Week 4 Senior Project

This week I was given a lot of models to make. Since I am making this game for a phone I need to remember to keep a small file size for everything I make and to keep a low poly count on my models.

A poly is a "side" of a model. For example, a six sided dice would have six poly's because it has six sides. When you get to more complicated objects such as basketballs and coffee mugs they need to have a higher poly count to get all the roundness. If you are making a game for a computer having high poly count is fine because most store bough computers can handle it, but right now not all phones are as powerful as modern computers, maybe in ten years they would be but right now there not.

When making models for a phone or any low poly models you need to think about the big picture. They might not be pretty but they do there job.

For example, think about taking of photo of yourself, now zoom in on your cheek until you can see the hair growing out of it. It's not a pretty sight, but if you frame the photo and place it on your wall and you look at it as you walk by it look really nice. That is what you have to do when making low poly models you need to focus on the big picture and not worry about little details because chances are that the average player wouldn't notice it.

I said that I had to make a lot of models this week and I will post pictures of what I made and what I used as a reference if I used anything.

Week 3 Senior Project

When your making a project this big or any project you need to set milestones however we also set tasks that we should accomplish for the week. This weeks task was to have a prototype of at least one thing from everyone and also to get a character customization menu up and running. Since each of us has there own assignment for the game we shouldn't have to rely on each other to have something done to work on our part of the project. I have all of my base models done which are the very simple shapes.

Since we are making our first level it should be easy enough so that the person playing the game doesn't have a hard time understanding what to do. Since all the "objects" are going to be stacking up on one another we had to come up with a "grid" for the object we all agreed that the most simplest box would be 256x256x256 px our character currently is 90 px tall and is a ball.

My other task aside from making these simple models was to also make the assets for the game such as the wallpaper for the background and assets for the character customization menu. The theme of the first room is a bedroom were not sure who's bedroom but were leaning towards a kid bedroom. since were making a game for a phone and not a computer some things we had to take account for was that the texture files need to be really small and not take up any memory. So we need to compress them as much as possible to be able to fit lots more texture in the game.

Child's bedroom wallpaper.

When you are making a game for the iOS you know that your working with Apple and Apple does some strange things that Windows users question. For example most cell phones are straightforward resolution such as 640x480, 1600x1200, 1920x1080 etc... But when it comes to Apple they use 480x320, 960x640, and 1136x640 I don't know why they use these but there just strange numbers and it's some what hard to convert things to fit perfectly on screen without having the phone re size the image for you. That is why our character customization screen is 960x640 because we are going to be playing the game on the side and not straight. The art style were trying to go for when making this whole game is kawaii or cutesy. So my job is to make everything as cute as possible it is somewhat hard but I think I got the hang of it. The big grey box that has text will be changed to something more stylish for the game maybe a slide menu function of some sort.

Character Customization Menu.

Week 2 Senior Project

This week is the final week we need to do any heavy paper work for this project. What we had to do this week is something really important, it is as important as the Game Design Document it is the Technical Design Document. The Technical Design Document is when you document everything you are going to do not as in models or what levels are going to look like that is in the Game Design Document. This is more of "what is your software going to run in." What graphics are you going to have 2d? or 3d? isometric camera or first person camera.

If you don't know what to write for a TDD (Technical Design Document) I will give you a basic template you can use. Remember these might not be applicable for the type of game your trying to make. First would be "Hardware" you would want to say what input devices your going to need such as keyboard/mouse or touch/joystick. This is also were you would say your bare minimum for running your game so something like 512 graphics card or iOS Version 3.1.3. "Hardware abstraction layer" this is where you mention what languages your will be using like Java Script, C++, UnrealScript etc. "User Interface" here you talk about what does your UI do to the game and how you will be using it. "Graphics Engine" you need to say if you are going to use a game engine such as Unreal Development Kit, Unity, Flash, etc. and what you will be using from these engines such as lighting, shading, collisions, etc. "Music and Sound" here you talk about what sound files you will be using MP3, Midi, MP4 and if there will be any special sounds that will play if something happens like main menu music will loop until game starts. "Game Data" this part of the document you might have to come back and edit as the project is close to finishing because here is where you like all your assist such as Background_Level_1.png and Main_Menu.mp3. While you make this document you will have to go back and make revisions like any game so I like to have the end of the document a section for "Revisions" here you would write the date and a small code to identify when you made a revision for a part of your document, so I can have in "Game Data" Level_2_Floor.png (0010) meaning this is the tenth revision I made.

After all of that dry blocks of text I will reward you with a little preview of some of the concept art. I am not going to say what does this mean it is just a little teaser and next week I will have actual fun stuff to post.

Dress up Concept

Week 1 Senior Project

This week I start working on my senior client based project. Typically DeVry students get simulation based project, but we were able to reach out to a game company located in Cambridge Massachusetts. Max Voelker Senior Producer of Fire Hose Games is our contact for this game and we will be developing it for a iOS Device.

Fire Hose Games Logo.

Me and our group brain stormed of how to make the game and we came up with Unity, UDK, and Objective C. No one knows Objective C and are not willing to go through the entire learning curve of a new language when we have one available. So we all have major experience with UDK so we decided to use that, but were still going to have a slight learning curve getting everything to work. We are using "Beginning iOS 3D Unreal Games Development (Beginning Apress)"

Beginning iOS 3D Unreal Games Development.

Since this is a client project most of our paperwork is complete. The only paperwork were going to need to do is a list of all the objects were going to have and what files were going to be using. Something that was real simple that I thought we were going to have trouble with was getting developer licenses but a team already did a iOS game in UDK and we asked what they did to get the development authority. The learning curve the other team faced was having a lot of their code not being able to work correctly we have three dedicated members working on programming code and the other team was only of two members.