Lego Halloween Party

The lecture by Nolan Bushnell got me thinking. I need to be more obnoxious and my team and I need to have some fun. Since it was Halloween I brought some candy! The main event was a Lego level design party! I was having trouble stimulating creativity, but this worked great. The artists all engaged and helped build something together. I look forward to more of these creative activities.

Nolan Bushnell

I just met the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell. He came for a lecture on business and he even addressed our questions on the game industry. Some of the things I enjoyed was his thoughts on hiring, studying, and living. Being obnoxious and dedicated is a good thing. Study while standing, eat chocolate, and weed out he toxic people in your group. His lecture was very fun and informative. It was great too meet such a big figure in the game industry.

Wreck It Ralph

I just went and saw Wreck-It-Ralph! It was a wonderful movie. It had familiar Pixar tone, great cameos, and all out fun. There were great one-liners, hilarious product placement, and more fun. FUN is the best word to describe this movie. I really felt like I was little enjoying my childhood all over again, but without my mom telling me that video games are silly. Well I guess they are silly, but there is a lot of culture to it. This culture is developing and this movie shows that the new and the old can mesh well together. That's another thing to take from this movie. Never forget where you came from. Learning from old games will teach you how to make new games. I am very happy this movie was made to at least make me feel valid.

Jedi Academy Intership

I am seriously looking into applying for the Jedi Academy internship. I don't have amazing assets created that I would be proud of yet. I have mostly put my efforts toward being a game lead and art director in both Game Design 1 and 2. I do have confidence I can make something awesome, but I am not sure what to put in there. Should I only go for what I am best at or what I like most? For example, I really like making textures for games. Textures like normal maps, ambient occlusion maps, and light maps to improve efficiency. I also like animating, but I feel like my biggest interest is creating a tone or mood. Games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes to mind. It is dark, scary, 3D, and has great sound. My biggest interest is immersing the player into a word through a unified art style. I would say that my skills as a modeler and 2D artist lack. I hope that this does not disqualify me.

Game Mechanics

Game mechanics are a tough thing to understand. Even after playing many games, taking classes, and building games, the mechanics are tough to define. I have recently played Wizorb and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. These two games both have what seems to be an rpg element where you walk around towns and talk to people. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past comes to mind when I am playing those games. Ninja Royale feels like that right now. You have a guy who wants to help a city, there will be some parkour, and eventually some sort of boss fight. What Wizorb and M & M have is that the game isn't actually an RPG. They are strategy games. There is a whole other game than just walking around cities, talking to people, and saving the town. The important questions we have to ask are:

What do you have to do to save the town? Why are you being forced to do it that way? Why are you saving the town?

We want to make our game unique. These games did something unique. You think it is going to be another RPG/Hack and Slash. They turn it on its head by creating a new mechanic or new gameplay style. How can we make a game within what looks like another RPG?

The idea I had was to use these spirit wards. In Japanese culture they many ways to ward off evil. I want to take this a step further and create a game out of these wards. I am still fleshing this out, but this could be the reason why the character has to parkour. These spells are in all the usual places so the character has to get creative and go around them. The character can also use these spells to protect himself or others. Anyways I am still working on it.

Avatar Animation in Maya - Getting Started

This tutorial will help you get started animating Xbox avatars in Maya 2013. This tutorial is for users who already know how to manipulate a rig and keyframes in Maya.

To get started, you will need to have Maya 2009 - 2013 (As far as I know) and access to the education catalog in Xbox Live Indie Games:

http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/

Once you have both of those ready, you will want to find a tool called: Avatar Animation Rig. Click that link and it will open up a bunch of options for your to download. Download:

AvatarRig_4_0_Maya_2009.zip

Once downloaded the zip file, unzip it, and you will find: Documentation, Textures, Avatar Rig Maya 2009.ma, and the Microsoft Permissive License. Read the license at your leisure. The documentation folder is good for when you want to export the animation to XNA. For exporting please see my import/export tutorial.

Fire up Maya and open up the .ma file. You may want to create a project file so you can store the textures stored in the Textures folder. Once the .ma is open you will see a full rigged model! The trick to start is to grab the controllers and look at the channel box. If it has a field called IKBlend or IK**** change the value from 0 to 1. The IK's for the legs, arms, and fingers are locked by default.

Once those are changed you can start animating! Good luck and post any questions in the comments.

Normal and Other Maps

I found a great page on normal and other maps:

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/

This page covers what are normal maps, how to make them, and how they work with other maps like ambient occlusion, etc. It also gives you a few ways on how to make them. You can use all sorts of programs like a free program from Nvidia that works with Photoshop. You can use CrazyBump which is awesome, but it costs money, and I also use Blender.

CrazyBump comes with a free trial and it takes a 2D image and creates normal maps, specular maps, ambient occulsion, and displacement maps. These are crucial in making great looking textures.

With the Nvidia plugin it will only create a normal map, but with a bit of Photoshop skills you can make the other maps. Using Photoshop to fine tune texture maps is highly recommended.

I really like using Blender because I can pretty much make most of the maps I need. It can be a bit cumbersome at first, but for a free program, it's great.