End of Marking Period 2 Peer Blog Posts Review

End of Marking Period 2 Peer Blog Posts Review

After seeing a few of my classmate's end of marking period blog posts, there are a few that really stood out to me as being both interesting and have also shown great progress on their projects. To start out, my good friend Michael has been working on his animation, one that has been stuck in his head ever since I've known him. As stated in my previous peer review, this idea is something that he has had my option on numerous times and I feel personally attached to the project in a sense.

The new animation style (in short, having comic book style panels for each major camera angle with action going on between them) , one of which I have not seen before in a 3D animation that he has come up with is something that I feel will better suite both the animation and the comic book-esk style of fight that Michael is going for.

Another person who I am impressed by their work and how far they have progressed is Areil with her digitally created oil paintings. The ones that she worked on over the course of the 2nd marking period are ones that I would personally hang on my walls... if I have space for them.

Another person who I believe made some excellent progress is Liam with his steampunk fantasy world for his animation. Over the marking period, he finished his landscape for the animation and also started to model one of the towns as well, both of which had a great amount of details and the town itself had some awesome looking houses in them.

End of Marking Period 2 Blog Post

End of Marking Period 2 Blog Post

So, yet another marking period has come and gone by in a flash. In that time, I have made considerable progress on Ninjio. In that time, I have been able to sketch, model, texture, and rig 7 different characters for Ninjio. At the start of the marking period, a character would take over 4 weeks to be completed, however by the end of this marking period, I was able to go from concept (not including a sketch) to completion (fully textured and rigged model) in under a week.

(Note: The areas in pink represent where a facial feature will be, they do not show up in the 3D viewer that I chose. Also, on Wen Nan and Yuan Shi, there eyes are where the textures seem to be messed up... can't fix it in the editor sadly)

Bao Lei (堡垒) 

Character Information

Bao Lei is Winding River's first and only robot that was hand built by Ji Xie, the tinkerer and gadget guy of Gold Water, to help in the fight to unify the country. Originally programmed to help aid with peace talks between Winding River and Jade Gate, Bao Lei has since been reprogrammed to help the resistance in their efforts to stop Huai Ren. Bao Lei is a lovable, floating robot that the whole team at Gold Water enjoys spending time with.

The sketch for Bao Lei

Design Iterations and Inspirations

The original design write-up called for Bao Lei to be a much more rustier and "thrown together" sort of robot, with the mentioning of cables and wires coming out of the body. In addition, the original write-up called for Bao Lei to be a humanoid character, however that was dropped due to the fact that I did not want to design another human-esk character.

The current design for Bao Lei comes from a sketch that I did for a summer camp at Carneige Mellon university based around game design. I would love to show the original sketch, but I am unable to find it. The orginal design also had wheels instead of floating, but I chose for Bao Lei to float as it would reinforce the futuristic setting that the game is set in.

Bing Nu (冰女)

Character Information

Her parents part of the former Swift Water division of Gold Water, Bing Nu knew for sure that when she grew up, she would join Gold Water in some fashion. This plan, however was accelerated soon after her parent's gruesome death that Huai Ren orchestrated. She now seeks a deep and ice cold revenge against Huai Ren no matter what she needs to do.

The sketch for Bing Nu

Design Iterations

A quick fact before heading into the iterations that Bing Nu had... Bing Nu was the first character that I did the full design process for (sketch, model, texture etc). As such, she took much longer than the rest of the cast as I was trying to design the process that I took for each character after her. As such, one of my old blog posts titled The Art of Bing Nu gave everyone an early look at the model for Bing Nu, however the design for her has been altered a little bit.

The original sketch for Bing Nu called for her armor accents to be ice blue, however I felt that the colors needed to be a bit more darker to resemble her want and desire for revenge. The result of this thought was changing her blue accent color to a more darker, red infused, purple.

Huai Ren (坏人)

Character Information

Huai Ren, Jade Gate's charismatic leader, makes for an interesting opposition for the members of Gold Water. Huai Ren keeps a tight over the happenings of Jade Gate but still manages to keep the creativity and innovation within Jade Gate to high levels. Although the grip of Huai Ren over the entire city seems like something that people would not like in a leader, he is almost unanimously loved by his citizens.

The sketch for Huai Ren

The original sketch for Huai Ren

Design Iteration and Inspiration

Huai Ren is one of the characters where I did a sketch around when the game was first being conceived and then realized that I absolutely hated the design. In this case, my hatred resulted from the overly broad shoulders and odd stance that I had sketched. 

The color scheme started out as the traditional "evil person" color scheme of red and black. This was changed in the 3D model because I feel that Huai Ren thinks that what he is doing throughout the game is truly good, therefore I changed the all black look to a more white out color scheme.

Ji Xie (机械)

Character Information

Ji Xie is Gold Water's tinkerer and gadget man. He creates things for the whole team to use in their fight against Huai Ren. Ji Xie is not great at combat, however he can analyze situation and look for ways the defeat the enemy that no one else in Gold Water can envision except him. He may look short, but he swears that it is due to the fact that the suit he made, unlike the rest of the team's suits that he made, shrunk on him.

The sketch for Ji Xie

Design Inspiration

Ji Xie started life as a dwarf-like character on the original write-up. However I soon realized that a pure dwarf character in an anime setting would be hard to achieve properly, so I then took the short nature that most dwarfs in pop culture have used that as the basis for Ji Xie's sketch. 

Kuai Long (快龙)

Character Information

Beside being the only character that players can play as, Kuai Long has quite possibly one of more interesting backgrounds of all the characters in the game. Kuai Long was the heir to the throne in Winding River. He never really enjoyed the pressure from his dad to become king. However shortly after one of Huai Ren's plans goes horrendously right, he flees Winding River for the Jade Gate. There, he joins Gold Water in their plans to take down Huai Ren and restore whatever they can of Winding River.

The sketch for Kuai Long

Design Iterations

I was originally going to make Kuai Long where a crown or something of that sort to symbolize royalty, however I decided against having that due to how Kuai Long dislikes that idea of being heir to the throne. 

Sadly I  was unable to make the blue accents that I have in the sketch work well in the model. 

Wen Nan (温南)

Character Information

Wen Nan, an unknown entity within the world of espionage yet a master at code breaking. A villain or a good guy. A man without a master. A mercenary without pay. A smooth criminal without need for disguise. 

The sketch of Wen Nan

Design Inspriation

The main design inspiration for Wen Nan is one from one of my favorite technology presenters Steve Jobs. The top shirt of Wen Nan is supposed to be a classic turtleneck that Steve Jobs wore at some presentations. The twist with Wen Nan's shirt is that it is grey instead of black.

Yuan Shi (远视)

Character Information

Yuan Shi, the passionate and proud leader of Gold Water. Yuan Shi is Gold Water's main strategic planner. Yuan Shi excels at close quarters fighting thanks to his two trusty swords that he primarily uses.

Design Inspirations

The accent color of Yuan Shi is purple, this color was supposed to represent his love and passion for the Gold Water organization.

The Gallery

Whats next

With the characters now made, I now have the equally as monumental task of putting together the rest of the assets for the Ninjio's first public demo. In order to achieve this in time for it's intended release date, see my blog post titled The Release Schedule of Ninjio for more, I need to get one of the first boss fights with Huai Ren, Kuai Long, Yuan Shi, and Bao Lei up and running. In order to do that, I need to create art assets for the stage on which the fight takes place on and get the boss fight itself programmed. So for the next marking period, I will be focused on primarily on designing the level on which the boss fight takes place on.

This week's work log:

Monday January 1st: Happy New Years!

Tuesday January 2nd: Sketched Nan

Wednesday January 3rd: Modeled Nan

Thursday January 4th: Worked on structuring the folders once again

Friday January 5th: Finalized some more mouths

The Release Schedule of Ninjio

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Release Schedule of Ninjio

Introduction

So some of you reading this may think to yourself "Wow Gismo, that Ninjio game seems pretty impressive, I wonder how long it will take for you to get anything done with it". As much as I want Ninjio to be the best game in existence, I would also like to release it in a timely manner. I would like for the game to be released either during my college career or shortly after that. Besides a big final release, I would like to have the ability to show off Ninjio early through the use of game play demonstrations.

Goals

One of the times that I wish to have a game play demo ready for people to play is during Cumberland Valley (my high school) District Arts Festival. This festival is where many of the art classes in CV get the chance to display their work to the rest of the school district as well as the public. I feel that this would give me the chance to set up the game in an E3 sort of manner, a video game show where many developers show off their games prior to releasing them with presentations and demos of their games. I hope that by the District Arts Fest to have a playable demo of the first major boss fight along with some of the story surrounding the fight. This demo should be relatively short but still give people a look into what Ninjio is all about.


Besides getting a playable demo out for the District Arts Fest, I have no solid plans for Ninjio's full release other than I would like to have it out before I get out of college, so I can add it to my resume.

Steps to get to the goal

In order to get to the point that I can make a playable demo for the festival, I have set a certain set of steps that I need to do. The first thing that I have, as shown in my Trello project management file, is to have the characters that I need to make demo happen made. 

The Trello board for Ninijo

For the demo, only 4 out of the 7 total characters will need to be made. I have done some math and figured out that I can have all 7 characters done by the end of this marking period if I finish one character each week. This would mean that I would have to sketch, model, texture, and rig the character all within a week, giving me a day or so for each of these steps. This may seem impossible but I have been doing this for about a week at this point and have found it to be possible if I work on my characters in class and during my free time before and after school.

Boss fights, the best skills test for video games

The second step to my master plan is to get the environment that the boss fight takes place in modeled. This should not take too long, so I am allotting around 1-2 weeks to get this done during the third marking period. While this is going on, I will also be working on, during my own time, programming the boss fight itself.

The third step is for me to program some of the allies and how they act during the boss fight. This is something that I have been doing some research on and have not found an adequate solution for, but I will outline my goals for the allies whenever I get around to it. The same thing could be said for the enemies, I have not found a good solution to how I want them to act.

Overall, I have a plan to some degree. This is the first time that I have put the plan down into wording, but I hope that this gives everyone reading a plan for how I am going to develop Ninjio going further.

This week's work log:

Monday December 11th: Modeled Yuan Shi

Tuesday December 12th: Did some more modeling work for Yuan Shi

Wednesday December 13th: Textured Yuan Shi

Thursday December 14th: Rigged Yuan Shi

Friday December 15th: Sketched 坏人

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The Design of Jade Gate

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Design of Jade Gate

Introduction

Ninjio's story primarily takes place in two settings. One is a city that has pushed to develop their future alongside nature while the other, the primary setting in Ninjio, chose to develop their future without nature. Although these two contrasts are not a primary part of Ninjio's story, I felt that they had the opportunity to be an interesting, and very extreme, contrast to each other. The city where the main portion of the game takes place is called Jade Gate, or 玉門 in Chinese. I think that Ninjio may finally be at the point where I need to create some portions of Jade Gate for use in testing game play features.

Jade Gate's design and influence

I find it interesting how Jade Gate was the first one out of the two settings where I knew exactly how I wanted it to look. I wanted the city to be the "City of the Future" where it's leader wanted as much innovation as possible, however this resulted a city where nature was destroyed and many human ethics were violated as well. This kind of city, where innovation was heavily encouraged, resulted in me thinking back to a few YouTube videos about Walt Disney's EPCOT project that I have watched recently.

Wait, the Epcot in Walt Disney World in Florida?

Walt Disney and his Experimental Prototype for a Community of Tomorrow

Well, no. In short, without going through too many details, Walt Disney before he died had come up with an Experimental Prototype for a Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT for short). This community was built to be able to survive, thrive, and show off what the future of cities can be. At the heart of this project, there was a gigantic city that was planned to be built using the finest technology that the  1970's could offer, including a labyrinth of transportation options like monorails and an integrated roadway design for the city never thought of before then. This concept of EPCOT city faded away with the passage of Walt Disney himself, however the idea of bring the best technology and innovation to a single place was eventually incorporated into the EPCOT theme park built in the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. I would like to make the main city where the story in Ninjio takes place to be heavily influenced by Walt Disney's idea for a "Community of Tomorrow" as I feel that Jade Gate's constant strive to innovate would fit well with the original drawings that the Walt Disney Company did for EPCOT city.

The model on display in Walt Disney World
of EPCOT City

So, what does a city of the future look like?

The road layout of EPCOT City,
note the circular nature of the city

A cross section of the city of tomorrow, look at those transit options!

This is a very difficult question, however when I look at the concept art for EPCOT city, I see many things that I like. One such thing is how the city is highly planned, with higher density buildings like apartments and high rise office towers situated in the center of the city and lower density buildings like single family homes and larger office complexes located on the edge of the city limits. Another thing that I found in the plans for EPCOT city was how much the transportation infrastructure is planned. In the drawings for EPCOT city, there are many modes of transportation ranging from roadways built onto of each other to various light rail systems (monorails, electric trains etc) that weave throughout the city. There are many other things that I find interesting inside of the concept art for EPCOT city, however I will spare all of you from my annoyingly long list. These are just some of the things that I want to incorporate in Jade Gate's layout and design.

This week's work log:

Monday December 4th: Finalized Sketch of Kuai Long

Tuesday December 5th: Did the body for Kuai Long

Wednesday December 6th: Finalized the rig for Kuai Long

Thursday December 7th: Textured Kuai Long

Friday December 8th: Did some eye textures for Kuai Long, restructured the project file structure and naming scheme…. yeah

The sun sets on Walt Disney's EPCOT

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The Art of War I: Weapons and their role

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of War I: Weapons and their role

Introduction

Most, if not all, of the main characters in Ninjio will have their own unique weapons that they use in combat. These weapons will be uniquely tailored to the character's personality and skills. For example, one of the character is of a short, almost dwarf like, stature with a knack for fixing things. Therefore that character's weapon may be a small, yet powerful, wrench-like weapon to suite the character's physical size and the character's mechanical know-how. Since Ninjio is set in a futuristic China, I would like to bring as many elements of the Chinese culture into the game as possible. One such element of China's culture that I find fascinating is how they view and use their weapons.

Chinese culture and how weapons are used and viewed

A good example of a Western game that favors the whole
"I'm a big guy with a gun, now eat it" sort of mentality

There is a dramatic difference between Asian cultures and western (USA and European countries etc) culture in terms of weapons and their role in war. In most Asian cultures, a weapon like the sword or even a gun is considered an extension to the body during war, where the sword or the gun is an extension of the artistic art form that war is. This means that in Asia, you would see less of the movie-esk "Imma gonna run at you with my sword raised above my head and shout like a madman" scene and more of the "Imma ninja, I am going to sneak around and stealthy kill you when you least expect it" sort of moments. Since this is something that is buried deep into Asian culture, video games that are made in Japan, where most major video game companies are headquartered, and any other Asian country tend to follow this mantra of using weapons to extend the body's capabilities. I hope to emulate this part of Asian culture in Ninjio but how?

But how?

I ask this because as an interactive experience, video games and the designers behind them have very little control over how the game is being played. The few things that designers can implement to increase their control can either be obtrusive, like a big invisible wall that the player cannot get through, or they can be subtle, like having only a certain number of bullets before you have to seek more ammunition (thus making the player have to pull out of a fight). Of the two ways of gaining control over the player's game play, I would like to make the 2nd option, making the boundaries very natural, be more prominent than the other option. 

Now rounding back to the original question, I would like Ninjio's combat to be as awesome and epic as I can while still sticking to the Chinese culture of using weapons as an extension of the body. In my opinion, I can do four things to insure that this can happen. 

One is that I can offer the player lots of movement mechanics to ensure that sneaking up behind an enemy is as fun as possible. I have already programmed the movement into the Ninjio, and boy is it smooth. I have it programmed so that there is no delay between you input an action and when it is carried out by the game. This greatly helps players move around the scene, get to where they want to go faster, and it overall makes playing the game feel very responsive and smooth. 

Another mechanic that I have implemented already in the game is a teleportation ability that the player can use after a short cool down. This allows players to pick a place to go to and use a teleport bolt that brings them to that place instantaneously. I may need to think about having this ability unlock around halfway through the game because it is seriously fun to use and may be a bit overpowered compared to the normal movement that the player has.

One thing that I can keep in mind while creating the levels for Ninjio is to make them as open-ended as possible. This means that enemies will be placed in a manner that allows the players to come up with different ways of getting around them or even killing them. One example of this may be a situation where there is a guard in the very center of a circular plaza surrounded by a high wall on one side and a fountain in the middle. They player, in this case, could get up on that high wall to achieve some high ground or they could just go to the center of the plaza and start fighting. In the second option, the player could then use the fountain or the walls as cover from the opposing fire coming from the guard.

A durability chart for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Another mechanic that I could implement would be similar to something found in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in which weapons break after some use. This could force players to not use their main weapon all the time and maybe force them to sneak around enemies like the ninja that they are. One of my concerns with something like this is that I would then have to program some sort of inventory system so that players can swap out weapons when they break, which is surprisingly difficult to get right. Another concern that I have with this system is that when I play Breath of the Wild I tend to have lots of "Oh crap" situations where my good weapon breaks halfway through a boss fight, but maybe that's just me being a bad player. Overall, I don't think that this mechanic would fit Ninjio's action packed game play.

These are just some of my ideas on how to enforce a lesser use of weapons inside of Ninjio, but I am sure that as the game progresses I can come up with some more ideas. Out of all four ideas, the only one that I am going to scrap in its entirely is the the weapon breaking system that I described and reputed above.

This week's work log:

Monday November 27th: No school, enjoy crashing those Amazon servers!

Tuesday November 28th: Worked on the eyes for Bing Nu

Wednesday November 29th: Worked a bit on the model for -... .- ... - .. --- -.

Thursday November 30th: Textured  ... -. ...-.. --- -.

Friday December 1st: Did final touches on .- --- .. - ... -. ...-

. .--     -.. . . -.     .-     -. --- .. - ... .- -...

The Code of Inverse Kinematics

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Code of Inverse Kinematics

Introduction

In most modern video games, developers use a technique called inverse kinematics, commonly shortened to IK, to insure that various parts of characters are interacting with the world as they are meant to. This can be useful when a character has to touch an object at a point or for a character to plant their feet on an uneven surface. The best part about IK is that it can be coupled with normal animation to insure that the character will plant its feet on an uneven surface even when it is doing an animation like running or walking.

Before and after IK, notice how the character's feet are in the ground without using IK

How a computer sees the human body

IK in Unity3D

In the Unity game engine, the process of IK is fairly simple to set up. As long as the character fits a normal humanoid bone structure, Unity automatically sees and understands which bones are for what part of the body (left/right foot, head, left/right hand etc). Once Unity knows that the model is correctly set up, then it will go ahead and create an avatar for the model. An avatar is a simplified bone structure that is generated from the model's original bones for the game engine to understand how certain bones interact with each other (IE. hand is connected to the arm bone). Inside of the code, you can then tell these main bones, like the hand bones and the foot bones, to move to a position and Unity will position the connected bones to the correct position.

The Code

This is just a small thing that I put together, the actual IK script used by Ninjio has more things using IK. Hopefully the comments, in green, will help those with little programming knowledge understand the process that it takes in order to get IK on one bone inside of Unity. If you would like to learn more about this, here are some links:

Unity Documentation on IK
Unity documentation on the Animator class which has a whole lot more than just IK under its belt

But when none of those work then ask Google, it'll help for sure!

Gismo's thoughts

I am honestly surprised at how easy it was for me to set up IK for Bing Nu's model! Surprisingly, the hardest part of getting her IK correct was figuring out how and when to have her foot follow IK and when to follow the animation inside of the programing. I plan IK in Ninjio to allow the character's heads to turn and look at an object, pick up an object with their hand, and to make their feet actually touch the floor (no floaty feet here)!

This week's work log:

Monday November 13th:  Started modeling Iron Flurry, but had to start over

Tuesday November 14th: Started modeling the Iron Flurry again

Wednesday November 15th: Finished modeling the Iron Flurry

Thursday November 16th: Textured the Iron Flurry, but for some reason it was deleted

Friday November 17th: Finished texturing the Iron Flurry

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The Art of Character Association

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of Character Association

Introduction

One thing that I have been having issues with in Ninjio is how to have players memorize and associate the names of the characters to their personalities and such. This is hard because I am adamant in keeping the original Chinese names unaltered in the final game, even though they are fairly difficult to pronounce correctly. I have toyed around with some ideas and have came up with a few methods for getting the name to image association correct in players minds.

How to be memerible, the right way

Borderland's style of character introduction

One thing that I found common in many video games, like Telltale Game's Borderlands series, is a way of quickly giving off some sort of information about the character along with some sort of memorable line that the character either says a lot or they center actions around. Borderlands does this in a very obtrusive way, with the game pausing, zooming in the character, the character saying some sort of silly voice line, and then the game displays their name along with a line that the character typically uses as their motto for their actions in the game.

Another method that I saw a lot in other video games to display character information is to have a screen that the players can access at any point in the game. Games that use this method typically just display factual information like the character's age, height, width, attack information, and any other information that the player may find useful. While this can display lots of factual information, I only know a few games that use this style of display to show character personality information, however I plan on using and displaying this information differently in Ninjio.

Character profiles in Ninjio

What I am planning for Ninjio's character profiles is a hybrid between the two methods that I outlined above. I plan on taking the memorable lines, the character portraits and the silly voice lines that Borderlands has and combining them with some other information about the character's personality or history (see sketch). These profiles will only be available for the player for the 7 main characters that the player will be interacting with throughout the story.

Incentivizing? I think so!

Incentivizing the player to view these profiles

As the game is currently written, the player (playing as the main character of course) meets the villain early into the story and the main character's mentor very early into the storyline. I think that it would be appropriate for the player to then be prompted, hopefully in a manner that seems natural to the player, to open up the character profiles for the main character, the villain, and the main character's mentor. As for the rest of the cast, including Bing Nu, I have a scene where the main character is required to go around and introduce himself to the rest of the cast (minus one!). I think that when the players introduce themselves to these characters, their profiles unlock in the character profile menu. The last character, I will just wait until he hacks into his own profile to unlock it.

This week's work log:

Monday November 6th: Made a run cycle for Bing Nu

Tuesday November 7th: Made a valiant attempt to get the foot IK working, which ultimately failed

Wednesday November 8th: Worked more on foot IK and it seems to work well

Thursday November 9th: Started work on one of the weapons, the Omega Blaster

Friday November 10th: finished modeling the Omega Blaster, ultimately got rid of it for various reasons

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