The environment needs fleshing out as well, more models, textures, better lighting, particle affects and interactive items. wow just realised that's a lot to do! Anyway aiming to get this section of the game playable so people can have a go at it and maybe even enjoy it! also start working on DoubleX again on Monday! wwooop!

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 doing some tests with a ship model I made. When I'm done modelling it I'm going to smash it up :) at the moment though it's in UDK, you can walk around it, it has 5 floors and 2 crows nests, still needs a lot of modelling work. It also rocks about in the wind. Been trying to put rain battering the ship in but hasn't been very successful. It also needs textures doing. Just added this texture for now to stop the normal's going invisible on me. If you want a clue to where the smahed up version will end up look at the right hand side of the picture in my last post ;)  Update! added this lil pic, you can see an earlier version of the ship on the right.

A screenshot from a little side project I'm messing aound with at the moment. Models & textures are placeholders. But I do like the super simple style.

First post in a while! Been crazy busy recently, but with loads of interesting stuff!! So on March 10th 2011 I got the opportunity to visit blitz games in Leamington spa!! I thought I would do a write up of what it was like to give anyone else thinking of applying an idea of what to expect. (If you're thinking of going already, do it! it's well worth it!) I arrived in Leamington spa on the 9th and stayed overnight in Buckland Lodge , the hotel it self was a bit dated but overall it was ok. Run by a guy called John who seemed nice and it was cheaper than the travel lodge! Also got breakfast in the morning, always good :) Next day I was up at 7:30 got breakfast had a bath (no shower in my room! gutted!) and got up to Blitz just before 9. At which point I waited for Rhys (One of the programmers we worked with in the 2nd year, also from Newport uni). But Rhys managed to get himself lost so I just went inside and I was cold. Once I was inside we got directed through to a ...

After the presentation last week (that I think went quite well!) it's back into production. Over the next few weeks I feel we need to really focus on a couple of things. #1 - Getting a working prototype out the door. This is so, so important and thus far we haven't managed to do it. I wouldn't say it's any of our fault that this has happened. But we have such a nice mechanic and at the moment we don't have the technical abilities to pull it off. In short we need someone familiar with programming and is possible scripting for UDK. Now we have two options, hunt for someone who can do this or one of us learn to do it ourselves, possibly sacrificing other areas of the project. So I'm stumped. We have a meeting tomorrow so hopefully we can discuss a solution then. #2 - Having a defined art style in engine. By this I mean something within UDK that shows how are game is going to look. At everything apart from the actual static meshes is out of the box UDK (textur...

So last Month I submitted my application to Blitz games to visit their studio as a 3D artist and I'm happy to say my application was accepted :D Blitz was founded in 1981 by the Oliver Twins (Creators of the Dizzy Egg series!!) and has been responsible for several games including the recent dead to rights. So I'm mega excited, this will be the first time I've had a chance to look around a commercial game development studio and get to meet the people who work there. Hopefully it will be a great chance to get a feel for what it's like to work in the games industry and make some useful contacts. ssooo I'll be off to Leamington Spa on March the 10th! wwwooo!

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've been trying to get textures down just to cover stuff. It's messy and not finished and still needs tweaking but at least I can get an overall picture of where it's going. Getting a bit sick of texturing now, have 2 days to go before I want it done so just trying to get stuff done.

So I'm going to do it a bit different today and instead of making multiple posts just update this one with my texture progress! Here's the first shot, pine end of the house, Haven't done the stones at the bottom of the wall yet.   update #1: got bored made this out of parts of the main building!    Update #2: Just got a comment on Polycount about how the wall texture is grainy, I do agree so I may bump the texture up to 1024 for the bigger parts. Here's a texture shot of what it's like now. (actual size). update #3: Door done! update #4:WHat I've done today, may revisit the wall texture but I want to get it finished in the next few days so I'll use it for now and hopefully have time to go back to it later. The roof texture needs working on as well.

Yes this and my previous post are a reference to lil jon & the eastside boys musical masterpiece that is "get low". :D So I've unwrapped and done a first pass on the textures, so most of them are big ugly block colours. Still pretty happy with progress and confident I'll get it done in the time I've set myself. There are a few dodgy shadows, I'll try and figure out how their sneaking in soon. Could just be the Ambient Occulsion being weird. anyway here are some pictures of what I've been doing.

So texturing isn't my strongest point and I find it really tricky and difficult. Especially when working with anything under 512's. I'm quite happy with them but will probably re-visit them later. Having to do the artwork with a mouse at the moment because I don't have access to a tablet, so that's a bit of a pain. May go hunting for a cheap one tomorrow. Overall happy with progress, was hoping to get more items unwrapped today but don't know how many I'll get done. anyway here are some screenies. And a shot of the texture.