Game Engines Part 2
For this part we had to create a Ren'py game and the document below features around what I created, however I don't want to produce the link of the game as it shall hopefully be for my last assignment.
Design
For my Ren’py game I’ve based it on Elemental Wolves, which
is a story I’ve been working on for a few years; basically this is my personal
FMP that I hope to make on the side. Ren’py
itself is mainly used for Japanese novel games such as: Toginu No Chi, Clannad
and Kanokon Inc etc. As the story starts off with Faith (the main protagonist),
wandering the streets of Osaka, Japan it does collaborate well with the
program’s background giving almost an authentic Japanese anime/manga feel. Plus
most (if not all) virtual novel games involve the manga art style which is what
I’ve planned to stick to. The
perspective of my game is 2.5 D (closely resembling some of the Final Fantasy
series) where I have the backdrops as a 3D modelled environment and the characters
or certain assets like the sedative, for example, in a 2D format which not
shows I can be capable of 3D modelling but drawing on Photoshop as well. In my
game I wanted menus so the player can choose Faith’s motives, variables so that
depending on what the player first choses, it might lead them back to the main
menu and their last option blocked so they have no other choice but to choose
something else. Then there’s sound, images and animation which should tempt the
players into finding out more if the gameplay is more realistic and they have
something else to interact or sympathise with the character- rather than just
relying on the story/ dialogue alone.
In my game I’ve managed to do all this, two of the backdrops
have been made 3D as I wanted to spend a lot of time into less models, than
make loads of environments that don’t look anything like I’ve planned. One of
them is based on Osaka’s streets where Faith begins to unfold her story, in
there is a Ramen shop with the rafter’s containing a watercolour painting of a
bird in a cherry tree and under that I’ve managed to create a tiny Japanese
lantern which most shops or restaurants like that, have hanging up. Across the
road are two other convenient stores and behind one of them are three red circular
neon lights that are usually plastered around the whole city. In my modelling
assignment I did say I wanted the environments to have not only a Japanese
theme to them but possibly an English theme, hence why I created a town hall
that looks a little like a bridge underneath. To be honest with this scene I
did enjoy making it as I’m not the best at modelling, but once I was able to
break pieces down my looking at certain photographs of the city and focusing on
one picture at a time rather than looking at the bigger picture, the buildings
started becoming more accurate and in time I felt I was able to make little
things like the lantern, the neon lights and even the glass ‘oddly-shaped’ dome
that sits on top of the town hall. I think what really done the scene a bit of
justice was having the multiple lights lit around it, hopefully giving that
night-time feel to player when they begin the story.
The other scenes were an alleyway and a deadend which were
easier to do. Although I didn’t have enough time, I would’ve liked to have
finished my graphite dragon texture that would appear on the building with
windows. To be clear I still enjoyed this environment but I don’t think I
could’ve added anymore models than what was already there. There’s a long
building that has three windows which turned out ok, at the side is a brick
wall leading onto another brick wall which behind that is cherry blossom trees.
I made a random chair in one of my modelling sessions and felt really happy
that it looked like something and imported it, into the scene and adjusted it
to make a bench for that atmosphere. The only thing I had a problem with was
the lightning and where I could put it. Above the windows I put three
spotlights there so it would look as though there are security lights there and
one just in front of the brick wall on the left-hand side to make out it’s a
street light. There would’ve been lights amongst the trees but I felt that
maybe might be too much for the player and look extremely messy so I decided
against that. When it came to rendering
these pictures I did set them at a resolution of 800x 600 which is what my
Ren’py format is set at and saved the pictures as a JPEG file, easy enough to
code down and for the program to work with.
For the drawing which I found the easiest part, it did take
me quite a while to first think about what actions and poses the characters
would be doing in the game write a list and then create concept art and final
drawings to be produced in Photoshop.
Already I had quite a bit of the coding done so I knew some postures
that my characters would be doing like walking, becoming tired, angry or
confused. I think what threw me off a little was one of the characters had
already been re-vamped from the final designs I created a few years ago but only
when Faith would arrive at Crystal Dynasty- not during the streets or Sukkusu
house scene. Others like Lord and Madame Smith, Ichi, Suso and Diane hadn’t had
their re-vamping yet and it was something that needed to be done so there would
be a final design. Luckily when I finished that it was simply just drawing
loads of different poses and scanning them into my computer to work on
Photoshop, although I had the concept art and designs done I hadn’t coloured
them in- so again I resorted to the final designs that were drawn and inked and
had to colour them in before started these Photoshop pieces. Before I saved my
images, again I re-scaled them to a size of 800x600 (which I thought I did) and
saved them as a PNG file, so that when I did add them into the game there would
be no backdrop and only the characters of what I’ve drawn. Sadly I didn’t save
all my files to that size and it turned out during the coding I had to re-size
most of my images by zoom 0.5- zoom 1, so that the player could see them correctly.
Animation and sound wasn’t that hard. Initially I did want voice
actors to say the lines of my characters so it added a little more to the game,
but a couple of the people already chosen for the roles couldn’t do it for
certain reasons and there wouldn’t be enough time to find these people in under
a week. The sounds I found on people who already collected them and have
written this in a bibliography so the websites have been credited, once I got
them I changed them into a .ogg file which is compatible with Ren’py. The
animation though I did struggle with a little but I noticed if I show the
images and then put with dissolve underneath, it would make a transition from
one piece to the next giving almost a heart-beat change which is great for adding tension which in the story, Faith
does get caught by catchers and I wanted to add that tension for the audience
as Ren’py doesn’t allow you to add cinematic animation to show the players but
can allow you to add transitions that will change the player’s features if
drawn correctly.
Production Log
The modelling itself had taken me about three weeks to be
full UVed, textured, lightning/camera’s added. To be honest I didn’t really
record down what I had completed in what lesson as the Alleyway I worked on at
college, looking back I remember creating a proxy scene and started working on
the building in one lesson, another trying to UV all my models and having a go
in Mudbox and another doing texturing and lighting which was my last lesson
(3.12.13). In one of my Game Engine lessons I modelled a chair to be put in UDK
and decided I wanted it to be in my scene, so in the last modelling lesson I
added the chair, UVed and textured it.
For the drawing I started on 19.11.13 with creating the
concept art for the characters. After a week a later I spent two full days
doing the drawings of different poses and week after that putting them in
Photoshop and adding the line art. Only on 29.11.13 did I colour in my
characters and started making some of my backdrops on Photoshop like another
alleyway and the Sukkusu House. The sounds I found on 1.12.13 and spent the
night adding them into my coding.
The coding itself I started not long after our interim
deadline and did leave it at points to do other things for other FMP groups
like concept art, or work on other assignments or to see to things at home.
During the last two weeks though I really got into the coding and added more in
like music and menus trying to picture how I would want my game to pan out. On
the 4.12.13 I added in variables and had a huge problem trying to get them to
work, unfortunately I have forgotten to screenshot this and show what I’ve done
but in the end after some help from my tutor I did finally get them working and
make the game do what I want, where if the character chose to ‘flee’ they would
eventually be brought back to the same option and the ‘flee’ button would be
disabled. Below though are the errors that came up when I tried to load the
game, and I’ve shown how they can be fixed.
Problem 1
My
first problem was I forgot to type in the music’s format so that when my game
played, it couldn’t find the music files I had typed in my code. Basically all
I had to do was write down the music to mp3, but later I changed this to .ogg format as Ren’py didn’t pick up mp3/wma
formats. Later in the code I had found out you had to write :
Play
music (or sound) “Sounds/tiresscreeching.ogg” fadeout 0.3. This is basically
what you had to type in your code for the music to appear. The fadeout 0.3 will
be how long it will allow your music to play before fading out, this sound only
lasted 3 seconds so I set the fadeout to that.
Problem
2
If we look above you can see that
I’ve typed my image files as JPEGs when in fact they are PNG files, all I had
to do was change the file format on the Ren’py, and so the program could find them
in my “Images” file.
Problem 3
The problem I had here was I had given the program too much
to take in with the images, so what I had to do was cut the phrases into lines
so the program didn’t get confused.
Problem 4
As the ‘and’ phrase didn’t work I decided to take this out
and stop confusing the program, so that’s what I did and it finally worked.
Problem 5
This is where the trouble started, as you can see here I didn’t put a gap between my = sign and the
True, which was my first problem. After that the problem was I had assigned
‘failure’ as a variable in the wrong the place.
Problem 6
If we look after the “Leave it here~” I didn’t put a colon in
there, so the program didn’t quite know what to do. Below you can see I put the
colon in and the game re-worked again.
Problem 7
The problem is here, I’ve made my image too big to fit
properly on the screen. This is a pretty simple problem so all I had to do was
change it to : zoom 0.5 as shown below.
Evaluation
Personally I felt my game did lack in a couple of places
after I compiled it into a zip file and re-played it a few times. By looking at
my Beta testers who tried both ways of ‘fleeing’ and ‘fighting’ I have noticed
that the characters did need more work on them. The reasons why I made my
characters bland was because I believed I wouldn’t have the time to finish this
Ren’py if I spent too much time making the art look like the rest of pictures
by adding shadows and light rays and the line art being cleaner. For next time
though I would spend more time making the art look like what I would do for
Deviantart instead of panicking about finishing after the deadline.
Another problem was because I didn’t carry on the story any
further to where I wanted to, in all honesty I would’ve carried this on if
again I didn’t panick about not finishing this in time. Finally the last thing
that seems to bother a couple of people was the animation being too fast and
sending them ill. In order to stop this I will have to put: with dissolve
fadeout 0.5 which will slow down the transition time so people can see the
images.
So what can I do for next time?
Not panic and rush my art so it seems messy, but instead put
in the same level of detail as I do for my other assignments. Make sure I keep
the coding going to the last couple of days so the story will stay on and the
animation be slowed down so people can see what happens clearly or make people
sick. Otherwise I really enjoyed this project and if I were to continue to make
Elemental Wolves it will be on this program.
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