State of the Environment 1

Going to be posting the updates on the state of the first shot of our environment over the next couple weeks. Here is the concept piece and a screenshot of the current 3D and Textures.

Gun Battery: First Shot  - Concept

3DS Max Screenshot

Animations: Take One!

Some rough, first pass animations done for Dani, since her rig and base mesh are functioning with a rough pass at skinning on it. 

First off we have a first pass walk cycle:

Next we have an idle weight shift:

                                 

And finally, crossing her arms:

Secondgiving!

Since I moved away from Wisconsin to go to college out here in Washington, a couple other displaced friends of mine and I started the grand holiday tradition that we now refer to as "Secondgiving." Secondgiving is celebrated sometime the weekend before or after Thanksgiving, depending on schedules of those involved, and we make all the standard Thanksgiving favorites for those who can't go home for Thanksgiving (and those who can) really, all the members of our Washington family-by-choice. This year the whole team was in attendance, along with a bunch of other friends.

 Danny either discovered that his camera had a panorama function, or just decided it was a god time to play with it, as he took a bunch of pictures for us!

Building a Battery

Environment work has started. The first area we're creating is based off of one of the many abandoned military gun batteries that scatter the pacific coast. We've got a full proxy of the level built and navigable and now we're putting forth the hard work of turning those boring grey boxes into something beautiful.

We started by doing a few paint overs of our grey boxed level.

And from there we've begun creating assets.

More art to come so keep your eyes posted.

Head of the Class

Progress update for Dani and Gabe.  With the final designs nailed down, we begin working on the creation of assets to bring the game together!  These are the current head models for Dani and Gabe respectively.  Their featureless, hairless craniums are rendered in porcelain of added creepy effect.  The bodies will soon be completed and connected to make our full characters, and the next task will be clothing them.

Team Building: Favorites!

Hello all!  Today's post will be about team building.  One thing that helps people connect is common interests.  It's how we relate to one another, right?.  But what do you do when you're so eager to know someone, you just want to instantly be friends?  We've come up with the perfect solution.

Don't let all those pesky extra words get in the way: just work on a spreadsheet like us!  A simple, efficient, and interactive way to know almost everything you'd want to know about someone.  Instead of putting words together in your brain, just filter to the golden nuggets of information you need to truly bond with another human being.  So the way it's broken down is easy: rows of categories and columns for each participant's answers.  "What's your favorite food?" No need to ask questions.  Make it a statement!  "You like cheeseburgers!"

Check out this absurdly cool chart!

Joking aside, it's a great little game to figure out what each person likes and dislikes.  A set of prompts that you can refer to when you need to buy Christmas presents, can't decide on lunch, or whatever other disputes you need settled.  The categories can really be anything.  So far, we have about 25, ranging from games, movies, music, animals, even worst fears.  It constantly gets updated with new categories or revised answers, and we had a great time spending hours figuring out out favorite Pokemon, books, and actors/actresses.

Horror Game Jam

This time around, we supplemented our Game Jam with horror films, in the spirit of our game. We watched:
Descent
Ghost Ship
The Craft
Silent Hill
The Last Exorcism

Other than that, we pretty much just worked on our respective parts of the game, no whiteboards this time around, but here are some pictures of working through the day:

 Clockwise from top: Paul, Frank, Ryan, Tyler, and Danny.

 Branden and Danny.

 Frank and Ryan ignoring Ghost Ship (if I recall correctly).

 Paul in the kitchen.

 Clockwise from top: Frank, Ryan, Branden, Danny, and Paul.

 Ryan and I discussing something while Danny, Paul, and Frank work.

 Ryan deep in thought.

Danny and Paul.

On Assembling a Team, Part 1

Hello all, I'm here to talk about a very important, and not very frequently discussed, aspect of making a game: The team.

Before I get into that, however, I'd like to bid farewell to our dear friend Paul. He's found himself an industry job, and unfortunately doesn't have time to dedicate to a second project. We're, of course, happy he found employment doing what he wants to do (Congrats, Paul!) and wish him all the best at his new employers!

 Back on the subject at hand, now. Teams and team-building are things that, in my experience, often fall by the wayside in project planning. Obviously a game (or any large scale project, really) needs more than one person to make it succeed. And therefore, a good, strong team is ideal. The two biggest components of this are: Skill sets and personalities.

Skill sets are the aspect of teams I see neglected least, simply out of necessity. If none of the team members have a specific, needed, skill, then the team can't complete that part of a project. So if you need, say, a programmer and none of your team members can program, your game isn't going to get very far.

Personalities are where I have seen many teams struggle and fall apart. It can be difficult to work with someone who clashes strongly with your personality, and this problem is compounded if only one member of your team doesn't fit. It's not to say that you can't work with someone you don't agree with, or even get along with outside of work, merely that I find that teams are stronger and work goes smoother if everyone gets along. Nor is it to say that everyone on a team should have the same (or even similar) personalities. The important aspect is compatibility: Can the individual members of a team get along and get work done without regularly having serious conflicts of personality, minor conflicts are to be expected and perfectly acceptable so long as they aren't so constant that morale and production are hindered.

As a result of these two things, when Ryan and I first began discussing Project Kassa, and the potential of making the jump from idea to product, one of my first concerns was finding team members that not only fulfilled the required skill sets, but could get along well. Before actually joining the team, we tried to have what were - essentially - informal interviews for each member. Both to give them an idea of what the game we wanted to make would be like, and to gauge their personalities for potential compatibility with the team. After the informal interview, next step was to introduce them to the team as a potential team member and look for conflicts there, since neither Ryan nor I can be 100% certain of how well a person will do with a team without seeing them with said team. And then, finally, officially have them join the team.

Prior to all of this, though, was the real hurdle. Finding people. Ryan and I were (and are) in the fortunate position of having gone to a school where the majority of our peers also wanted to make games, so we had a good start there at the very least, as well as already personally knowing and being friends with several potential members. We already knew and were close friends with Frank and Paul, so they joined up quickly. We tried using Craigslist, though got no serious responses from it, as well as relying on our connections to friends and peers from DigiPen, which proved to be much more useful. Unfortunately, the programmers we knew at the beginning were either uninterested in the game itself, or were far too busy to take on such a time-intensive project. The same problem occurred with concept artists, and an animator. I then was fortunate to meet and work with Branden through a friend's senior projects team, and he was interested and would have the time after the semester was over. Through him, we found Danny, which brought our team total up to six.

 We, fortunately, have yet to have any serious issues with disagreements or conflicts of personality, so we haven't had to actually solve any of that sort of thing yet.

Since this has already turned out a fair bit longer than I anticipated, I'll discuss team-building and morale in a future post about teams.

Biweekly Games Proudly Presents

Hello all,

We’re Biweekly Games, a burgeoning independent studio, and we’re happy to announce the first game in our series:

Shove Aside is an co-operative episodic adventure series following brother-sister duo Gabe and Dani Kassa as they adventure throughout the pacific northwest, facing off against all variety of supernatural creatures. Think a mixture of the show Supernatural and the game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Shove aside offers great characters who will grow and change based on your choices; choices that have a lasting, meaningful effect on not only the characters but all of the world; co-operative gameplay including puzzles, conversations, and exploration; a pacific northwest setting, and elements of horror directly relating to the evils you’ll be facing. The evil's you'll be facing each episode are based on a different emotion, the first installment is Grief.

Characters

Players will take control of Gabe (Gabriel Kassa) and Dani (Danielle Kassa) a brother and sister from Arizona. After a litany of mistakes over the past few years, the two have been recently reunited. Together they’ve taken on a strange responsibility, putting their faith in each other to overcome the trials that lie ahead.

Dani is the muscle. She’s playful, headstrong, forward, and instinctive. Always the outgoing life of the party, shes acquaintance to many, friend to few. She keeps her guard up, never wanting anyone to close. She’s always looking to solve problems blunt and quick, often great short term, but with big consequences in the long run. Working as mechanic since she dropped out of college she’s been yearning to get out and see more. Shes excited to tackle the world with her dork of a brother, one of the few shes close to.

Gabe is the brains. He’s snarky, charismatic, thoughtful, and philanthropic. A studious orator Gabe has a way with people, but a problem with authority. Gabe will often get in trouble bending the law, and stepping on the fortunate. Often to prove a point, or help out the vulnerable. Gabe tends to think patiently things through, but can easily lose his focus in the face of injustice. On the run for white collar crime, Gabe found his way home looking for direction. He’s eager to put a smile on his sisters face, as they face the trials ahead.

Gameplay

At it’s core Shove Aside is a narrative adventure game, with the gameplay focusing on investigation. You’ll have to solve the mysteries behind the supernatural entities you’re trying to defeat. You’ll accomplish this through exploration, dialogue with townsfolk, and the the occasional puzzle.

We want your experiences with NPCs to be rich and open, encompassing more aspects of a conversation than just the dialogue itself. You will be able to approach the dialogue in different ways.  If a hobo asks you for money you can be aggressive or caring. If a cop asks for your information you can be open or guarded. Whatever choice you make will set the groundwork for the conversation. You can also make actions during conversation. Pacing could make someone feel nervous, or sitting down next to someone could make them comfortable. Along with all this Gabe and Dani will have some different options in conversation, reflecting their unique personalities and experiences. All this will give the player a wide range of tools to run a conversation however they please.

Choices

While you are investigating the world still moves forward, changing and reacting depending on the choices you make. As you explore a church the tide may come in a cove you we’re interested in investigating. Breaking an entering may have the police waiting for you on your return. Threatening a pastor may result in a run in with his crazed followers down the road.

Your choices are determined by your actions, big and small, and not just a cut and dry dialogue choice. Choices also affect more than just the flow of the plot, they can affect the relationship between Gabe and Dani, bringing them closer or driving them apart.

We don’t want these choices to be an obvious fork in the game, you won’t be shown a dialogue box and have to choose between left or right. Rather you are shown left and right, each hallway silently implying what lies beyond. Some may be as subtle as this, while others are more obvious, the outcome relying on what action you take, if any at all.

Setting

The Pacific Northwest has a rich history, legends, and locations untapped by most television and video games today. Many of us have grown up here, while others have moved here, but at the end of the day we all have a strange love for the drab beauty of this place, and we want to display  that love to everyone!

We will be using real world locations, but taking some creative agency where it better suits our needs. This first episode will take place at Cape Disappointment near Illwaco, WA. We urge you to take a trip yourself to check out some of the rich naval and native american history.   

Horror

Gabe and Dani will be facing off against the unknown, the frightening, the supernatural. We want the powers of these creatures to be beyond the physical, you won’t be able to just shoot at them to win. Because of this we want our horror to be creeping, and tonal.

We feel horror isn’t about bombast, or making a player jump, it’s about setting a tone and building tension. We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from games like Eternal Darkness and slow building horror movies like Alien and The Thing. There will be no visual indicator that scary things are about to happen (like a horror meter, or screen effects), but places and situations. Dark corners, being alone.

We of course can’t tell you everything now, but we hope this is enough to catch your interest as we move forward. We’re updating every week and always happy to answer your questions. So keep an eye out however you like as more news comes your way.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BiweeklyGames

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BiweeklyGames

Email: biweeklygames@gmail.com

Audio Programming

Hello internet!  I'm Paul Kankiewicz, a programmer on Project Kassa.  I have only very recently started using Unity, but I feel like I've been learning fast.  I was tasked with creating a sound manager for our project.  Here's a short video demonstrating my work:

This is currently just a test project that I did to learn how to program sound stuff in Unity.  This project currently uses one script for each behavior type.  In the future, I will be reworking this to make it so that one script can be applied to any audio source.  Then, the user can select the behavior they desire, plug in any necessary input data, and sound will play according to the selected behavior.  Currently, there is functionality for 3D sound, like the music box, repeatable sounds, delayed sounds, sounds that only play once ever, and sounds that loop when the player is within a certain collision volume.

Design Process for Dani

Hello there!  I'm Danny Huynh, the concept artist for the team.  I take broad ideas and create concept art for characters, environments, and anything else that helps to refine and nail down the look and feel of the game.  Basically, I make pretty things.  Ryan previously talked about the inspiration and direction we want the game to go, so today I'll talk about the design process for one of the characters, Dani.

When I first joined the project, I had a rough sketch and a character background.  I read through to make sure I understood the character, and focusing on the main aspects of her personality, I needed to make a strong willed, outspoken, take charge kind of character.  Before I started fleshing out her character, I wanted to have some of the more key physical features nailed down, namely her hair and clothing.

Clothing and hair thumbnails.

One of my first sketches of Dani.

With feedback from the rest of the team, this is one of the first sketches I did of Dani.  This was before I had the design elements applied.  As you can see, her proportions and style are pretty average.  We wanted something a little more stylized.  Something with the grit of Backwater Gospel, the bold style of The Gorillaz, and the unique rendering of Ashley Wood.  Taking in mind the inspirations for the game, my next sketch came out like this.

Notice the sharper angles, the play on proportions.

For being a leader-type character, I wanted to play with having a heavier lower body to give her a more grounded look.  The other character in contrast is much slimmer.  With this as the newer reference of how I would draw her, I played with some brushes in Photoshop to get a better vision of how she would look with texture.

Dani with texture and thick ink lines.

Near final concept of Dani.

This is the closest to final concept that I've gotten.  Reassessing her design, I decided to go back a few steps to fix some problems.  Her baggy pants wasn't reading quite the way I wanted, and with the jacket, having her come off as bottom heavy was a bit difficult.  So, to remedy the situation:

More thumbnails, more silhouettes, MORE EVERYTHING.

I quickly pumped out some more silhouettes and thumbs to play more on her proportions.  In the end, I've decided to flip her design, making her more top heavy (makes sense with the jacket right?) and to have thinner legs.  Another feature that most characters will have is exaggerated hands.  Most of the stylization will take place more in the body than the face.  Even though the previous concepts won't be accurate to the final design, the work wasn't done in vain.  It helped to visualize what the quality of the final piece will look like, and it'll be interesting seeing how different the final design will look compared to the original sketches!

Creating the Style Pt.1

Hey all, and thanks for checking in on our weekly blogs. I’m Ryan Sand, a man with too many titles, but in this case we can call me our art director. I’m in charge of handling the development and cohesion of our art style as we move forward with the project, so that’s what I’ll be talking about today.

Since we've started working on Kassa, we've always wanted the game to have a dirty graphic style that would match the games setting and themes as well as stand out amongst most other games you’d find on the shelves today. Messy outlines with varied line weight, a dull color palette with spots of saturation, a good range of value, and a painterly messiness to our textures.

With that in mind we began to research a multitude of styles that fit our vision and how others have translated those styles into 3D. We latched onto many of the elements from artist Ashley Wood, and the animated short Backwater Gospel. We've been especially impressed with how well the messiness of Backwater was transferred into 3D, and can’t thank them enough for their making of video.

Ashley Wood, Backwater Gospel, The Walking Dead, and a bit of Borderlands for good measure.

From here we've taken element’s from our research and gave them to our concept artist, Danny Huynh who has worked to combine them into a style of our own. Here are some of this pieces showing the evolution of our style through character concepts.

Danny started with broad simple concepts to nail down the look of the characters. Once he had their look down he started to brought the stylistic elements we researched to the the characters.

As concept work develops we’re creating test assets to bring the style into 3D. Nearly all of our line work is going to be done in texture, similar to Backwater gospel. On this model we're taking advantage of extra strip geometry to give the asset outlines. Right now this is a box only with a diffuse texture, and from here we can quickly experiment to develop our unity shaders.

A simple crate for experimentation. 

The foundations been set and there is plenty more to come as our style develops further. 

Well, It looks like I'm up to write the next update. So before we begin I'd like to just introduce myself. I am Branden the Chief Technical Lead (Hey if you get to pick your title go big.). In simple terms I handle everything on the programming and technical side. Since we're playing catch up with the blog I'm going to be spending most of this post talking about what we've been up to these last few months. But before I get any farther we'd like to invite you to check out our latest build of the game here. Later down the road we'll have a list of multiple builds on that page so you can view our progress over time.

The first thing we tackled right out of the box was our unique camera system. If you play the latest build you will notice that as you move to and from each room or area the camera will shift and change. Visually this adds a lot of control as the artists can be ensured that their work will only be viewed at a certain angle. Cutting out the worry of  making everything look good from all angles and instead time can be spent finely tuning lighting, materials, and geometry to a specific angle. Technically however, camera control; which is traditionally handled purely in code is now a content issue. So to tackle this we developed a way using minimal content to define where and when the camera changes and how it behaves.

To do this we started with the base definition of a 'room'. Now a room is nothing more than a container with unique name. Inside of a room are definitions for trigger volumes that signal to the camera that the player have entered the room, as well as one to four points which define camera position and behavior. Currently we have three camera behaviors with a few more in the design document. These are a single pivot, a pan, and a leash follow. The single pivot is a stationary camera that continuously rotates to keep the player in view. The pan is a camera on a track, and the leash follow is a camera which will attempt to always stay under a maximum distance of the player.

My next post will hopefully cover our character controller and the current state of the dialogue system.
Thanks for reading!

Project Kassa - Introductions and A Cabal

First, some introductions.

This Blog:
This production blog will detail the creation process of Project Kassa, the working title for a series of episodic, co-op, survival/horror, adventure games produced by Biweekly Games. The games tell the story of Gabe and Dani Kassa, a pair of siblings, who are trying to re-capture the evils that have been released from Pandora's Box.

The Team:
Allison Kinzelman - Producer, VFX Artist, Animator
Ryan Sand - Art Director, Environment Artist, Texture Artist, Creative Director
Branden Gee - Chief Technical Lead
Danny Huynh - Concept Artist, Animator, Visionary
Frank Schorsch - Technical Artist, Modeler, Animator
Paul Kankiewicz - Consultant

We're currently in the beginning phases of the project, and yesterday (8/25/13) we had a game cabal to discuss several aspects of it.

Titles:
While "Project Kassa" is our working title, we don't like it for a permanent one, so of course we need to come up with something we like better. We wound up mostly just brainstorming this, and coming up with a few we liked fairly well but weren't in love with (Cycle of Discord/Chains of Discord), so we'll be revisiting this at a later date.

Horror Events:
We brainstormed out all sorts of ideas for horror events, varying both in implementability and in quality. We might have had a few more ideas for these than for titles.

We went through all of our suggestions and red X-ed those that were just bad or impossible, blue X-ed those that were possible but might be difficult or were just okay, and finally green checked those that we all agreed upon and were relatively easy to implement. We also discovered just how many sound-based ideas we had come up with.

Kickstarter:
We figured out rewards and reward tiers for our eventual Kickstarter plans, though we'll be waiting to release those until we release said Kickstarter.

Working:
Just some pictures of us working the Kickstarter plans together, when Ryan remembered he had his camera with him.