Texturing

Recently I have been serving as the assistant of our environment artist, helping him out with finishing the environment assets for Lord Valac's new room. I have done a few sprites that he will use for spell effects, but mostly I have been working on painting textures.

When we felt that we were falling too far behind schedule, due to all the things we have had to redo or had problems with, we decided to write down every single asset that we need for the area that we are currently working on and organising them on a priority list. We realised that we needed to change up the way we work in order to push things out so the coders have something to work with. We also need to release builds as soon and often as possible due to the course that we are currently taking.

Modifying the work process the way we have, with letting go of our own tasks and instead working together on the same assets has really sped up the process and it feels as if we are starting to get back on track. For now it is working well, but soon we will probably need to revert to the regular way of working, in order to get assets out simultaneously. When we start working on the next area of the level we cannot work on separate assets one at a time, but rather need to work with all lowpolys simultaneously and then all high polys and so on in order to maintain consistency.

Since I had already painted Tamarrion's new textures and found a new way of working on them it was easy for me to help out with the environments. Hopefully this will even help create a more consistent level of the art in the game. It was still a challenge though, as I had to find a way of painting surfaces that are new to me, most of the textures consist of only stone which cannot be found on Tamarrion's textures obviously.

The trickiest part was figuring out how the light would hit each tiny surface from the high poly, since we want to paint in more light and shadows into the diffuse maps in comparison to the old ones. Painting the banners was more of a straight forwards process that was not too difficult with a little help from references.

The carpets were another story though, we needed them to be visible and interesting enough while still not taking over the room. They are probably, up to this date, the most well worked textures that we have in the game, apart from Tamarrion's. It was a process of trial and error, pushing the level of contrast and details further and further until we found something that looked good in the engine, but still not being overly visible so that they distract the player or create crazy bouncing lights on the characters. In the engine we have also added clipping masks to make the edges look broken and give them more of an old and worn look.

In comparison to the textures that we created during the Big Game Project, I would like to say that they are now of way higher quality. I feel that I have developed a great deal since then as a texture artist, as well as in other areas. Back then I am still sure that we did the best we could with what we had, in the time we had. That learning process combined with studying the way others work on their texture after have really helped me level up my skills and ability to create the visual style that we want to achieve in the game.

Traveling

We recently got back from DreamHack Winter 2015 in Jönköping, it was the last time this season that we will be showing Tamarrion at show floors.

Our booth at DremHack Winter

It felt as if our booth was quite small and perhaps did not have the best placement, so there was not really that much traffic passing through. We did have some players that seemed to really enjoy playing Tamarrion in spite of that and we handed out quite a few business cards.

It was unfortunately not possible for us to be present at the booth all the time as we shared the space with three other teams and split the time of "booth duty" between us. This meant that we do not know exactly how many who actually played the game and only got a chance to speak with about half of them.

The three of us who went to show the game did have a lot of fun and we all want to go there as visitors and actually play some ourselves. :)

My teammates at DreamHack Winter

I have already spoken about our other trips, but we have been around the country a few times this semester, starting with DreamHack Stockholm and Invest in games and then Comiccon and Finally DreamHack Winter. We have had many people playing and really enjoying the game, gotten valuable feedback and chances to place our game in the spotlight.

One of the highlights from these trips is probably when I was told that someone high up at Avalanche that complimented our art and had been really impressed by the animations since it was unexpected from a student project.

Players at ComicCon Stockholm

Overall it has been tiring with long days of standing up and speaking with people and it has been a lot of fun. I am happy that we can now relax and just focus on the game, but I am also looking forwards and hoping that we will be able to show the new updated Tamarrion at show floors next year!

Mandatory team selfie at DreamHack Winter :)

Nihteana

I have previously posted a sneak peek of the new boss that I have been working on, I have already written a long blog post about her on our devblog which can be seen here, but I thought I would just show some pictures of her character concept here as well.

 

The initial thought was that the first boss was supposed to be a lower ranked male general in Lord Valac's army but we wanted the prototype to show a greater range of what we had planned for the game and wanted to create a spell caster rather than another sword fighter. We decided that it was supposed to be a necromancer and sometime while drawing character thumbnails we decided to make it a female instead.

I had to rewrite the character story completely, but I think that Nihteana, which means "bird of the night" will be a much more interesting character than what we ad originally planned.

I am still working on her model, nut had to take a break from it as we decided to reprioritize and work together on finishing Tamarrion's updates and Lord Valac's new room. Instead of working on her I have been helping the environment artist out by painting textures and visual effect sprites. I did however find the time to finish her concept art, so here it is!

Motion Capture -Tamarrion

A few weeks ago we had a motion capture shoot, this was necessary as we are switching to PC controls and needed new animations for Tamarrion to fit the new movement system and to record animations for the new boss that I am working on.

We had some problems setting up and our first attempt failed as something went wrong with the files that did not know where to search for the markerset. For our second attempt we got some help and after some additional problems we did manage to get it up and running.

Last time that we had a shoot we had two male actors, it meant unfortunately that the run animation could not be used and had to be hand made. This time we knew that we needed a female actress and with no one else available to fill the part it had to be me dressing up in the silly suit and doing the acting.



There were some problems with that though, one being that I am not a professional actress or have any real knowledge of how to wield a sword, and, frankly, I am about as agile as a bathtub. But the biggest issue was that I was unable to see myself what we were recording. I am the one responsible for how the animations are supposed to look and the one who will be working with them later and not seeing what the takes looked like made that impossible for me to judge.

Instead I had to rely on my fellow artist, our hired in mocap operator and our designer, who all had opinions. The biggest problem with that was the people who have no experience in working with animations telling me to move my arms more, which meant that when I was working on the animations I had to reduce the arm movement significantly as it looked far too busy.

We did show the entire shoot on my art stream and had quite a few people watching and asking questions. This also means that the entire shoot is now available to be seen on my youtube channel, here is one part of it.

It was a three hour workout and I was quite sore the day after, but we did have a lot of fun. One thing that we could improve on is planning the animations better in advance. I got a tip recently of doing thumbnails for all our animations and I think that might help us knowing better how they should look and work. We did have a general idea of what we wanted but we could probably save us some time by doing this in the future.

Changing Roles

Today was an exciting day for my fellow artist and I as we got invited to speak to the 2nd year art students as part of their 3D class. This is actually the first time that we have been on the "other side of the classroom" and actually speaking to others about what we do. Apart from presentations as part of our own courses which is far from the same.

We were asked to speak about what problems we have had while working on Tamarrion and why we decided to make the changes that we are working on right now. It was actually a valuable experience for us as it gave us an opportunity to reflect upon our own work and our process and really think about what we do well and where we can improve.

It felt a bit strange being the ones doing the lecture and we were a bit unsure of exactly what to say as this was a whole new situation for us. I do hope that the 2nd years felt like they got something out of it though, I know that it is hard to learn from other's mistakes but at least it can feel better to know that others have been in their shoes and faced the same struggles.

Here is a picture of the new environment that I have been helping out painting textures for, in our next release you will be able to play in it. Sign up at tamarriongame.com for a chance to play it!

Check out the new environment in our devblog tamarriongame.wordpress.com