Game design concepts

I am currently working on designs for the start of a game idea I hav come up with. The aim is to create a realistic looking, believable futuristic setting. I am concentrating on one building for now, the home of the main character, and on the designs of individual bits which give the feeling of a futuristic setting. This includes showing advanced technologies suh as animated wallpaper and digital displays projected on many surfaces such as walls, mirrors and windows. I will work on transparency and animated textures in maya and the unreal engine to achieve these effects. Currenlythese advanced features are just conceptual and I have not yet implimented them into any software yet.

I will also look into the use of programming within unreal to see if it going to be an achievable goal to have the character interact with the differnent displays to effect different parts of the room. If this is not going to be easily achieved then I will simply code a GUI in C showing how the system would work, and havedifferent preview screens within the program showing how the displays would change the look of different rooms.

I would also like to experiment with scripting in unreal and the creation of objects which can be picked up and used to solve puzzles etc. Dialogue/Monologue would also be important in the sort of adventure game I wiso create/demonstrate. If this is not easily achieved in unreal then again I wll look at other methods of demonstraingtis in C or actionscript.

As I am going away for a week or so, I wl justbe working on more concepts and designs before creating anything more in maya and unreal. I will scan in some designs at a later date date as well as get some screenshots of what I have done already (I'm not on the right computer at the moment to get anything like that).

Unreal Level

Ahhh all projects for this year done and handed in, just an essay to hand in tomorrow which I'm printing out now. I'm pretty happy with the work I have done this year, and although I think I was a bit ambitious with the scale of my level, which I think ended up with it being more quantity than quality I still think it turned out quite well. Its not up to a proffessional standard but it has been very useful working on the unreal level, in learning how to use the game engine as well as the 3D software maya. I know I would be able to create the same level with much more ease if I were to do it again.

Over the summer I am going to try and achieve a few projects.

1. Another unreal level. A bit smaller than the one I have done for the term three project, but with more detail and more work with maya and photoshop in creating tiles. I might have it completely platform based and try and work with some of the physics to make a more advanced, less first person shooter-ish level.

2. Work on my website, put some new stuff on it, get my projects up on there, etc

3. Come up with a game concept/idea for a flash or unreal level, plan it out and if I have time start working on it. Something to put on blog.

4. Some work with maya creating general static meshes to use on projects.

5. A summer comic of some kind, maybe an interactive animated comic or something.

map of my almost finished level (made changes since) quite a bit of the level is underground so this picture is pretty pointless :P

House Model

This has taken a lot longer than I'm sure it should have. Oh well my first real attempt at UV Mapping. Really enjoyed it actually, just a bit frustrating. There are rooms in the house, and just a big open space upstairs.

So much more left to do. I still have the actual level to design (though I have done a lot of planning and a bit of the level planned out) and loads more stuff to make. As well as putting it into unreal, doing the lighting, etc.

And now blogger is being rubbish and not letting me upload pictures again

Static Meshes and Sky Box

A static mesh of a building created in maya based on drawn designs. I have had problems with importing static meshes into unrealED, with it complaining that there are 'not enough vertexes'. Much more simple objects such as primitive cubes and much more basic rooms will import though.

Creation of a sky box in unrealED 2004, following the tutorial here.

Stuff I've been doing

I have redesigned my website, created a new banner, background, added links to other pages of mine, such as this blog, my flikr account, etc.


(http://www.guiblin.com/chris)



I have created the flickr account which I have been adding some pictures to, including 3D things created in maya and 2D stuff from Illistrator.



I have been doing a lot of sketching of random character designs and stuff, mostly quite abstract and cartoony. I have scanned a sketchbook in and created a PDF file of it. The upload for the whole PDF keeps timing out both on my server back at home and my file den account, blogger too is refusing to upload pictures any more to here, so I will try again later. (one page can be seen as the background image of my website).

I have also been doing some colouring in of images that I sketched and scanned in. (I uploaded these before i tried the sketches that wont upload)

Daily Routine by ~chrisguiblin on deviantART

Other stuff: been doing a little bit of playing around with Visual C#, learning some basic stuff. I haven't got anything really to show from that but just been learning to use different controls, create them at run time and other window related stuff.

Also got my hands on UnrealEd 3 and been doing some practicing of that in creating simple rooms and such. I have been watching videos on Game Trailers (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/136126.html) showing basic tutorials on using the engine. I have been writing notes on stuff I have learnt from the tutorials I have watched so far and this will be very usefull for this terms project.

What else....I have been working a bit on my flash game from my last term's project, 'Wizards'. I have started it from scratch and using online tutorials about tiles used in tile based platform games I have created a basic way of using arrays to map out the levels. To do this on a bigger scale I need to look into using xml files to load in the level information, but I have given this a break for now to work on learning to use UnrealEd.