SEIZA Games

A Melbourne-based video game design studio.

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Changing the flowers into 2D

10/10/18 - Jamie

Since our polished game environment involves with lots of 2D sprite plants, when my team member puts in the flower model, it looks very odd and feel like it doesn’t match the other plant’s style.

Hence we decide to take off the 3D flowers and make flower patch sprites instead. So I used Photoshop setting the brush with wet edges just to bring the flower little bit of aesthetic in it. 

However, we think that the flowers can be just lay flat on the ground instead on standing and floating with the wind, so the vines wouldn’t be necessary. Also, the flowers I’ve draw are too colourful, which would be too busy to stare at since we are making a calm and relaxing game. In the end, I ended up giving up the wed edge brush and use a solid brush to illustrate yellow and white flowers rather than colourful ones. 

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Gardening

Morgan - 10/10/2018

Being the artist of the initial concept art we’re basing the game off, and feeling that our scene was lacking the charm of the original image, this week I’ve taken it upon myself to refine our game scene and get into the nitty-gritty of changing the hues of textures, the strength of light sources and shadows, and making everything look consistent.

First off, this is the concept art:

And here is where we were at a few weeks ago with the scene:

Here we can see that the colours are a far more yellow hue in comparison to the concept, as well as the trees being the completely wrong shade of green. 

I updated all of our textures to be the exact same colours from the concept art, and began ‘gardening’ by arranging large quantities of our new grass model and more bushes (our previous grass sprites weren’t cooperating with the cloud shader).

The result is now this:

If you compare it to the initial concept art, it’s now much more accurate in terms of colour. There’s still a lot we need to adjust and pick apart, but it’s been improved and is actually starting to look pretty neat!

We’ve got a week left until our final submission, so I’m handing over the ‘gardening’ to one of the other members for now so I can work on figuring out what to say about our game during our presentation.

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Polishing!

Jeff - 10/10/18

The semester is almost over and our project is coming to and end. This week I continued to polish our project’s sprites. We’ve realised our leaves and bush textures were too detailed for the art style but fortunately, they were easy to edit and reimport. 

Example: Tree leaves

What’s wrong: Leaves have unnecessary details and were glowing in comparison to all our other assets which are flatly coloured.

After! Flat leaves, no glow, adjusted the colour to match with Morgan’s concept art, added black background due to shader issues.

As animation is an essential part of our game, we’ve also realised our player animation required some reworking. Since I have animation experience after going through an animation course last semester I was able to assist Kurt with it. We are currently working on renewing some of the player animations and will continue to polish it for next week’s presentation.

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Refining the current animation assets.

10/10/18 Kwangduck Kim

So, we had feedback from our mentor and the mentor pinpoints that refining animations that we already had is more important than having more of it. Quality over quantity. I considered the game should be relaxing and fun as it plays, but apparently, animations such as rolling and walking glitchy are told that they ruin the ambiance and feeling of our game concept. I did try to make them look good back then, now they look less complete and missing something over feedback. Therefore, I decided to take a step back in time once again from the beginning.

I manipulated the existing animations by looking more references for each animation this time. So far, we have got some animations that are already made and the quantity is fairly enough to experience some features of our game. Thus, I will stop making more assets of animation and begin to focus on refinement to be even more detailed and smooth as my last task before the presentation.

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Bug Fixes, Cameras and Shaders (Oh My)

Chloe - 10/10/2018

I come bringing better cameras and more shaders. (Well, the same shaders but with more nodes and codes added to them)

To add cinematic cutscenes into our game, Cinemachine has been implemented so that we can move the camera to different positions and angles when the player interacts with certain objects. I’ve also learnt how to use timelines to set this up properly!

For instance, this is the bowing trigger timeline, so when the player presses E on an invisible trigger in front of the cat statue, an Event script will play the timeline once, in which the player bowing animation is played, and the main camera switches view gradually to a stationary camera that shows the scene at another angle.

The grass wobble shader now also has a script that allows the grass to smoothly slow down as opposed to how it used to jitter or snap suddenly in previous builds. This is because the shader relied on a time node to offset the vertex, but when the time node was changed, it sped up time itself rather than slowing down the grass as I had hoped it would. I was taught a workaround to this by not using the time node at all, and relying on a float in a separate script that moves through the cosine wave a tiny amount on every step. Stepping into the trigger of the grass will then speed this float up and then slow it down after a set amount of time using a Coroutine to determine how long to wait until slowing it down, and a min and a max wobble amount to determine the fastest and slowest that the grass can wobble.

I’ve also applied this shader to the bushes as well to get the same effect!

(look at him go!)

Lastly, I have just started implementing a PBR shader that will hopefully mirror the same cel shading style, since the unlit shader I was using before doesn’t receive shadows. Some critique was given in the last playtest about how adding shadows will give the player a better sense of being in the scene, so I felt it was important to try and implement that.

So far the shader is only on the ground, it receives shadows and feeds a normal map and a dot product node through a smoothstep node, so that the shader either returns a darker or a lighter shade rather than a gradient. That is then fed into the emissions input, which is why the lighting on the shader is still very smooth, since there doesn’t seem a way to completely override the lighting that I know of.. but it’s a start.

That’s about it from me!

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Making Some Jams

3/10/18 - Morgan

Lately, I’ve been working on a short and sweet OST that can be played as background music in our game. With a pair of headphones and Garageband, I sat down and churned something out from a moment of inspiration in one sitting. Despite it having flaws galore, it turned out to be the perfect background music for the game’s atmosphere. Instead of making a refined version, I wanted to keep the charm of the mistakes.

After editing the track to sound a little rougher, and setting up a radio model in Unity with some 3D sound effects, the little tune can be heard playing in the scene at varying levels of volume depending on the player’s location.

It gives the scene a quaint yet mysterious atmosphere, as the tune definitely sounds like someone’s misshapen piano recording, which it is. I wonder what kinds of theories players will come up with about this element.

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Interactions and Sounds

03/10/18 - Jamie

We don’t need anymore models therefore I’ve been told to do some scripting. The tasks for me to do is to code the water sound, footsteps and trigger event for players to play catching petals animation underneath the cherry blossom. Since I haven’t done much about Unity coding and is not so familiar with the languages either than Gamemaker, therefore I looked up YouTube tutorials to help me have ideas of what to do, then sub in our needs will be very easy.

First I started working on the water sound effect where our leader Morgan wants the soundtrack to play louder as the player gets closer to the water. It got solved faster as I imagined how complex it should be. Basically for the audio file, it has two colliders: Min & Max. So with two of these colliders, we can easily set it when the player is closer to the Min collider, the water sound will be quiter, but if get further of it(closer to the water), the sound will be louder.

Next, I found a way to have the footstep audio to play when each step of the player has made, once a foot is stepped on the grass ground, the audio will be triggered. Which is to add events in animation clips so each time a foot land on the ground, one event will be added and named as “step”. Then with these events, I will address them in the script so each time when a event is reached, the audio will play a single footstep sound. 

Then moving onto the animation triggering event. It is very easy just like another events that requires a collider, target and target event, with the video tutorials I manipulated the code to our assets ready to be placed in. However Chloe told me our mentor has sent us a very handy world interaction script that can be used broadly on every game assets by just dragging features into the script’s tool bar. Therefore we don’t have to hard code every single movements individually. Awesome!!

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Water and Ambience Stuff

Chloe - 3/10/2018

I’ve been working on tweaking some coding issues and getting the water to look a little more like water. The cat now bobs and is recognised as swimming when it’s in the water, now all we need is animations to add to it!

The water has gentle waves and ripples will show up around the cat just a little bit above the water when the player swims in the water.

I’ve also tried my hand at making ripples around the island but it looks a bit rough, I think there’s a better way to go about this.

Other than that, I’ve just made tweaks to the toon shader (to lessen the contrast of the shadows), removed the painted grass because it wouldn’t work with the toon shader, and experimented with a day/night cycle by overlaying a texture that gradually scrolls past every object in the scene.

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Refining!

3/10/18 - Jeff

Our core idea and assets have be successfully implemented into our game. Now it’s all about refining. We invested our time in creating intractable gameplay based on feedback we received from our previous playtesters and replacing some of our 2D assets with new ones that better suits our art style as well as tweaking the colours of our scene. This weak I had the chance to help with some coding and scene editing as well as creating some replacement assets. Here’s what I’ve made!

Napping Rock

An additional asset which is a flat rock that the player will be able to trigger a napping animation on when interacted with it.

Ground Texture

To better match our style, this will be the new ground texture for our game!

Catnip

A second grass sprite used for special patches of grass that the player will be able to trigger a rolling animation on when interacted with it. Unfortunately, this will likely not be used as we have decided that 3D grass will better suit our game so we will be replacing the 2D grass sprites soon.

Cherry Blossom Petal

The cherry blossom petals that falls from the cherry blossom tree we used previously was a placeholder sprite. This is the new one! Smoother, bigger and more detailed while maintaining a toon-ish art style.

Water Caustics

The water caustics we used previous was a free image from the internet. It was far too detailed and realistic. This is the new water caustics sprite we will be using!

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More various animation interactivities

03/10/18 Kwangduck Kim

This week has been more challenging than I thought it would be with many unexpected errors of Maya’s auto-locating animation which twisted and rotated the model weirdly to each framework. It was time-consuming to fix the problem that I had to look for the issue one by one of which joint is causing it in the editor.

 It was quite fun, though. I didn’t know that I could manage such advanced movements like jumping, crawling and scrubbing on the floor and they came out quite nicely for the first try.

We put running and swimming animations aside because we decided that other detail animations in particular spaces which will enhance the game feel of our calming and peaceful concept for idle, special animations to be combined in the atmospheres. Things like playing on grass, pouncing on a butterfly, catching petals in the air etc. will give a feeling that player enjoys and experience in a cat life along the environment.

I am at halfway through the task list of animation(priorities) right now. According to that, the next priorities will be napping and pushing through bushes. Apparently, running and swimming are located as minor concerns to the last.

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Minor Details

20/9/18 - Chloe

This week I’ve just been focusing on little tidbits here and there like setting up a water shader and adding cherry blossoms. The materials for Jeff’s leaves/bushes have also been given a custom shader so that the cloud shadow texture runs through them too!

(May edit the texture for cherry blossoms later because having 3 blossoms in one texture makes it look a little odd)

(Still trying to figure out how to make the caustics distort better to simulate waves)

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NO MORE MODELS

19/9/18 - Jamie

Apparently we have more than enough models this week, therefore as a modeller,  my modelling tasks are DONE. However, I wouldn't like to sit back and do nothing, therefore I’m send to help Chloe as she is busy on working with her coding. 

So after drawing her cloud shadings and cherry blossoms, I’m left free again. Now just to help members to worry less about setting up the environment, I took the task of working on triggering different volumes of sounds depends on where the player is standing at, and also to get the footstep sounds going with perfect timing on every step that the player made. Now, I’ve filtered some nice tutorials and finally come up with some ideas, ready to be tested in Unity.

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Spring Cleaning

19/9/18 - Morgan

I’ve spent this week gathering and organising all of our game’s assets, as things had started to get a little bit messy. In the past few months of working on this game, we’ve managed to pile up a hefty stack of models, and after sifting through them all, I realised we have more than enough to work with for now. Our next area of focus has become programming the interactivity into these assets, as our scene has begun to come together nicely. With all the assets we need, now all we have to do is make them interesting to play with :-)

We’ve also refined our intentions for this project, and made sure to stick to them more thoroughly from now on. Those intentions are simply to develop our skills in 3D, by replicating the atmosphere and emotional responses from our concept art into a 3D environment.

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Animations in depth

18/09/18 Kwangduck Kim

I gave more efforts on iteration of the basic animations that I already made earlier. Additional details of muscle and joint moves are added to make the animation even more natural. Despite taking heaps more time to fix the motions, I am glad that I made fulfilled animations that assist to experience the game feel up to the maximum. My next aim will be the running animation with four legs and swimming if possible(the stage is an island surrounded oceans) since I am more confident in making animations because they look good! :D I got rid of running animation made earlier because it did not look nice and it was running lame.

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I hate trees.

12/9/18 - Jeff

After a good break, it was time to get serious again. Through our experience prior to the midterm milestone and a recent group discussion, we all agreed that we needed to work harder and faster. After re-re-rescoping, we have finally settled down on a near solid idea that we all like and will be working our best towards. In this week, I was assigned to set up the island for our game and create more trees *vomits*.

Cherry Blossom Tree

The first tree that I modelled was the cherry blossom tree that will be occupying an elevated space on the island. We are attempting to use a different method to model the trees this time using textures as leaves rather than a mesh like before. Unfortunately... I went through an unnecessarily complicated process to create the trunks and branches by extruding each section BIT BY BIT which resulted in a considerably longer amount of time to model the tree than needed.

General Tree

Fortunately, I discovered a method that reduced the overall time needed to create the branches of the tree. Introducing... DUN DUN DUN... the Bridge Tool! I have been using Bridge Tool for a long time now, however, Bridge Tool can also be used to bridge edge loops to create a curve. Although the created curve isn't very smooth and accurate and needs fixing, it definitely saves a lot of time compared to extruding each edge loop into a desired position and rotation.

Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvdM-LrMalo

Island Setup

Setting up the island for our game was relatively straight forward; create a terrain based on Morgan’s concept and make it look nice. I created a fresh scene, made the island and added in the grass and skybox I made previously to give it some basic character. Looks good! But some improvements to the island are necessary in the next week such as better elevation and rocky textures on the sides.

Shrine

Near the end of this week I was also able to take a break from making stupid trees take over one of Jaimie’s tasks which was modelling the shrine in our game! Geometric things are always fun to model. The shrine turned out quite well and should be able to be immediately textured soon without changes.

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More animations & modelling

11/09/18 Kwangduck Kim

I managed to make critical animations that are going to be used in the project. Simple, but they will help players to understand the game easier by seeing visualised gameplay, system and mechanics. Animations that I produced such as picking up, running, sniffing around and cleaning its leg and ear will hopefully fulfill the game with satisfaction from the environment and the atmosphere of our game would give. 

Also, I participated in modeling again. Just simple objects, stepping stones, and pavement. 

Because we have and made enough models that are critically used in the game and for an upcoming milestone, I am going to learn how to texture the objects next that need more detail shading besides simple environmental objects that are used by shader in Unity.

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Cat Statue & Other Models

12/9/18-Jamie

This week, I’ve been given several modelling tasks to do, but my most important job is to make a shrine. A shed with a sitting cat statue inside. Before start modelling, I opened up a cat sitting statue in real life as a reference and begin making the model about 1 hour, slowly to realise that the method I using by extruding faces to make limbs would become a mess for UV mappers to add textures on; so I changed my method by using separate shapes jointing together to make it as one. Turned out, it is still a mess. 

So after this happened, I asked Jeff and Morgan for the older version of the player character, thinking it will be better to just have a finished cat, and then manipulate it’s pose to make it sitting like a statue.

Then I got the model. Played it for 2 hours trying to make it sit down with back of it’s leg curling beneath. However it is very hard because it is unlike a realistic toy that can be changed poses easily. The cat is sitting down with weird body proportion. 

I guess I’m good with making plants and objects, but not good with figuration modellings. In the end, Morgan asked if she can have a try at model the statue whilst I focus on other models.

Here’s are the other models I’ve made during struggling with the cat sitting model:

Cattail plants:

A patch of flowers:

Polaroid:

(literally only took 1 minute)

Grave that doesn’t look obvious as a grave: