Hi everyone!!!!

Today is concept art day!! yehaaaa!! And I bring you the first level sub-boss first concepts. They have been done by M!ke and I have to say they are fu**ing amazing!! 

The first idea was a sub-boss for the first level of the game. Something bad-ass, something every shoot'em up game should have (in my opinion). A mecha. I love mechas, I love robotech, evangelion and so on. So I gave M!ke the specs and references for these task.

The first thing I asked for was the head. I wanted to see how the head of the boss was going to be so the entire mecha looked like the head. In a previous post is the awesome result, click here to see it.

The references are clear, the anime and manga style is all over the concept art. I love the protectors on the jaws and the little fangs of the mouth.

The next step was the body. I gave M!ke some references and tips. Big feet and forearms, square and sharp edges for the hole mecha, devil-like style and so on. The result? A first sketch with two kinds of leg design and a very promising overall look. :-)

Oh my god! I love it! The two versions of the legs are awesome, but very different so I was "forced" to pick one up. What do you think I chose?

After choosing the leg style and giving some corrections to them the next step was the rest of the body, the details, the shoulders etc.

New specs, more changes, a lot of talking and sketching and some colors. The concept keeps going and here is the new one :-)

Nice!! the coloring is great, the forearms...LOVE IT!, the little wings need some work, but we0ll get to that. The sword? Awesome!! What do you think about the progress of the sub-boss concepts? 

With some more tips, specs, instructions and hours of work the shoulders are modified and the right arm is done.

Ok! I think it's awesome but there is still a lot of work and it will get better and better. Let's give it a brake. Let's think and talk about it. In the next part, the full body concepts...WITH GUNS!! AND SWORDS!!!

Thank you very much for reading us.

Keep updated in our twitter and indiedb accounts.




Bye!!!

Hi to everyone!!!

Well, all games needs props right? Boxes, chairs, tables, fake guns etc. Our game also need props. There are meteorites, missiles etc. Let's have a quick look at them :-)

Here we have some meteorites, texture tests and the ship for the scale. Cool yes?

With normal mapping in unity3d

Big range missile. YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHA!!!!!!

Homing missile. You can jump into light speed, but you can't hide ;-)

Aaaaaaaand here is Javi making some "weird" tests with the glow for the game. Do you like it? :D

This is the end of this post. The next one I promise a video tutorial for the laser. I PROMISE!!!!

Bye and thank you very much

:-)

Hello everyone!!!!

I'd like to introduce to all of you to the new member of our team. His name is "M!ke" and he is a hell of an artist.

His first job? Well, I don't wanna spoil it but, let's say...it's a little "robotich" MUAHAHAHA

Thank you very much and again WELLCOME M!ke :-)

Hi everyone!!!!!

This is the third part of our first ship 3D modelling posts. 


Here we end the modelling and start with the texturing :-)In the previous post we saw the ship almost finished. We know the ship is not a 4 million polygon ultra-detailed ship. Well, we could do that, but it would be "useless", cause this is an enemy ship in a shoot'em up game, its size will be like very little on the screen and there are going to be a lot of this ships at some points of the game so we decided to do it "medium-poly". 


The last change to the model, as we were talking about in the last post, is the "laser" cannons. They look pretty simple and flat. So Javi fixed it and this is the result.

Finally!! the ship modelling is finished!! Let's get it into our game...oh wait...what do you say Javi? Texturing, unwrapping, U/Vs? What the fuck is that? I thought we just finished!! No!! you SOB!! We have to do more work? And do you say unwrapping is long, tedious and not easy? MmmmmmmOk :-(

After this little stupid joke we started texturing the ship. This is the first and basic combat ship of the evil empire we will fight against in the game. So I wanted to make the look and feel of the ship texturing very specific so the rest of the empires ships look like kind of the same. You know what I mean? Like in the Star Wars Trilogy(YES!!It's a trilogy, they never did episodes I,II and III NEVER!!!) where all the tie fighters and bombers, destroyers and AT&Ts had so many things in common that when you saw some new vehicle on the screen you could think "oh!! It's from the empire, I can tell that!".

While my mental process was in rampage mode, Javi made some tests. Let's take a look at them:

Whooooouuuhhhhh It's like future transvesti-Spiderman's ship XD

Ok, now we have something

Full color!!! Cool!!!

At this point Javi showed me an experiment he did that was very special. He played with some of the Unity3d materials and shaders, combining them and with a lot of talent he come up with this.

What the heck!!!! It's a fake glow effect on the canons and the "little thingys" next to the cabin. And even the wing has some glow on the empires "logotype". I LOVE IT!!! We have to squeeze this thing until we get something really cool.

After this experiment I thought  "and if the evil empires signature is the glow all over their ships?". Something like Tron Movie. FUCK YES!!! This has to work!!

But you know in every creative process there are mistakes made...ejem...lets take a look at all of them.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHRGHHH!!!! My poor corneas!!!!! They hurt!!!

This one looks like a 3 year kid painting with crayons. Like Painting a red dog or something like that

Ok, that's better...but, that brown looks like "Look John, someone peed on my fucking ship!!!. Fuck you Anakin!!!"

Aaaaaaaaand more pee. But this looks great for an arctic level, doesn't it? :-) 

 FUCK!!! This looks great. This is the chosen one!!!!! Great colors, nice glow, not peed. It's perfect!!

So with this image the series of posts about the first 3D modelling gets to the end.

In the next one "how to program a laser in Unity3D"...if I can manage to record my fucking screen and mic it'll be a videotutorial

Thank you and don't forget to comment and share please!!

Hi everyone!!!!!

This is the second part of the first 3D ship modelling posts. Now we will see some bad-ass  work from Javi.

Ok, so in the last post the ship was good, but not perfect. Let's see it again

It's nice, but...I don't know, it looks far from being aerodynamic, doesn't it? It's bad-ass, but this is an enemy ship, it has to be more bad-ass. So, what can we do? Well, if you think on cars, and planes if you wanna make the design "aggressive" the can use some specific kind of  tricks. Like giving it a more regular view. Just like this:

Can we tell the difference? I think so!!!! So lets take this approach to our ship. It's a "lamborghini aventador" by the way :-)

Yeah!!! That's what I'm talking about!!! It's just a sketch, but the difference is huge with just "little" changes :-) I'm happy now!!

But, let's see all the four standard views of the ship:

Nice!!! very nice!!! eh.....wait.....hummmm....something is wrong, That wings...too much squared, don't you think? The top view shows us that. Well, a little stretching!!!

As you can see this little 20 minute long change gives the ship another whole style. Well, I'd like to think so. Now it's time for the details, the laser cannons (right now the look like pipes) and so on. But I think this will be in the next chapter MUAHAHAHAHA

See you around!!

Please comment!!

Hi everyone!!!!!

Here we are again and I'm going to introduce to all of you our first 3D model. The one representign the first concept art of a previous post.

Javi is our 3D artist and I'm so happy about he being in the project. His work is awesome and he can even develop a little bit in unity, so if I need help he's the perfect one XD.

Ok, so he got the concepts and my instructions and this was the first quick, low poly model. It's cool, but it will get way cooler.

Let's see...the ship rocks, but everything can rock even harder \m/. So after a few "hundreds" of mails and chats and hours thinking we found ourselves in the same page. After adding some sweet sweet polygons, two or three details and a nice light blue color Javi come up with this.

 

All right!!!!! This is getting much much better, but...there is something wrong...hum...the wings...are too rounded for me (and I'm the game director hahaha) and if we remember the concepts the wings are not rounded. Let's iterate once again and.............Voilá!!!

 

Please Javi!!! A side view. The game is lateral scroll remember? :-)

Nice!!!! very nice. I was thinking...and thinking and thinking "I like it, but there's something wrong...I don't know what...but there is something that does not feet...". What do you think people? What would you change in this ship? The answer in the next part of the dev blog.

See you around!!!

Ibai.

Hi everyone!!!

One of the most difficult thing for a programmer to understand in the early stages of your 3D video game programming career is all the "rotation" world. I mean,  2D? Piece of cake. Just use Euler angles, no Gimbal lock and everything works fine. But, when you enter the 3D world...oh my friend, the rotation of 3D objects can make your head spin at first.

Unity has many good options to rotate the gameobjects for easy stuff when you are learning Unity3D and testing: transform.LookAt will rotate the forward vector or your gameobject so it points to the target you want. Perfect for easy things like make enemies follow you in a really easy and little game.

Other good example is the Quaternion.Slerp function. It will rotate from one rotation to another one with a factor of X. Wait, are you thinking "what? quaterninon? what the hell is that?". Ok, we all do to ourselves these same question the first time. Long story short: a Quaternion is a way of storing the orientation of an object in 3D space. Actually the most used way in videagames. Why? It needs less math operations to use the Quaternions, and that's important in video games. If you want to know more about Quaternions...be my guest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion

If you don't know what a Slerp is, may be this post is too much for you. Naaaaaaaaaaaa, it's a joke. Slerp is just a mathematical way of going from point A to Point B (rotation A and B in this case) in X time using Quaternoins. This is the quick explanation. Just think "rotate from this Quaternion to that Quaternion in X seconds".

So, we want to rotate our battleship "realistically" when the user goes upwards or downwards and return to neutral position when the user is not moving in the vertical axis. How can we achieve this? I'm not a superUnityProAAA programmer, but I managed to do this with Euler angles. Big, horrible, very horrible code. This should be inside our character's Update function.



Ouch, pretty awful...

I was trying to mix the Euler angles with the Quaternions and this "beast" code was the result. I realized one thing: you can't try to make use of Quaternions as with Euler angles. You have to abstract of the Euler angles and think "ok, I wanna rotate from here to there with Quaternions". You can't create a Quaternion that is a rotation of 90 degrees on X axis. At least not by numbers. We have to use the Unity3D great engine. So, we need to go from rotation of 0,0,0. The regular ship standing position to 45, 0, 0.

Ok, let's think in Quaternions: We wanna go from rotation A (0,0,0) to rotation B (45,0,0) in X seconds. So if we abstract from the Quaternion, we could think like this: we want to perform a Slerp from "thing" A to "thing" B. But, how do we make the "thing A"?  Very easy with Unity.

Quaternion thing1 = Quaternion.Euler(0,0,0);   //From rotation A
Quaternion thing2 = Quaternion.Euler(45,0,0); //To rotation B

transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(thing1, thing2, 2.0f);

In three lines we have perform a perfect rotation with Spherical interpolation. Think of the Quaternion as an interpreter. Just something the SLERP needs.
So if we want our character to do this when we move in vertical axis, the code should be something like this (inside update function)

Quaternion fromRot = transform.rotation;
Quaternion toRot = Quaternion.identity;

if (Input.GetAxis("Vertical") > 0.0f)       {toRot = Quaternion.Euler( 45,0,0); }
else if((Input.GetAxis("Vertical") < 0.0f){toRot = Quaternion.Euler(-45,0,0); }
else                                                      {toRot = Quaternion.Euler(0,0,0)      }  //neutral rotation

transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(fromRot, toRot, 2.0f);

And there you go!! with these few lines we have a very nice rotation.

Thank you and leave some comments!!!!!

Hello to everyone!!

As may people know one of the most important things of a game is the concept art. The artists take all the chaos that is inside the mind of the designer and I don't know how, but they turn this madness into drawings, landscapes,  portraits, and half finished characters. This little pieces of art usually are not what we see on the final game, but they are the start of it. The first Kratos concept or the first "picture" of Rapture will never be in a game, but they are the essence of it. All the designer's thoughts can be put together in one drawing that when you see it you say "Holy f**k, that's what I was thinking it would look like".

As  game director and designer of "warp space" it's all in my head and when you I see all this things with my own eyes...it's amazing how proud and happy I feel. That "little character" or NPC, prop, landscape has been on your imagination for weeks, may be months, and one day, finally it's on a paper or on your screen and it's one of the best things on the world, that feeling is the reason why I want to make video games.

We are going to show you in diferent posts all the art of the game and right now I'm giving to you this first and very special concept art. It's been done by JUAN MIGUEL GONZÁLVEZ CRAVIOTTO and you will see the evolution of the first concept to the final art that is then sent to the 3D modelling team and after some time is finally a game asset.

I hope you enjoy!!

This is the first concept of an enemy battle ship for the game. It's a very goo start, the artist took all the information and references and did a very very good job. But it's never perfect, it's never exactly as you thought. So we started to iterate and I explained to JM that the idea is to make the ships more  sharp, more angular, with a lot of edges and not so rounded. An so did the artist :-)

Yeah!!! That's much more like it was in my mind. Don't you think it's more badass like this? Finally some little details where done and the side view was added to the concept.

There you go!!!! It's ready to be turned into polygons.


Thank you very much and keep reading us!!!

Hello to everyone!!

In this post I'll explain the first few steps and the core characteristics of our project. For example the technology, members of the team etc.

The technology:

Well, the world is moving fast, so are the gaming technologies. The best AAA games are developed with Unreal Engine or directly in C++ with their own graphic engines. C++ is the most powerful language for making games. But, there is always a but, it's really hard to develop a game in C++. At least an indie game as we want to do. So there where some other options: Unity3D, Godot Engine, Cocos2D-x, Corona 2.0 and many more.

After a little analysis we chose Unity3D, as many other indie studios. Why? Because it's so easy to make multiplatform, and the internet community is huge. Alse there is the asset store: If you need an A* pathfinding and there is no time...just pay 50$ and you got one!!! GREAT!!!

After this we had to decide: 2D or 3D? Well, none of them. We are making a 2.5D game. This kind of games uses the 3D part of the engine to render the objects in the scene, but you only move in 2D, like the old arcades. That's 2.5D :-)

The team:

I would love to make a game by my self, but I can't draw or model anything further than a sphere with 2 holes on it. Also I can't play music, no really, I tried, 2 years with the guitar...impossible...I just can't... At this point and after crying for hours with chocolate Ice cream  all over my face I decided to look for help. After some weeks I found the perfect people.

Concept artist/2D Illustrator: Juan Miguel http://craviotto65.wix.com/portfolio

3D Artist: Javi http://javi3d.blogspot.com.es/

Music/Sound FX: Mikel http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mikel-corcuera-vigalondo/53/7a9/5aa

Game Director/Developper: Ibai http://ibairamirez.jimdo.com

Here we are!!! and we are here to rock you all!!!!!

Bye!!

Hello to everyone!!!

First of all let me introduce ourselves. We are four true game fanatics. Each of us has experience in some of the aspects of a video-game, 3D artists, concept artists, designer, programmer, musician etc.

We want to do a good game, not a AAA game, that's obvious, but we have a lot of heart, a lot of hard work and a lot of free time XD.

On this dev blog we will share with you the experience of making a video-game. It'll be long and hard, but always worth it.

Thank you and welcome!!!

Ibai