My progress may come with great effort, but my genius does not.

So i put in another few hours tonight to start designing and crafting the next level - the lecture hall. it comes complete with expansive stadium seating, blackboards and a projector. This level may end up presenting some polygon issues, but I suppose its a good test to see what the average computer as well as the 360 are capable of. I plan on having this level done mid-week, as tuesday is my last day of classes this semester! In my next post, ill toss up some shots of the lecture hall as well as a couple from the dorm room.

Fonts

Progress has been slow for me lately as the spring semester winds down and finals work piles up. However, I have collected some fonts that will give the menus an edgier look. Also, our developer has successfully implemented the dorm room level! Now that I understand the technicalities of modeling for the XNA platform, its full speed ahead from here on out. Hopefully my momentum will pick up this weekend.

a quick note

something to remember that an artist may not realize - whenever adding textures to a scene that is going to be exported and used with directX, always make sure that the width/height resolution of each of your textures is a multiple of 4!

not that I ever make that mistake or anything...

Error4:Invalid texture. Face 0 is sized 2560x1881, but textures using DXT compressed formats must be multiples of four. C:\release18\src\DrinkingGames\content\models\dorm_room.fbm\
Wood.jpg

Menus

Over the past couple days Ive been working on designing the menus - they are going to be in full 3d. I think that a 3d menu can be far more dynamic and engaging than something pre-rendered or composed of sprites. I am still working out a general visual theme for the color scheme and texturing of the menus as I want them to be very cohesive with one another while still remaining interesting. Our developer has promised a new build this week, so hopefully we can get some good testing in during this week's meeting. I will try to get him the dorm room level although I dont know if he will want to spend the time to implement it before creating a new build. More news soon...

first level complete

Last night I spent about 2-3 hours finishing up the dorm room level. I used maya's fbx export feature and have sent the .fbx files of the dorm room, the fold out table that will be used in it as well as the basic cup model to our coder to be implemented. I hope for him to be able to set up gameplay within the new level soon so we can start to get a feel for the final product. Also, I had to re-render our introduction logo video last night because I had deleted the original images files. I did this because our coder has told me that XNA does not support the integration of video so I have created a jpeg sequence to emulate video at 30fps, which he says is possible. Seems like an odd shortcoming of a game development engine. The next few days will undoubtedly be spent in correspondence with our coder fixing bugs from the new level, but thats what game development is all about, right?

more modeling

spent another 2 hours today modeling out more assets for the dorm room. its just about filled up, so the level is near completion. hopefully by the end of the weekend I can send it off to our coder to be implemented into the latest build! then on to the next level...

Im starting to worry about texture compression. the size of the texture files ranges from 300kb up to over 3mb and I think I may have to start scaling some of them down if the game is ever to be of a reasonable size for distribution over xbox live. nobody wants to fill their hard drive with a 700mb game that could be 50mb. Ill be experimenting with formats to see what retains the best quality while allowing for small file sizes.

Level work

Today I spent 1-2 hours working on fleshing out the dorm room. Ive got the basic structure and assets set up, but theres more work to be done to really fill it up, posters, desk stuff, dressers, etc. Thats all the work for today though, because we're headed off to the Boston Post Mortem to stir up some interest in our game!

render of the dorm room

Work begins...

Although my primary role is a member of the Drunk Productions team, Ill mention a few things about myself first. Im currently a 3rd year student at Northeastern University in Boston, MA working towards completing a BS in Art, concentrated in Animation. I work in Maya 8 and Beer Pong will be my first commercial endeavor into video games, although Ive been an avid gamer for most of my life. anyway...

The purpose of this blog is basically for me to list what ive been working on in the development of Drunk Production's first game... beer pong! We're utilizing the XNA development kit that Microsoft has released and hope to enter our game in the competition ending in June. As the art director/only artist on the project, everything in here will be related to the design and construction of our 3d assets and animations. Excuse the backdating on the first few entries as I am switching over from another blog.

3/16/07 - spent approximately 2-3 hours modeling, laying out UV's and texturing the alien character. This will serve as a good test model for our first maya to XNA translation.

3/18/07 - spent about 1 hour building a template table based on the official beer pong rules, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Beerpong.png I used this template to create a basic metal/plastic folding table. modeled/textured, ready to go. I will continue to use this template as a guide when building future tables so that there is a sense of proportion between the levels. spent another 30 minutes building a cup model in scale to the table. textured it classic solo - red/white. other combinations can be made with a quick edit of the texture file.

3/20/07 - spent about 4-5 hours working on my first level, the college dorm room. assets built include the room itself, desks, chairs, bunkbeds, computers and light fixtures. tomorrow I should be able to finish the room up and I will post a few images in the gallery. this task was a good exercise in low-poly modeling. Im trying to keep the models to a reasonable poly count without sacrificing too much detail as well as providing interesting textures with suitable bump mapping. im pleased with the results and the work will only improve in quality as I go. One bonus is that my workflow is speeding up greatly as I get more comfortable with the tools and my new dual-monitor setup. (kick ass)