incredibly useful!

here’s my first ever textured character uv map! ah understanding things is great!

This whole process is achieved by first selecting the edges of your model and designating Seams, these seams represent the different divisions in your model you want your texture to notice, once the seams have been created you can export them as an image, and you can use image editing software, i..e photoshop to add textures/images to the different faces of the image.

So, here’s some of the inspirations i wish to incorporate into my main character:

The images relate to the following:

1. leather armour  from Fallout New Vegas
2. Mad Max outfit
3. Jagi’s outfit from Fist of the north star
4. Punch blade from Republic Commando
5. 10 mm pistol from Fallout series

Here’s some basic sketches of what i want my character to look like based on the above mentioned influences… remember.. they’re rough!

and then some very basic shapes to base my models rigging on for animations and poses:

More soon…

Proposal: Maverick justice

Game Description

Maverick justice is a single player third person shoot’em up (shmup) game set in the not too distant future, the adventure takes place in Mohave, in the United States. The player must take on the role of Lance Maverick, veteran bounty hunter, in his quest for justice… and cash, this game draws upon many popular post apocalyptic fictions, and should appeal to action oriented gamers who like fast paced combat and playing the role of the one man army.

Story Summary

The Story revolves around Lance Maverick and his current Bounty; Professor Hugo Lutz. Maverick’s aim is to bring Lutz down dead or alive, when he’s tipped off as to Lutz’s whereabouts he heads straight to Calico to see if he can hunt him down, this is where the adventure begins, Mavericks finds Calico infested with strange extremely hostile beasts, and he has to blast his way through them, eventually he comes upon the suspected laboratory of Doctor Lutz and he has to navigate his way through more strange creatures and Lutz’s psychotic traps.  When he finally catches up to Lutz, Lutz plays his trump card; revealing a massive robotic suit. Maverick faces off against Lutz, and although he’s almost gotten the better of, Maverick wins the day, and more importantly collects on his bounty.

Platform

Currently Maverick justice is being developed for PC only, this may change in future, but further research is required to see if requirements for other platforms can be met. It is generally recommended to develop for a single platform before exploring multi platform potential, this way the scope of the game will not be affected by whatever problems cross platform optimization might present.

Genre

The genre of Maverick Justice is a single player, third person, shmup, it shares many similar elements with the neo geo game:  Metal Slug

Target audience

The target audience for this game is anyone who likes fast past shoot’em ups, with an emphasis on fun and game play as opposed to rich character and story development, it’s a game that can be enjoyed by anyone, and is very simple to play.

Gamers who’ve played games liked  Metal Slug or Contra, should feel right at home with this game, However, I’m not aiming for the same level of ridiculous to impossible difficulty, merely the same fast paced shoot everything a million times mechanics.

Mood Board

This is the mood board i developed today to encapsulate the themes, references, locations and feeling of the project.  the Mad Max character represents the player characters personality as a  post apocalyptic force of justice, the style of his clothing is also akin to what I’m looking for in my character, though overall style of the game has yet to be decided, The army ranger from Popular game Fallout new Vegas  also physically represents the look I’m interested in for my character, if not the style, however it also represents the Mohave, where much of New Vegas is based, i based Maverick Justice in the Mohave Desert because it was a barren wasteland, but also because it’s got so much history, gold mines, ghost towns, and gun fights

The town in the lower background is one such ghost town known as Calico, which i decided seemed a pretty cool place to base  the first act of the games’ story

The Middle Background image is a shot of the wastes of the Mohave, this emphasizes the lawlessness and solitude i desire for my games theme

The upper background images all relate to the other aspect of my game, genetic mutations, horrific monsters and scientists playing god, the images in the top left background are of course from the amazingly brilliant film the thing these aberrations represent the creatures the player character is going to encounter(and by encounter i mean kill) the scientist casually picking DNA strands apart with a tweezers represents the depraved scientist Hugo Lutz, my games antagonist

In the not too distant future,

In a world of greed,

Corrupt politicians and moral decay;

 One man chooses to fight,

Using his own personal form of justice…

Maverick Justice

Characters

Lance Maverick is a courageous soldier of fortune, who travels the country looking for the people needs his special variety of help the most. His method of transport is also his prize possession; his custom Harley; the Sabre hawk. Mavericks’ past is as shady as he is, little is known about him, but his skill and tactical acumen suggest military training at an advanced level.

What is clear about Maverick is that he’s a force for the people; no job is too great for him to take on. Though he is in fact a bounty hunter, Maverick only pursues those he deems as a true threat to the public. Maverick has no home and no family, he travels the Mohave and lives and dies by the gun.

Doctor Hugo Lutz was at one time a brilliant and well respected scientist he pioneered many new and amazing treatments for illnesses using genetically cloned tissues, and he led the first team in their attempts to clone the first full human.

Unfortunately, the disaster that ensued ruined his reputation, his colleagues shunned his dangerous work and human cloning was regulated as an inhuman practice by the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (Comest).

Dr. Lutz became increasingly disheartened with the attitude possessed by both his colleagues and the mass media. Having his passion stolen from him generated bitter resentment over the years, until one day he disappeared, a group of young lab workers and millions of dollars worth of lab equipment simply vanished the next day, it is considered highly probable that Lutz stole the equipment with the intention of directly violating the ban on his old research. It’s equally likely that Lutz, with his exemplary intelligence and persona enticed the young lab workers into aiding him by appealing to their sense of curiosity.

Dr. Lutz has been a wanted man for the past fifteen years, he hasn’t been heard or seen, nor have any of the scientists who left with him.

Until today…

Background

A local resident of calico found the body of a middle aged man whilst exploring an old mineshaft with some friends. The body was no more than a year old, and well preserved, the state coroner was immediately able to identify the deceased as an “Alan Fairdale” one of the scientists who’d gone missing a year before, he’d been shot at close range in the chest several times.

Maverick didn’t usually go on hunches, but he had a feeling Doctor Lutz was going to re appear in a big way at some stage,   and this was the only clue anyone had gotten to his whereabouts in years,  Maverick decided he’d head on to Calico and see what was going on….

Setting

Maverick Justice is set in America around 2111, criminals, independent factions and autocrats have all risen to power in different regions of the states, the oil crises and the second great depression caused great schisms in the country, in all countries really, a great deal of states and communities became segregated from one and other, and a great many of those that came to power abused it whole heartedly. But it’s not all doom and gloom, great advances have still been made in technologies, particularly medicine, energy, and robotics.

A relative lawlessness plagues the regions outside the control of the United States government, places like California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico are all independent states governed by their own lawlessness… These are the regions Maverick finds most work, places with blatant injustice and no red tape, whereas crime in the states is more subtle, criminals protect themselves with loopholes and fat cat friends… Not mavericks’ style.

In my next post i’ll  demonstrate a proposal plan for Maverick Justice

If not for any other reason, this should already be a thing i mean that name! its like the epitome of cheese, Segal and Van Damme level of cheese!

it should be right up there with:

And

Filed under: Final Year Project: Creative Digital Media ]]> http://manoose47.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/05-final-year-project-expanding-the-theme-02/feed/ 0 manoose47 maximum risk halfPastDead http://manoose47.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/04-final-year-project/ http://manoose47.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/04-final-year-project/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:05:48 +0000 manoose47 http://manoose47.wordpress.com/?p=521 ]]> My next objective was to delve a bit more into the theme, i started thinking about my main character, their interests, reasons for their presence, the setting, the enemies.

at first i wanted to merge the awesomeness of 70′s blaxploitation movies into my own game, like a “70′s sci fi mutha who’s no ones sucka!”

or  a future  (more like, if the seventies was in the future) seventies sci fi game fillled with funk!

I will not lie, i thought it was an insanely brilliant idea, my Project coordinator, did not!  i appear to be making a habit of being shot down in this module, a lot..

seriously though picture this, only sci fi..

so  with that idea gone it was back to the drawing board,

So i narrowed down what i need to explore to develop my story, setting and characters:

• names for main characters
• location, time frame, setting
• back story for main player character and antagonist
• personalities of characters

Surprisingly this turned out a lot more difficult than i originally expected, mainly due to the the utter madness that seems to occur when one transfers a model form blender to unity, i kept getting an awful re occuring error, whihc bascially prevented any of my Blender files textures from transferring to unity with the model, so i’d get these naked models, and then for soem reason even unity wouldn;t let me put textures on them from within unity.. lets just say models are depressing without texture and materials applied to them….

So i scoured the web and found multiple instances of this same issue occurring to many people, but as of yet i have not found a solution, not wanting to frustrate myself to the point  of meltdown i turned my attentions elsewhere, i had a look at creating exterior terrains in unity, as i knew i would need to know how to do this for my game.

that went a whole lot smoother, i was using a guide from the excellent book:

unity game development essentials

which although is a little out of date, still very much  applies to what i’m doing.

Here are some screens of the level i made, complete with imported models… thta cannot be textured

•   Moon bomber
•  space pirates

Science fiction

Bounty hunters

And began thinking of my latest concept,

which is currently unnamed but revolves around a bounty hunter, who’s mission is to hunt down a mad scientist.

 

i began some early concept drawings of the games features, which i will go into in further detail, but for now here’s the image:

BountyHunterSketches1

But anyways… it was only supposed to be a rough guideline, and doesn’t honestly reflect the final edit, i  had some interesting calls to make, i found out that my aunt who’s sound we needed to redo and who currently resides in Los Angeles… has no recording equipment! so it was down to crazy techniques to salvage our audio, however we found an awesome resolution in the form of re interviewing and recording her over the internet through a Skype call, i set up an external speaker from my computer and put a zoom recorder (my dad had one to himself all along… facepalm) up to the speakers.

I edited the sound as well as possible and Adnan and Jack Pieced together the final edit with the new sound, some clever editing form Adnan allowed us to “pretend” the new sound was the original sound. we also used mixcraft to put together a short intro and outro track for the final film, eventually we decided agaisnt out original use of narration in favor of text on screen

The link for the finished piece is here on vimeo: “What it takes”

Alternatively, check it right here:

So i have hailed my aunt in a n effort to get her to re record he audio, and hope fully save the day, our only other option is to get more footage,  but that may prove extremely difficult, due to the lack of actors i’m currently aware of. We will endeavor!

Adnan worked tirelessly with what footage we had, and we have until Thursday to work some magic, so hopefully we’ll  crank something worthy out…

Today was the big day for our second interview, in contrast to the last interview we decided to hold this interview indoors, to counter the worsening weather conditions… as camera equipment is expensive and wind is VERY NOISY.

We used my room for our shoot, setting up a tarp against the wall and clearing the set up, so that a single chair was all that was present on screen, we ensured the lighting was good and made sure there was no subtle noises (such as the hum of a computer)  in the area.

Gordon came in and after a sound and visual check we began our take.

 - Gordon makes himself at home

This time i stayed out of shot, but the setup was much the same i interviewed Gordon and got the fledgling actors perspective, it went well, we all had lemonade.. the next step in the process would be the most challenging! Editing!!!!

 - Adnan aligns the camera for the shot

it sometimes feels like the saturation of the media   in modern life has rendered individuality extinct….  i mean there seems no way to simply escape the world and really be yourself without being influenced by something on TV or the internetz. or maybe that’s just me.

Cabin fever sucks!!!!!

i cant just sit here looking at my computer again today, I’ve done it every day for the last few years, its dull! everything i do revolves around it! the worst part is i cant even think what i should do without it, i really don’t have a genuine reason to go outside and that is very sad, modern convince has condemned me to a life inside my own room where i don’t need to go anywhere, look for anything, work for any reason, its all there, its all in the internet or on the TV and its all been done  …

motivation depleted!