Peter Harries

So this week I'm up at GameCity 5 in Nottingham! We got here on Tuesday, Nottingham is a nice city and the talks and expo's have been great! Also seeing several Newport students showing their games ( colour runners , Q.U.B.E. and Mush ) was really great! If everything goes to plan it would be great to be in a simmilar position to them next year! So far The talks that I have found most interesting have been Jonathon Blow talking about the development of BRAID , Chris Hecker talking about Spy Party and Niv Fisher talking about Confetti Carnival . All very interesting and inspirational talks. One key points that I have picked up on throughout the talks is that plot should be secondary to gameplay and that pushing for what you want the players to feel should take priority. Making the game scary rather than figuring out why the game is scary. So in essence designing with how you want to affect the player in mind rather than the story. Ofcourse this could depend on the game

  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 :)

Not so happy nwith this one, lot of problems with it. Trying to get a more of a street level view.

I've done a very sketchy city concept for our third year game. Next I will continue to research and concept ideas for the general feeling within the city. At the moment I'm going quite a modern city that feels very cramped as it's been built on a cliff. So I will be looking modern cityscapes and also places where people live in very cramped areas. I'll post again with full details of our project later on!

WATCH ON YOUTUBE HERE " "Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film. This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world. www.sintel.org" This short film is a must watch. Simply Brilliant!