Islands - Skybox

Last week I created a new sky box for our scene, so that it suits the style of the game a bit more.

Here's an in game screenshot without the islands -


I'm not sure how noticable it is, but the edge of each image is in pretty much in the centre of that picture. I'm really happy with how seamless it looks, and the colours work really well too, in my opinion.

Here's some more shots with the islands and some place holder foreground clouds -



I really enjoyed drawing it, and it seems to have completely changed the look of the game (for the better). Things are looking promising for Islands once again! *fingers crossed*

Industry Workshop - Journal

For Industry workshop, I chose to try and add a Journal feature into the Skunkwerks game. Cameron and Henrik teamed up with me and we've spent the last few weeks throwing together some concepts, sending them to Andrew (the game creator) and seeing what he thinks of them. The final product isn't too far from what we started with, but it looks great! And Andrew seems very happy with it.

You press 'J' while in game and it appears like this -

Ignore the filler text >.>

We thought the current mission should be the first thing you see. Along with amount of objects you have collected and a list of missions you have completed.

Then if you click on Monsters, this appears -


In the pitch document, it explains that every monster type has a weakness you have to discover and use to defeat it. So we thought it would be a cool idea to have symbols representing these things on the left page, along with the list of the monsters on the right page.

When you click on a monster it looks like this -

We didn't have a description...

So you get a description of what the monster is, then the symbols underneath it so you know how to kill it and what stuff it drops when you do. We thought this might make the game too easy, so maybe you have to figure out how to kill it yourself before it appears in the journal. But that decision is up to Andrew. To go back to the monster list you just click on the blue monsters tab on the right. The symbols page doesn't change inside the tab, so you can refer back to it.

Weapons tab -

Again....no description

This has the same format as the monsters tab, I didn't think I needed an image of the weapons list. The symbols show what kind of damage the weapon does, to correspond with the weakness of the monsters. Again, the symbol page doesn't change inside this tab.

Lastly, the story tab -


All the words on the left are clickable, they have a similar format as the last 2 tabs. For example, if you clicked on Characters, a list of characters would appear on the right page. If you clicked on Dusty, then it would look like that image. We weren't sure what kind of stuff to have in this tab, that's also up to Andrew. But we do feel as if some things are necessary, like the character and story background. We think alot of players need that, to understand completely what's happening. That being said, it isn't being forced down player's throats and they don't have to read it if they don't want to.


Henrik is putting together a flash animation, so that everything that is clickable.....is clickable. That might make it a bit easier to understand. At the moment it can be a little difficult to explain.

Islands - UV's

Last week I UV'ed these objects for my Japanese island, Zac showed me how to do it in Blender and I found it much easier to do.


This week I will be figuring out the style and then texturing them.

Islands - Japanese Island

I have modeled the basic Japanese Island. I'm going to see what the other guys think, then update. I also can't wait to see them all put together in unity, should be cool.

Islands - Waterfall

This week there was a bit of a crisis. We didn't feel like we had much direction for the assets and islands and seemed like everything was falling apart. After having chat with Zac, he volunteered his skills to make a style guide with concepts for each island. This is what he's done so far -


Japanese island is next!

I've spent most of my time modeling the assets for my island, so far I have -

• 2 houses
• Temple
• Bamboo
• Bamboo ladder
• Torii gates

We've also decided to model our own islands now, instead of Amjad doing all of them. We thought it might be easier for everyone to get stuff done. Speaking of Amjad, he modeled his snow island today, go check it out at his blog, it looks awesome.

I spent most of today trying to create a waterfall in unity, for when we need it later on. I figured it would be a good idea to wrap my head around it.


Click here to download a copy of the web build, so you can see it flowing.

Islands - Assets

I thought about making an asset list last week and I have no idea why I didn't, because we really do need one. Matt suggested that we make one this week in class so today we did!

Cameron, Amjad and I sat around thinking about what should be on each of the islands. There are only 4 of them now -

• Main island you start the game on
• Beach island
• Windmill island
• Japanese island
• Snow island

They aren't overly complicated themes, but they are all pretty distinctive, which I think is important. Each island has a main town building that the other houses surround, I'm not really sure what we'll be doing with that yet, for now it's just there to look pretty.
At the moment we are just creating 3D models and textures for the models. Although we'll probably have another discussion about what style we want for the textures to be before starting that.

I am creating the assets for the Japanese island, here is the first one I've done -

Torii gate

Islands - Unity Tree's

As I was looking around the unity website, I came across some terrain assets that are free to download and use in any Unity games.



However, after talking to Cameron about the style, we think the textures maybe be too realistic. So I thought instead of creating entirely new tree's, I would quickly try out some filter effects on one of the trees.

Before

After

There is a fairly obvious difference between the two. This isn't the final style, as we want to to be Miyazaki-ish. I just wanted to see how quickly it would be to edit the texture to make it look...more cartoony.