The Launch Rush

Our goal was to launch our game, Princess Revolutions,some point during this week. However, it seems every time we set this as our goal we run into unforeseen issues that set us back. This week these issues were primarily having to deal with the game's various menus and UI.

It is hard to tell if we will still be able to launch this week as most of the work finished on the art side was only completed early this morning. However I am hopeful that we will be able to get an early version completed soon. Then we can spend the rest of the semester fine tuning everything, and hopefully have something we can all be proud of.

As for this posts image, I have a render of all the characters together for the first time outside of the game. This image was used for a placeholder background in the game for some of the early story segments. I should mention the assets I created here are the two characters on the left. The other two were created by other artists on the team, the characters by Tyler Patchin, and the floor by Whitt Hansen.

Approaching First Release

We will be locking in all of the features of the game soon which means that all the assets going into the first official release have to be submitted soon. As a result of this, I will not be able to post radically new pieces of work as most of this time will be used to animate models and refine textures. However, hopefully we will be able to show new content after the initial release.

What I can provide is a quickly made version of one of the game's stage hazards. This was made as a variant that may make it into the final game. While some of the imperfections, such as the jagged lines around the spikes, are difficult to see once the model is sized down, the model still needs some texture work. There was also an error made in the creation of its UV shell which caused the texture to be flipped as you can see below. While this works for the most part, it does have the undesirable side effect of placing the eye highlight in the wrong location.

Refinement and Animation

At the moment the character side of the art team is working on rigging, skinning, animating and refining our models.

Ideally, the characters should be fully animated by next Tuesday. The only exceptions to this might be the "Snow Girl" character due to her differing body structure, and potentially unique idle animations.

I've also resized the mouth on the human characters, as I had heard that the larger mouth with little chin space was described as creepy by a reliable source.

Onward Towards Adventure!

At the end of last week I finished creating my second character model. I had about a day to alter the Fee mesh, create a uv layout, and texture this new character. The image below is a front, back, and side view of the character smoothed out. Unfortunately, there was a bit of trouble with texture around the face, hence the odd looking eyes.

I've taken to calling this character "Gear Girl" at the moment as she is the group's intellectual tinkerer, because in groups of four there must always be a Donatello. Later I was able to fix the texture, the version below is without Maya smoothing, and another few hours of moving around vertices. I also cleaned up the facial expression features.

First Week Back and Previews

We've been back at work on the game for about a week now, and it seems like everyone with working arms, and even those without, seem ready to work as hard as it takes to get the game to beta prior to GDC.

I've split the art team into two groups, character creation, and environmental asset creation. My hope is that by doing this, the work can be distributed more evenly among my group, hopefully ensuring an increased rate of productivity.

Also, here's a first glimpse. Hopefully we'll have more character previews to show you every week, and I hear tell that the environment art team will be doing something along the same lines.

Open House Week

Tomorrow we plan on showing our progress to a large group of people at our program's open house event. In order to help spread publicity, my team created several posters to garner interest in our game. I created several concepts and colored one for print.

We also worked on recreating the tiles for both floor and walls. We went with a more generic stone visual as we felt we needed a more standard and comfortable level appearance to introduce the game to new players.

Apologies for the upsidedownness

Into 3d

Our eventual plan for the sprites in the game is first to have 2d renders of a 3d model for most facing directions. This may even be the final outcome if we can't get 3d models implemented in time. As a result I've been working on modeling one of the characters to get proportions and camera angles ready for when we make the move to full 3D characters.