Festival of Magic Early Alpha Trailer
Mothhead game art piece
We wanted to talk a bit about a great art demo made by the awesome guys over at Massive Black for Unity3D! We had a couple of fingers in that particular project and it’s so cool to see it live!
We helped Massive Black with programming and game design to bring it to life along with the Unity demo team. Mothhead started as the brainchild of Peter Konig and meandered through both comics, concept art and finally into this game art piece.
You can download Mothhead for windows and mac over at the Unity website.
Teaser video (spot the reference to us in there!)
For more delicious Massive Black artwork related to the project head on over to their Mothhead Page.
Crossbow weapon design
Hey guys! I just finished up this design, and wanted to show you a bit of the process behind it.
This crossbow weapon is a design for one of our main characters, it’s going to be seen a whole lot so we wanted to nail the design. We ended up going through 16 iterations before landing on the final piece.
First up I usually do a bunch of silhouettes to get the masses down. After these were done Frits, Hans Kristian and myself gather round my screen and discuss what we like/don’t like about them.
I had this idea that the first one looked kinda front heavy to I added all these counterweights by the handle. Which looks cool, but it brings to mind a rifle or shotgun very easily. We wanted it to be a single hand weapon, so a solution would be to make the “body” of the crossbow hollow.
I took the first thumbnail and iterated on that and came up with the next few. I’ve defined the masses a bit more with these seeing as how we know we’re on the right track now.
After another discussion and lots of pointing around the screen we landed on the one with the “check mark” by it. There were a couple more tweaks that happened while rendering it out as well, but nothing major. Now I can’t wait to see it translated into 3D and see it in game!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Thunder in 3D!
This is Thunder, the big cat/dog like creature. He’s a follower, like Gnart, and will be used to buff and support Amon and other characters as well (who will be revealed at a later time).
Concept art by the amazing Fridtjof.
I’ve been busy lately with converting the lovely 2D artwork here at Snowcastle games into 3D characters. I most recently finished Thunder.
I’ve recorded most of the sculpting process from zbrush. It was a little harder to get the right look than I imagined, but I think I got it down.
Timelapse Part 1
Timelapse part 2
The final Sculpture looked like this.
After the sculpture was done, I did the lowpoly in Topogun, and the texture in 3D coat.
This is rendered in Marmoset for presentation purposes.
I hope you guys like it!
Exterior Level Design – The Hamlet
We have shown a piece of concept art from the outdoor gardening environment.
I also wrote a blog post about how we want the harvesting to work. (Link)
Now that we have completed most of the Hamlet scene, I would like to share a bit about the process of building the outdoor scene in Unity3D. Be aware, this is a long and quite technical post.
Take 1 (Terrain Editor):
It turned out that making the outdoor level was a lot trickier than we had expected. First off we tried to use the built-in terrain editor that comes with Unity3D, but with the level of detail we wanted, it soon became too heavy.
We had 12 different terrain textures (like grass, gravel-road, dirt, more dirt, more grass, grass with flowers, sand, etc). The terrain system then generates some extra textures to keep track of where we use the different 12 terrain textures. Problem was that these auto generated “tracking” textures were huge. In fact the total disk space just for tracking turned out to be 64Mb!
Lowering the resolution sure would help, but then the visual quality dropped below what we could tolerate. We also tried a very cool terrain tile tool (featured here on indieDB) that in many ways could have worked, but we could not create a game scene that looked enough like the concept art. So at the end of the day we went for make-your-own terrain, piece by piece.
Take 2 (Tiled Mesh in Grid):
We wanted a modular terrain system, so we could easily build any kind of terrain from a library of pieces. I designed the different farm field pieces using a grid with the size of 1×1 meter, 2×2, 1×2, 2×3, etc. With these pieces I could easily build anything.
…Almost, and then there were visual glitches.
Light baking turned out really ugly results with the weirdest shadows ever. I finally figured out that we needed to add an extra empty UV set to each terrain piece. This solved the light baking problems – almost. Now there were some ugly black seems where the different pieces met. Turned out that this was lightmap-bleeds and scaling down the UV sets to allow for some UV padding would eliminate them.
Ok, so now all technical problems were solved, but the
visuals…well, they became too generic! It was close though. Our AD Fridtjof, did a paintover of an isometric screenshot of this that lead to the final solution.
Take 3 (Big chunks of terrain – custom made):
So, we had lots of smaller pieces that kind of worked, but everything became too straight. By using the same process as I did while making the smaller terrain pieces, I instead made relatively big pieces, like 20×30.
I could now give the terrain some nice bumps and the road could get small natural bends. This matched the concept art a lot better, and also gave a more village feel over the previous Roman structure. There are still some seams, but they are few and easily covered up by rocks and plants.
We still have not added everything that will make the scene look nice, but there is a whole different feel to the environment now. One thing that also will need to be redone is the texturing. At the moment it is still tiling like it did originally at a 2m x 2m grid. The tiling is very visible especially when zoomed out.
We will now redo the texturing and at the same time fill the scene with buildings, trees, flowers, rocks, grass and other props.
And here is the end result:
We plan to post a video of this as soon as it is done.
Elevator Scene almost done
Elevator Scene almost done
We have done good progress this week on the elevator-puzzle-scene. The visuals are almost in place, and we are now adding in the final gameplay pieces. Man I love my job!
Working on next room…
Working on the elevator room
We are now working on both the elevator room (as seen above) and an out door scene from the Hamlet where harvesting is done.
We are also preparing a new Game Design post about our combat system, as many people rightly has commented on the combat in the video being both slow and not-so-innovative.
Please rest assured that the combat in the first pre-alpha video does not show the final gameplay. (It’s pre-alpha wich is before alpha and way before beta!)
Festival of Magic – Gameplay footage and interview!
Exciting news! Our game was featured on Level Up, Norway’s most popular video game web series! @Muffenskarl did a segment about us and our game which finally has a name! You can check out the interview (in Norwegian) and some gameplay footage from Festival of Magic here!
If you want to see more, there is an unedited video capture of Festival of Magic gameplay right underneath the Level Up video!
It’s Friday, what are ya gonna do, right?
Introducing Hans Kristian in the role of Amon and Fredrik as Gnart in
Project FoM – The Movie!
Ok, so maybe not, but hey! It’s Friday!
Have a great weekend guys!
Brave Slinger – Weapon Concept
Hey guys! Long time no post! We have something cooking that we are super excited to share, but we can’t just yet. Next week!
In the meantime, I finished up this crossbow concept that one of the characters will use as a main weapon and figured some concept art would sweeten the waiting!
I give you Brave Slinger! (cue drumroll)
