Wasted Youth - Week 6 Progress Report

It's been another exciting week of progress, with at least as much work on the back-end planning stuff then on all the pretty art that's so fun to post.

First of all, we've got a new artist on the team! Daniel Samuelsson has joined Scrap Metal Games as a support artist, he'll get to start working on high-poly sculpts and texture work on props this week. This helps us fill the last major gap in our pipeline, and just in time, as it frees me up to focus on animation right when we're getting our character rig completed. We're all excited to work with Dan, he's a great 3d artist, go check out his blog.

That's right! Our first iteration of the character rig is nearly ready! We should have a prototype of it tomorrow to start testing, making sure that the system will work in-engine and we can test the last major hurdle of our pipeline, getting character animations in and scripted to be fully functional, right away. As I've been helping some underclassmen with their animation lately as a Projects TA, I've been itching to get a chance to do some more animation, so nobody is more excited about this turn of events then me.

We spent a lot of time this week trying to finalize the most recent drafts of our GDD and TDD, and are getting a very solid roadmap of where we're headed with the project in the process. We got some really valuable feedback from professors on how we can further refine them and where we can put more attention, and we're well on our way to having an exceptionally thoroughly documented project - with a crew ten students working on this game, often in their own time at their own houses, this is a critical component to success, and helps us make sure we're working on the highest priority tasks we can be at all times.

We also wrote up a complete roadmap of our roadmap feature commitments this week, giving us a long, thorough overview of every critical feature of the game we're planning on implementing and when they're expected to be deliverable. It really is great getting to look this far ahead and see how everything is coming together - especially considering we're still right on schedule to meet our current deadlines.

We had a lot of new concept work and art tests done this week - Beau has been pumping out concept art for new props.

He also worked on testing some grass and foliage alphas to put through the "painter" feature in Unity that allows us to lay down broad strokes of plants and other debris on terrain objects. We're planning on using this feature to help scatter random trash and stuff throughout our environment, filling the world way faster then it would be if we had to place each object by hand. He put a bunch of this stuff down in-engine along with some test models just to see how things might look in-game, then dropped in a first-person controller to let us walk around the models and see how things look!

We got some new art assets textured and ready for engine, too.

Zach got Jenny all textured, too. There's a few final touches to make, but she's nearly done! If the eyes and mouth seem a little out of place, that's because they are - they're going to be applied later as an animated sprite texture, allowing us basic facial animation without having to deal with facial rigging, a major time-saving feature.

And last but not least, we may have a new name for the game! Wasted Youth was always a working title for us, as we liked the idea of it but it has some implications we're not particularly pleased with, so without further ado, I present you with our newest name:

Whatta ya think?

Wasted Youth - Week 5 Progress Report

Another busy week, and a whole lot of progress. We're all getting very excited, as we're on the verge of getting the first art assets in-game this week, which will prove out our asset pipeline.

A lot of this week was spent on getting art assets ready for import into the game - we have a couple of props complete now with normal, specular and diffuse maps.

Our Jenny character has gone through the ZBrush sculpting phase and is now moving on to texturing. This is thrilling, as it means we can get our character rig built and ready for testing in the next week. Plus, she just looks awesome. Zach's done a great job on her.

Randy's been doing great work on the tank, too. The high-res mesh is complete, with placeholder colors to demonstrate how each plate is a separate object that can be colored on its own.

He also did some rigging experiments with the treads. We may use a path deform, like in the video below, or we may just animate the UVs for the treads - we haven't decided yet.

Alexi got the first house unwrapped and ready for texture tests, and we should have diffuse maps for it in the next week or so.

The house uses four different texture maps - one for the roof, one for siding, one for trim pieces and one for accessories like the porch, windows and chimney. This allows us to swap out a different roof style, for example, to create a ton of variety with very few assets.

Beau and I spent part of the weekend working on writing the script for the opening cinematic and promotional materials, and we're nearly ready to create the art for it. We're really excited about this stuff, but we don't want to give away too much yet. There will be more to show soon.

In terms of design, we've spent a ton of time working on improving the gameplay feel based on testing feedback, we've got placeholder UI in place and are working with the particle systems, greyboxing out the first few puzzles and getting the interactivity scripts such as scripted physics events and such working. We also spent a bunch of time finalizing our most recent draft of our GDD, which came out to nearly 60 pages! There's still a number of things we want to refine further, but it's been great having such a detailed blueprint for the project.

A lot of our meeting this week was spent looking at our task list and making sure everything was up to date. We're right on our expected schedule, and we may be bringing in another artist to assist with high-res sculpts and texture work, which is awesome. We've got a very busy couple of weeks ahead of us, but we're all motivated and working very hard to get stuff in-engine and get the game looking good. We should be able to get character animation tests in in the next week or so, and that'll be the last major pipeline test we need to resolve - if that works as well as we hope, there's nothing stopping us from cranking out art and gameplay through the rest of the year.

Wasted Youth - Week 4 Progress Report

It's been another exciting week of production on the game as things are starting to really come together. The most visible change is that we have a playable early build of the basic game mechanics put together and ready for testing! We actually got it in front of testers yesterday and started gathering up feedback on the control scheme and basic mechanics and got a ton of wonderful data in the process. Really exciting stuff, and a huge boost for morale - it really made everyone feel like we're working on something tangible.

Working with placeholder art elements, of course, but we've got them actually working in game, with working physics and everything.

We've already incorporated a ton of the feedback into the game and should be able to test the new changes in tomorrow's playtesting session.

Jenny's base mesh is basically done and being unwrapped in preparation of texturing and high-poly sculpting.

This low-poly version of the mesh will have additional edges added to it and will be brought into ZBrush for high-poly sculpting so that we can extract normal maps and make it look really great. Zach has been working really hard on this stuff, and we're really excited to get the mesh in-game.

What an adorable backpack.

Beau spent some time working on more concept work, focusing on some great designs for our robots.

He also put together another great look and feel piece, helping to resolve some of the style questions. It was extremely helpful and brought up a lot of new questions we are going to work together this week to try to resolve.

This week we're going to spend a lot of time working on tying down the backstory for the world, putting together the script for the comic book that will serve as the introduction to the world, the opening cinematic and a great promotional piece.

Finally, one of the most exciting pieces of art we got this week was a glimpse at one of our favorite pieces of the game.

How cool is that?

Wasted Youth - Week 3 Progress Report

This week one of the main tasks the art team had was to create textures and high-poly sculpts of a few props so that we can test out our pipeline and try to nail down our style. The props given to most of our team were the lawn mower, power pole, trash bin, wheelbarrow, mailbox and mailbin. Each artist was told to get as many done as possible and return with the results so we could compare techniques.

Aleksei, our environment artist, came back with the mailbox, sculpted in Mudbox. He didn't get to do many others, however, as he spent most of his time working on other models. I'll post those in a moment.

I had the time to work on a number of props. The first one I did was the mail bin.

High-poly sculpt made in ZBrush

Render in Unity of the model with the first pass at the diffuse, normal and specular maps. Not very happy with the  diffuse, it needs more detail, but it was just a first attempt.

I also worked on the mail box.

Profile view of the sculpt.

Detail view of the mailbox - I used a very stylized alpha image for the wood grain and tried to exaggerate the main details like the rivets and the number stickers so they'd show up well in the normal map.

Render of the mail box in Unity with normal, specular and diffuse. The specular here is WAY too strong.

I also worked on the garbage bin and the lawn mower, but wasn't able to get diffuse maps painted for them, as I ran into some problems with the models once I had started sculpting - a benefit of doing this test is it gave us a chance to look for these sorts of problems and make sure they aren't repeated later in the project.

Detail of the wheel and body of the mower - mainly focused on adding the primary details to the wheel and damage and scratches to the mower.

Another detail of the mower. We only modelled one wheel, which will be duplicated and added to the mower in-engine, making for fewer resources to work on in the production phase.

High-poly sculpt of the trash bin.

Detail of the wheel and damage on the trash bin.

Our lead artist, Beau, did a test of the look and feel of the game levels themselves.

First he created rough models of the houses and laid them out in perspective.

Then he took that image and did a quick paintover, adding in the lanes for gameplay.

Then he focused on creating the levels of detail needed for each row of houses, simplifying and reducing contrast each row.

More detail and content added, giving us a good feel for how the game layers might look.

Alexei, our environment artist, started the first pass at creating models for our modular house system.

This process of building the house in parts then assembling them later will allow us to create a tremendous amount of assets in-game without having to make each of them by hand, giving us the ability to adapt to game testing and build tons of levels in a minimum amount of time and effort.

Alexei also created a new set of props, including a newspaper, a couch, a tire, a fire hydrant and a wood pallet.

Finally, our character artist Zach got the first pass at color comps done for our first character, Jenny. We critiqued these comps and he's working on a revised pass at them, as well as about halfway done with her base model.

Our designers and programmer did a bunch of other great work this week, getting multiple lanes functioning, as well as location-based lane-restrictions. They've also got character abilities started, keyboard and controller input working and the first basic level ready for testing. Next week we're moving forward with menus, creating a complete list of sfx and our robot characters, getting object throwing, pause and quit menus and researching how to add sounds and checkpoints in Unity.

For the art team, our goals for next week are to add texture work to the style guide, finish the comps and model for the Jenny character, complete the concepts for our tank and keep working on new houses, props and texture work.

Wasted Youth - Summer Post-Mortem, and reflections on what's next

I spent the majority of this past summer working with my game team, Scrap Metal Games, on what will be our collective senior project - a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with the working title Wasted Youth.

The game, as pitched to the team originally during recruitment and over the first couple of weeks, was an ambitious one - turn-based tactical combat plus squad management with dozens of levels, similar to the X-Com series or Jagged Alliance, one of my all-time favorite games. The squads would consist of children living in a wasteland of trash and scraps left behind when all the adults in the world abandoned their pollution-wrecked homeworld in pursuit of a new utopian planet to infect, leaving the children behind. The meek literally inheriting the Earth. Through a long, difficult, amazing and exciting series of weeks we really collaborated to find ideas that we were all passionate about, could get behind and thought were of an achievable scope given the team, resources and time, and that's where we're at today.

As of now, Wasted Youth is an entirely different animal - we retained the original world and the idea of the kids in the wasteland but decided to move in a more positive direction, eschewing the violence of squad-based combat in favor of trying to communicate positive messages through play - collaboration, teamwork, clever non-violent solutions to difficult problems and the value of discarded things.

The team consists of myself as Producer and Animator, Beau Bateman as Lead Artist, Alexi Gill as Environment Artist, Zach Hartlage as Character Artist, Randy McMeekin as Technical Artist, Jeff Mountain as UI Artist and Art Support, Thor Gass as Lead Systems Designer, Vincent Leone as Level Designer and Ryan Cassell as Technical Director.

Our main focus for the summer semester was to prepare ourselves for the Fall Semester and get us to the point where we could enter full production, to spend our time exploring the art styles, gameplay choices and world designs we wanted to so that we could enter production mode having made the hard decisions and ready to go to work. In that regard, I think we were very successful. We also spent a lot of time getting used to working with the game engine (Unity3d, in this case) and preparing basic prototypes to test ideas and the general asset pipeline. In that regard, as well, we were successful and have a fully interactive and playable rough tech demo in place, and are on schedule to have the first couple of levels designed and playable within the next couple of weeks.

One of the biggest challenges with working with a team of this size is communication and collaboration, making sure that everyone knows what they need to be doing, where the project currently stands, to collaborate on work, share progress and get feedback. For this team I found that using one of the Google Sites worked spectacularly well so far. I set it up at the beginning of summer and got the entire team to subscribe to it so it emails out whenever it is updated. Each of us share current progress in the blog section. I embed various Google Docs documents to give us all easy access to our Game Design Document, Technical Design Document and Style Guide, and we use the list/task system to keep track of who is doing what and when it is due.

I've also been working on developing a thorough cascading scrum toolset in Google Docs' spreadsheet program, but it's been difficult - I needed it to perform certain jobs that I couldn't really work on using Microsoft Project, as this task set has different requirements for budgeting time then you'd see in a business environment since we're all students with varying schedules, but it doesn't really feel like a good fit for the team so I've been playing it by ear, being sure to keep track of what tasks are going to be necessary for the project and getting them scheduled in our weekly team recap meetings on Mondays. Having them be part of the process, volunteering to handle a task rather then just assigning one, is far preferable in my opinion. Additionally, it helps all of us retain ownership of the work we have to do, we're more accountable for our work and we learn how to better estimate our skills and abilities.

Keeping a fairly well established chain of command for issues and such was also useful. Having Beau and Thor be the leads for their own teams makes sure that the two departments feel like they have ownership over their own jobs and know who they need to turn to with questions.

All in all, I'm excited for the next few weeks - we've just moved into full production mode, we're scheduled to have the first levels greyboxed in soon and we'll be ready for playtesting in the next couple of weeks. We've established look & feel for the world and for individual props and are just dialing in the texturing pipeline now, already having established the styles and pipeline for the characters, rigging and environment models. Now all we have left is making our group vision come to life.

Finally, I want to show off some of the fantastic art that's been generated from this project so far - a lot of the art that follows wasn't made by me but was made by my team during our summer exploratory preproduction phase.

Early environment model tests by Alexi Gill, exploring the ability to reuse assets to create an assortment of environment props and areas.

Look & Feel concepts and paintovers by Lead Artist Beau Bateman. The first is a rough concept and color comp of one of our characters. The rest is a process series in which he created rough models of the environment to speed up getting the shapes and perspective correct, then did a rough color pass. He then went through and populated and aged the world, then tossed in the character concept so that we could all see how things should look in-game.

Character and prop concepts by Zach Hartlage.

Vehicle concepts by Randy McMeekin.