Discover Top Posts Tagged with #fat loot

I’d say that was $30 well spent.

#MtG #Magic the Gathering #Modern Master #Fat loot

COMPOSING FOR FAT LOOT BY MAX LOH

My name is Max Loh, and I am the musical composer for Fat Loot. This project was very interesting for me because the game is simultaneously thrilling and comical, so I had to find ways to blur the lines between these two emotions in the music. I also needed to make the music evoke the feeling of being in ancient China, which is why I chose to record Dizi (Chinese flute, performed by Monica Williams) and Erhu (Chinese violin, performed by Hui Jin and Tung Lan).

For the main menu, I wanted to create a theme song with a memorable melody and an oriental sound. The Dizi and Erhu were perfectly suited for this task, because they are two of the most beautiful and iconic Asian instruments, and are well-suited for playing melodies. I took care when writing my melodies to make them pentatonic enough to evoke the feeling of ancient China, yet catchy enough to appeal to more modern tastes. I also added accompanying Guzheng (plucked instrument), pizzicato strings, as well as various light percussion in order to provide an exciting backdrop to get players excited during the menu screens.

https://soundcloud.com/maxloh/fat-loot-main-theme

#Max Loh #Fat Loot #Music #Fat Loot Theme #Temple Theme #Mist Theme

YET ANOTHER GDC EXPERIENCE BY XIAOTIAN CHEN

Hello, I’m Chen and I’m the team leader of Fat Loot. It was great to attend GDC this year. Lu, our lead engineer, and I had the Summit pass and went to many lectures that we found inspiring. I’ll talk about some of them here.

On the first day, we attended a lecture from Simon Unger about animating cameras in games. He was the cinematic animation director for Hitman: Absolution. In the lecture, he talked about camera fundamentals, composition, and conventional techniques used in game. More importantly, he talked about how to reduce motion sickness for the audience, which is a problem Fat Loot is experiencing currently. Third person camera, if not handled well, will easily induce motion sickness. Simon used a clip from a demo he made to show the difference of visual feeling between different camera shaking amplitudes — stabilizing the camera while character is moving can reduce sickness significantly. Then he showed a clip from Ubisoft’s Watch Dog. The camera zooms in when player enters a room. Closer to character and wider FOV suits confined indoor space well.

After the lecture, we talked to Simon and showed him Fat Loot. He liked the game and gave us some suggestions for improvement. The most important one is to improve frame rate — there’s noticeable frame rate drop when player gets into the Mist. When players are close to walls, our camera will zoom in quickly to avoid penetrating the walls. He suggested to have an invisible sphere around player, and force the camera to move along the surface of the sphere. This method can prevent the camera from sudden snapping and force a smooth interpolation. It’s a very interesting idea and we decided to test it in our next iteration.

#Fat Loot #Xiaotian Chen #GDC 2014 #GDC Experience

A GDC EXPERIENCE BY RAVI SANAMPUDI

Fat Loot engineer Ravi Teja Sanampudi describes his experience at GDC 2014, below.

GDC!

I almost did not go for it.

Thought it was too much effort and cost to go to SF from LA, pay for the Pass, stay at a hotel and eat outside for a week. Especially considering I’m a student spending each dollar and each hour thoughtfully. Plus, I can’t possibly leave my precious assignments and personal projects for a week, right?

Lucky I am in a circle of game developers. Many from my college were going. I reconsidered. Our super helpful TA, Powen, gave a good perspective on pros and cons (none really) of going to GDC. So I thought, ok, let me take the cheapest Pass avaialable. But when I looked at the schedule, I saw awesome talks from developers of The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Infamous Second Son, Assassin’s Creed, etc. Really exciting. But I’d have to pay $900! Are you kidding me??!! I could get 2 PS4s for that! Pay 2 months of living expenses! Or just buy 900 chocolate bars. No way I’d spend so much. Maybe. After a LOT of thinking and a final discussion with my Dad, I finally bought it! The Main Conference Pass! Then we booked the hotel and travel and just forgot about GDC.

Monday, March 17

First day! Sachit and I picked up our badges around 10am, saw the Video Game History Museum, picked up free (yay!) game dev magazines and walked around the North and South Halls. Then we went to Microsoft Lounge where they had Development Challenges setup. I started with the Unity Challenge. It was a tutorial on making a simple 3D treasure hunt game. Took about 30 minutes for that. Then I did the Project Spark tutorial. That was new and interesting. It seemed friendly to artists because there’s no code per se, but being a programmer, I’d still prefer to write code for gameplay logic. For building terrain, assigning textures, placing assets, etc the interface seemed pretty good. The designer sitting beside me built an awesome level within 1 hour (he was told to leave eventually because there were others waiting to use the computer!)

Sachit had the Expo and I Main Conf Pass, so there weren’t any Talks for us to attend. We left around 3pm and toured SF (was our first time here). Fisherman’s Wharf was good. We walked till the end of the ports and noticed a road going way up.. almost 35 degree slope!. We walked, walked and when we reached the top, wow what a view! long, uninterrupted views of vehicles, buildings, lights… and the sky! We just ran around like little kids. Every where we turned there was something awesome to see! North, South, East, West .. brilliant. We fell in love with the city then and there We walked around till almost 9pm then finally returned to the hotel.

#GDC 2014 #Ravi Sanampudi #GDC Experience #Fat Loot

THE SECRETS OF THE MIST BY VELIN TCHALAKOV

Hello everyone! My name is Velin Tchalakov and I am one of the level designers on the Fat Loot team. In this blog post we will be exploring some of the nuances of the mist level, and the changes I made to it to make this level more fun to play. The three things I will talk about are: Guards, Teleporters, and Artistic Design of the level.

The mist level allows players to sneak through the palace to capture the treasure, while trying to not get caught. One of the main ways of getting caught is by a Guard. These little guys patrol the corridors with their lanterns and won’t hesitate to catch anyone caught in their light! Even Fat Lady gets caught sometimes.

#Fat Loot #Mist Level #Guard Path #Velin Tchalakov #Level Design

MODELING THE NEW CHARACTERS BY JASON RONZANI

My name is Jason Ronzani and I am a 3D artist on the Fat Loot team. My main focus has been character modelling and animation. This semester we introduced 3 new playable characters all with brand new abilities, which means we’ve all been very busy!

One of the things that makes our game stand out is its Chinese influenced art style and our lead artist, Henry, designed some amazingly cartoony characters to populate the game. When I first saw Henry’s first character sketch of Lady, I knew I had to work on this game. She was so round and pudgy had a lot of personality. It’s always a letdown for me when I see excellent 2D designs get muddled up when they make the transition to a 3D model. So, when I was modelling our characters it was really important to me to maintain all the life and personality that made Henry’s 2D designs so great.

#Fat Loot #3D Modeling #3D Art #Characters #Jason Ronzani #Art

RE-DESIGNING THE TEMPLE LEVEL BY MELODY WANG

Melody is a level designer for Fat Loot. Here, she describes the process of re-designing or re-thinking the new Temple level.

Design is all about iteration and communication.

Through play testing and feedback from fellow team members, I concluded that there were several flaws with the map: 1) the size was too big for our tiny little character 2) the open space was too large when without grass 3) the player can get the treasure easily just by going up the stairs, and then jumping down 4) once the player got the treasure, it was hard to chase her down. To add to all that, the art progress for this map is slow, as the art team has to create completely new assets. This is an outdoor level, so the assets are completely different from our other, indoor levels.

So I’ve made a lot of changes to the map. First, I shrunk the map and simplified the design by removing the four fancy corner stages and the stages where the player spawns. Second, I staggered the position of the central top platforms so that the player won’t be able to go straight forward to the treasure place. Third, considering the factor that it was too easy for the player to get the treasure and then just jump away, the lead designer, Pat, proposed an idea that I could make the top platforms inverted. I thought it was brilliant and I did that. But later in the play testing, I realized I didn’t like that layout change very much and to prevent the jumping issue, I could just add a small wall on the edge of the platforms. So I decided to stick my original design and put the walls on. Finally, I painted grass, the key of the level, on the ground.

After so many changes, I still stick to my original concept – open, large view, outdoor scene. That’s how it looks now:

#Level Design #Fat Loot #Melody Wang #Temple Level

IMPLEMENTATION OF MIST BY XU ZHONG

Xu Zhong is an engineer on the Fat Loot team. Here, he describes the process of implementing mist into the new level with David Dai, another engineer.

Design

The design of the mist has gone through several iterations. It functions much like the grass in League of Legends. Essentially, it prevents the player who is outside of the mist to see in and shortens the field of view of the players who are standing in the mist.

Although the logic of mist is pretty straightforward, carrying out the idea into our game on the engineering side is kind of complicated and confusing. In the following part, I will describe the technical implementation in detail.