Master of Fine Arts Achieved!

Earlier today I had the chance to see everyone in the cohort for a last time over a MGS sponsored breakfast for the students and family. It was fun talking to people one last time, but at the same time kind of weird seeing everyone's family.

Then later it came time for the ceremony, and it was kind of boring until it came time to walk up on stage. Since the MFA is a terminal degree, we got hooded (I don't know if that is the right term, but I'm going to use it) and everything. I tried to look over to my family in the crowd as I got hooded, but the lights were so bright I couldn't see anyone in the crowd. But the feeling was amazing, like that feeling that you get when you have just beat the final boss of a really good game. Like you would do anything to do it all over again for the first time. That might sound a little weird, but its the only way I can explain it.

Now we just have to put the final touches on our game, an it will soon be published on Desura. I also have to make up a lot of hours on my Internship, but more on that later. Thanks for reading!

The End Is Nigh

So this is my last official week at the MGS lab, and I'm happy to say that today my group and I presented our thesis game, Drop Drop. It took a while to get here, but it feels like yesterday was the first day that I meet everyone in my cohort and now we are about to graduate on Friday.

First off, I have to admit that I wasn't really ready to present my game. I don't mean that I hadn't prepared something to say, I mean that I didn't really know what to expect when presenting your thesis and going to your formal defense of it. My team created a movie instead of a PowerPoint presentation, this made sure that we were only going to have 4 minutes to talk about what we each did on the game, and to stay brief and to the point. I have to admit that I get really anxious when I have to talk in front of people, but I think I did ok.

After the presentation, I had to wait about 2 hours for my turn to go into a room with the Chairman and the rest of my committee evaluating my contribution to the thesis game and my thesis paper that I finished last week (which is why I haven't been posting much lately). For the first part I knew what I needed to say for those 4 minutes, but for this part I didn't really know what they were going to ask me about my paper or the presentation. So I really had nothing ready, I was just ready to answer questions truthfully and hope that it would be enough.

The first thing the Chairman asked me was, "What does the title of your thesis paper mean?". I had titled my paper "Development of an Artist", FYI. And from there a conversation started about how I had started two years ago and where I was now as a game artist. I honestly can't remember everything about the conversation, but I'm really sure that it lasted about 20-25 minutes going back and forth between the five other people in the room and myself. I even had the pleasure of having an old teacher from my undergraduate degree in my committee  and she knew that I had really improved since I took classes with her almost 4 years ago.

Then they had me step outside for a few minutes, until they called me back into the room and congratulated me on the completion of my thesis game and paper. Now all that is left is presenting my Sci Fi environment on Thursday for my hard surface modeling class and one more short paper to write. And if all goes well, I will be walking across the stage on Friday receiving my MFA along with my peers.

Its all kind of surreal actually, thinking that I'm about to graduate. I've been going to school every year since I was like 5 (or whatever the age is when you go to pre-school and all that good stuff) and now in less than a week it will all be over. I'm actually one of the weird kids that like school, not only because I'm kind of a nerd, but because I like what I do and I like talking to all my friends in the MGS lab. I will really miss my computer, and all the really late nights some of us stayed up playing games of League of Legends (its a team building exercise) yelling at each other to stop feeding the other team. Those were the good old days, and now they will be nothing but memories.

I'm going to miss everyone in my cohort, and while I can't really call them family, at different levels, they are all my friends. I will try to stay in touch with all of them, and who knows, one of them might end up being a really famous game developer one day. I may even have the chance to say, "I know that guy/girl, he/she is a friend of mine from grad school." I know that every single one of us has the potential to work at a AAA game studio, and I know that we will all get there one day. Some have already achieved it, I have a few friends that have accepted positions at EA, some in Orlando and some right here in Salt Lake. I can't help but feel a little jealous that they have jobs lined up after graduation, but at the same time I'm proud of their accomplishments and I hope to catch up to them soon.

There is a lot I've learned from this program, and recently it was ranked as number 1 in the nation for the undergrad, and number 2 for the graduate degree. I hope that one day we will be able to claim #1 in both slots, and I'll be even more proud to say that I graduated from the U.

Now the real challenge starts, where I have to find a place where I can get my foot in the door. I've applied at a couple places, even had a couple interviews, but so far nothing. I hope that someone will be able to give me a chance and prove that I'm a good game artist and that I have what it takes to contribute to the studio and the project at hand. I know I will find a place, I just have to be patient and in the meantime continue to improve my skills as a game artist.

This was a really personal post, and I'm sorry to have made it so long. But for now, that is all I have to say. After all, I still have a project to finish and a paper to write. Thanks!

-Chris (soon to be Master Christian Munoz!)

Kite

So for the last week I've been thinking of more objects to build for my thesis game. Someone in the team gave me the idea to make a kite, so here is what i came up with:

The model was about 400 and I use one texture map. Now I have to create a few more texture that can be applied to the kite model. My team also wants me to create some new particle effects for some collision when the player is falling, so my weekend will be very busy. :(

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Confessions of a GameDev - A Discussion About Equality

So for a while I've occasionally been part of podcast being done by a few of the people here in the cohort, specifically my friend Karratti and Spencer. There's been other people that have also been there, but there are too many to list. The podcast is called: "Confessions of a GameDev" and you can listen to all their episodes if you follow that link.

The reason why I'm making this post about the podcast is that the episode we made last week (but is available today) talks about stuff that is very close to me. Its usually a bunch of students and other game devs that have a discussion about current events, but for this episode they invited a PhD student/teacher named Cindy Huynh to the podcast to discuss equality in media, specifically how we portray people in games.

A lot of what we discussed took me back to my freshman year in college since I had to take a few Ethnic Studies classes as part of my scholarship. I hope that if anyone actually reads my blog, you will give this episode a listen since I think that we touch on a lot of points that most of the time get overlooked in media or games.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

GDC 2013

So this week was GDC and I'm happy that I got a chance to go and talk to a lot of industry professionals. Lucky for me this wasn't my first time at GDC, and I learned a thing or two from last year.

To start, last year I didn't have a tablet or a way other than my laptop to show my portfolio. But the wifi at GDC get overloaded within hours and its almost impossible to get a signal and speed. Last year my uncles gave me an iPad for my birthday, so I got my portfolio images saved on my iPad and was able to show my work this time around.

Next, my business cards were in better shape. Last year I made some at the last minute and they didn't turn out that great. I feel that the design that I worked on this year are more presentable and professional.

Also, thanks to the help of my friend Ash, she helped me put together a better resume that says "hey, I'm an artist!" and not just one that I put together in Word using a template. I really like the way it turned out, and it just goes to show that I'm getting better as time goes by.

The one thing that was a let down was that the career pavilion was tiny this time around, last time it was at least half the size of the expo. This time it was so small, that they put the expo and the career pavilion in the same place.

The big companies still made an appearance, but Blizzard was noticeably missing as well as other big studios. Riot Games was there, and I tried to talk from Riot as I could. Specifically, I got to talk to the Lead Environment Artist at Riot, and got him to look at my portfolio. The critique that he gave me was brutal, but that's a goot thing! Only when people tell you where you are lacking, do you truly become aware and work towards improving yourself.

I talked to other big studios, but none were as memorable as the ones that I had with Riot. I hope to go again next year and be able to impress him with my work and have him tell me what I should work on next.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

New Water Droplet

So today I was tasked with creating a better looking water droplet than what we have in the game at the moment. Here is a quick render:

I'm not sure, but I think that the water droplets that we have in the game at the moment are just spheres with some texture attached. I tried to make the droplet interesting and tried to use a darker shade of blue that what we have in the game.

Also, I created that texture following a water texture tutorial I found online and I think it turned out good.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Circle Sprite Sheet

So I have a lot to catch up on for my blog, but I decided that I should start to blog when I get the chance and stop putting it off until I'm caught up with everything that needs to be up here.

Anyways, for the game, we needed a simple sprite sheet of a ring filling up and since it wasn't going to take very long I decided to do it today. I did the circle using Photoshop and then saved out the separate images and used this program I found called Sprite Sheet Packer to make one map out of my image sequence.

I'm happy with how easy that program was to use, since I spent all morning long trying to use Pixen on a mac and it was driving me nuts.

Here is the simple sprite sheet that I made:

That's all for now, thanks for readying!

Low Poly Bird

So I've been working on low poly bird that we can put on the sky in our thesis game. Up until now, the player had only clouds as a point of reference that they are falling through the sky. So I've been trying to come up with things that we can put in the sky to give a better point of reference for the player. Here is a screen shot of the model and simple texture in Maya:

The main point was to get the basic shape, since the player will be falling by really quick. That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Splat Patterns

So for today, I had to create a few different splat patterns that the engineers could use in out game. They have been using only one for the longest time, and it was really noticeable that they were all the same. Here they are:

I found a lot of reference images from google and I think they turned out really well. Granted this wasn't a hard task, I'm still happy that I'm getting comfortable to work in 2D. Thanks for reading!

End of the Semester

So today was my final presentation in my level design class, and I'm now officially done with class. With the exception of making sure this blog is up-to-date on everything I did in my class, there really isn't much more for me to do. So starting on Saturday, I will focus entirely on my Internship that I've sort of neglected for the last week since I was really busy trying to get my Art final to a stage that I would be proud to show my work to everyone else.

For our thesis project, we have it a level where its playable but there is still much work to be done. Which is why I'm grateful that we still have a whole semester for polish before we have to publish the game. I think we will have to do some changes to the way the game works because right now its not very interesting to play, but thats a topic better left for another day.

I have been thinking about it for the last few days, and I'm sure that I can pump out at least 5 models a week. The models wouldn't be textured, but they would be good enough that the engineers will be able to use them in Unity. I will work really hard to get everything done before our deadline on January 15th.

Other than that, I'm going to rewrite my resume since I've showed it to a few people and they have given me a lot of advice on how to make shorter (it was 2 pages before) and more interesting. I'm trying to find an internship at a studio where I would be able to do some 3d environmental art.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Low Poly Car

I've been working on a low-poly car for a few days now, since the ones that are in the game at the moment have a really high tri-count. Here is a render from Maya of the new low poly car.

I made a total of 4 textures for the cars to make it look like there is more variety of cars on the streets. Since its almost the end of the semester, I don't really know what else I'll be able to get into the game before the open house on Thursday. Anyways, thanks for reading!

Progress on Thesis Before Thanksgiving

So we have decided that we are going to try and get the game published before the start of the next semester, but we still have a ton of stuff to do. Here is our task list for the rest of the semester for art:

Art - ranked as level of priority

1 - Outer level poly reset - We need to optimize the poly counts for objects in the outer playing area. 
1 - Smoke trail particles - Put particle systems on the feet and hands that enhance the feeling of the character falling.
1 - Flower model popup- Flowers will popup on the ground around the radius of the splash. We need a flower mesh, and texture that will just translate and scale up through the ground.
1 - Fix Legs on character mesh - Character needs to not crumble. One attempt is to upres the mesh. 

2 - More Hoizontal objects - This may not mean more new objects, but just populating the Horizontal plane (bottom) of the game. 
2 - Fire escape and clothes line effects - The objects need to be added and ready to work with the correlating code. 
2 - Intro animations - Adam and his motion capture stuff. We need to integrate his animations with the in game scene or a separate scene he creates the animation in. 

3 - Buildings update - All buildings need another pass on them to improve mesh on some and texture on others. Pay close attention to our color pallette. 
3 - Textures related to saturation - This is dependant on the code george is trying to get a texture to desaturate.

4 - Ripple Splat - Have the particle effect of the splash have more of a ripple effect over the landscape

5 - Achievement system - This would require a lot of art, UI etc. 
5 - Themed cities - China town, San Fran, with bridge etc could be considered.

6 - Zelda Ripple effect - This is super low priority and more a pipe dream. Akin to this Zelda video.

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So we are slowly working through this list. I've made the flower and I'm trying to lower the poly count on some of the objects. After that, I'm going to try build more objects that we can use to populate our scene. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Drop Drop Submitted to IGF

So this last Wednesday, my group managed to submit our game to the IGF competition as we take the rest of this week off to relax and work on homework from other classes. I'm actually still a little tired from this last weekend from having slept in the computer lab, hopefully that won't happen again since I don't know if I could handle it again.

We had a lot of feedback from students in our cohort, as well as from other people at school to try and weed out any potential bugs in the game. The producer managed to get a trailer for the game, and it give you an overview of what the gameplay is like. This is all for now, enjoy!

Sleeping At The Lab

So this is the weekend before we have to turn in our project to IGF. There is still a lot of work to be done in the art side of things, and there is not enough hours in the day to get everything done. This is mainly due to the trouble that our project has been in over the last few months, and why the other two teams are in much better shape than us. So I have brought one of my sleeping bags with me and a pillow to get at least some sleep at night.

At the end of last semester, we had to go back and think about what we could do about our game since the feedback we had from many people was that our game wasn't entertaining or appealing the way we wanted it to be. So over the summer, the producers of the team got together and came up with Dead Drop and we thought we had nailed  it. We worked really hard to get a playable demo during the summer even if some people had traveled out of the state/country and we couldn't count on everyone to work on the project. We presented our ideas, but then a few weeks into the semester we were told by a guest professor from another school that our project would get disqualified at IGF.

This really brought our morale down, and we struggled for a few weeks on what we could do to salvage the game so we wouldn't have to start from scratch. But this was probably not the best idea, since I was able to witness our team slowing deteriorate from internal fights due to stress and anxiety. This eventually lead the professors to make us vote on a new project, which because Drop Drop. From then on, we had to go back to pre-production stage and try to plan everything so it wouldn't happen again. The only thing is that we didn't have much of a level designer and it wasn't until recently that we got told what type of models the artist need to build for the game to make interesting ways that the player could fall through the city.

I had a list of assets to work on, but all the stuff on the list was mainly as props for the level once it was built which is what I belief our first mistake. We should have focused first on level design and once we had all the shapes of the buildings that we wanted, that's when we could start working on props and everything else to make the city look the way we wanted it to look. This has led to a huge crunch to the art team and I don't think that we are going to be able to finish all the 16 building models that they wanted us to do.

So for now, I will continue to work throughout the night (it is currently 1 AM as I'm writing this blog post) and try to get as much stuff done for the game. That is all for now, thanks for reading.

Back to Pre-production

So art team has been spending some time in pre-production again, since we need to get a clear focus on how the art has to look. As you know, we have abandoned the idea of dropping zombies from buildings, so we are now going with a more abstract look for the game and following in the direction that Flower by Jenova Chen. Some of the game play mechanics are still a little fuzzy, but that will hopefully be cleared up in the next few days.

So my task for this weekend was to write up a 1 page document on how the level could look like, along with some possible color pallets. Here is what I came up with:

Overview:

• At this point, we have talked about making the environment look run-down and abandoned.
• We still want to make it look like a city, but at first it will look dry and lifeless. 
• Once the player has reached the bottom, the parts that have been hydrated will look new again.

Look of level before player starts:

• Dilapidated/Run-down
• Abandoned/Desolation
• Dry/Parched
• Cold

Look of level after player splashes down:

• Revitalized
• Energized
• Warm
• Back from the dead
• “Phoenix rising”

Reference:

• Hong Kong slums
• Darksiders level “the cross roads”
• 9 movie: house or factory
• Total Recall

Possible Color Pallets:

Dry/Dead

Hydrated/Alive

Here is the link to the PDF I created since I like how it looks there better, but I didn't want to just provide a link to the PDF in the blog post.

I emailed the document to my team, and now I'm just waiting back on some feedback from them to see if they like what I came up with. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Redesigning Our Thesis Project... Again

So the thesis project that I'm a part of has been through a lot of changes over the last few months. If you remember my last post, we had presented Drop Dead to the professors but they still weren't happy with what we had. We spend a week trying to work on a different character, each of the artist had to come up with something else that the player could control with the Kinect. I created a simple teddy bear  model that one of the other artist would be able to do a quick simple rig so we could start experimenting with the new characters each of us we had created.

Screenshot of the low poly teddy bear I made, tri-count is at the top left corner.

But then we had a problem where a guest professor said that due to the nature of our game, we may be disqualified from IGF since it can look like people are committing suicide by jumping of buildings. We immediately started to think of another way to keep our game mechanics but that it wouldn't be like Drop Dead. To top it off, because of the situation some people in the group were getting frustrated and there were some arguments. All of this resulted in having to redesign our game to something a little simpler but that still kept the Kinect.

So what we have so far is that the player will control a water drop in a light rainstorm. The player will have to collect other water drops on the way down to get bigger. The player will also have to dodge obstacles and you have to reach the bottom to get a bigger score. There have been some talk about trying to hit specific targets on the ground or making the water affect the environment kind of like in the game Flower.

With the new game, we are going to try and make an interesting city environment where the player will be able to have a fun experience. So far, I've taught about using stylized cartoon like environment that is abstract. I worked on a quick simple model of a house, but I've been talking to a few of the other students in the cohort and one of them said that I should look at reference images from Hong Kong and the apartment buildings there since they are tightly packed and have a lot of different obstacles that would be cool to dodge if you were falling. I think that the next time I'm in class, I will work on a city environment that resembles Hong Kong and see how it looks.

That is all for now, thanks for reading. 

New Semester

So this post is a little late seeing as how the semester started 2 weeks ago, but late is better than never (or so I hear).

So at the end of last semester, we were told that our game needed a lot of work because the player couldn't really tell what was happening most of the time. (Refer back to this post to know what the game is.) So over the summer, a couple of the producers worked really hard to come up with a new game idea that still involved falling as a game mechanic, but that was far more appealing that Graviators. The product of their work was: "Drop Dead: Zombie Divers".

There really isn't a narrative at the moment, but the premise of the game is that the player chooses a zombie from a group of other zombies and then drop it off a skyscraper. The player will then use the Kinect to control the falling zombie to dodge obstacles in the environment and make it all the way to the bottom and... splat! Along the way, the player would be able to find power ups and multipliers to get a higher score which is also affect on wether you reach the bottom or not.

We worked really hard to have a playable demo by the first day of class, since we wanted to make sure that the professors could see that we had taken the feedback we received seriously and had done something about it. The professors loved the new idea, but there was still one problem... zombies.

The professors think that zombies are over used in todays game market, and if we want our game to stand out at the IGF we should do something a little more original. So they told us to stop development of other assets (for us the artist) and work on developing other ideas and test them out in the game to see how it feels. So far we have been working on things like: scarecrows, clowns, teddy bears, and other crazy stuff.

Our next meeting as a group will be this next Wednesday, so thats when I will give an update on what I've been working on (I've been doing the scarecrow and teddy bear btw) and see if its still something that we want to do. In my opinion, I don't think that zombies are a bad idea. If the game is good, who cares if its zombies or mummies or bears falling.

What I think we should be focusing (and this is a little more for the producers) is on making a cohesive narrative for the game that makes sense and that it isn't too complicated. It could be something as simple as the narrative in Angry Birds, but they get really complicated really quickly and then it doesn't make sense.

Hopefully they will have something nailed down by next time, because this whole thing is actually making me kind of nervous since we don't have time to be experimenting this late in the year when IGF submissions are due at the end of October. Anyways, thanks for reading.

Multitasking

So for this week, I've been working on a few different things.

I've been working on more textures and I have to redo some of the "rocks" that I made 2 weeks ago. This is because the rocks that we are using as reference are HUGE and the ones that I made look weird and tiny even if you scale them up.

Also, they want me to change the level design that I made last week. They want the arena to have lest debris so it doesn't look too much like a asteroid field.

Last, sterling wants me to make a simple HUD like this one. I only have to make a health box and a box that will go on each side.

I don't think that I will have all of this done by tomorrow's class, but I will try to get at least the HUD done. That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Progress On Level

So last time I made a texture for one of the rocks I created last week along with a simple normal map for some detail. I'm trying to go for a post apocalyptic look, but for right now I'm just trying to make quick textures in Mudbox for my models.


Jeff suggested that I look into geology and the different rock types that there are and try to go for a particular feel, instead of just doing random things. I will do some quick research into rock types and make at least another texture today an hopefully finish the other ones over the weekend.


Here are the renders of the stuff that I've made for far:

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Graviators

So since last time I wrote about the progress of my project, we have decided to change the name from Atmoz to Graviators since its a little more descriptive and I actually think that it sounds much better.

Previously the game was a flying game, and like I mentioned before it was going to change. So the game is now a falling jousting game. The premise is that there will be battles fought in the air, but the player and the enemy will be falling towards each other thanks to a "gravity well" like object.

They will be able to shoot at each other from afar,  while dodging incoming fire and obstacles. Once they get close to each other, the game will switch to something like "bullet time" and be able to hit one another and then keep moving away from each other, and after a short break it all repeats if there was not a winner on the first go.

We have decided to work on two arenas, one that is in some sort of long tube that will be an enclosed arena and one that is in an open area. I'm in charged of the open area arena.

I've been getting a lot of inspiration from the James Cameron Avatar movie and trying to do something like floating land masses. But we decided that we were also going to add debris from ancient buildings (ex: roman temples or buildings). The reason why I'm trying to do that is that I want the arena to be filled with more than just rocks, but also because I want it to be a post apocalyptic feel since this game is suppose to be in the future.

So far, I've done really rough models just taking spheres and using the lattice tool to deform them. I've done solid rocks, and some that have a tunnel that would allow the player to go through them. We plan on inserting power ups as a risk/reward option for the player that is more experienced.

I've also done a really quick sample level with the few models that I've done so far, since one of the engineers wanted something that they could use in Unity to start working. That's all for now, thanks for reading.