It is sad...

...but while I scroll down the blog, I see that the whole project have died and revived a lot of times, making little progress every time I bring it back to life.


I guess this is one of the "dead" periods of this project. My job and a couple of other projects keep me extremely busy those days, but I hope I will revive it again, and try harder this time.

Slow but steady.

Hello again, the progress is slow but exist.

I'm not sure if anyone else have faith in the project anymore, but I still do.
I believe the guys I have shared my plans for this game so far are like "nice images, but I don't see you ever complete the project". Maybe they are right but I want to believe that I have plenty of years ahead of me to complete it. Maybe I will not have it ready in a year but maybe I will have it in 2, I don't think that having this project mostly as a hobby means that it will never be completed.


Anyway, I have some more images to share. As you can see a reason for my slow progress is that I just can't use freely available 3D models in Multiverse, or to be honest I don't want to use them.
I make every single object from the ground up, I love to do that, it make it feels mine. This have an impact in workflow but I don't care, I don't want to make something with objects I found around the internet and just arranged them in a scene. However I used some ready objects for the "intro" cutscene as you can see below, even if they are heavily edited and it is hard to say.


Enough with the talking however, here are the images:

I made some adjustments in the teleportation device.

This is inside the building I have hided the building however for faster previews.

A render with the walls up but without the rest of the furniture, only the device.

A detail next to the entrance, we will have to light the room once we enter, right?

The view from the windows, good thing we arrived in time, just before the rain started.

From the intro cutscene, I will use the animatic style here. Static comic like frames with a little animation (like zoom in or pan the static frame), voice and other sound FX.

Every dramatic story need something terrible to start.

Taking the right direction.

The time between each update is huge, I know, but this happens when you try to do something that big all alone and you try to have real life as well :P

Anyway because I don't update the blog here it doesn't mean that I'm not doing any progress with the game at all.

As I previously said the whole game is complete revamped and as of that I scrapped almost everything I made back in college.
This may look stupid, but if you have started something completely wrong trust me, it can't go any better than bad! The best thing you can do is to start over, keeping in mind all those mistakes you did last time and trying to avoid them.

So I posted here the revamped first level and the revamped teleportation device but all this time I was working alongside the graphics with the new scenario.
Yes NEW scenario, the basic idea is the same, a scientist who made a teleportation device and he is traveling through dimensions. However I never had a clear view on where the first scenario was going, I didn't have any specific leads, I didn't know what the purpose of this travel should be, I was just like "lets design beautiful worlds and I will see how I will connect them".
Now however I have scripted in detail why our hero is traveling and what he is doing there, also I added a more emotional point of view for the events.

The problem is that I'm not sure about sharing the scenario at the moment, I haven't figured out yet how I can talk about the scenario without adding a lot of spoilers about the game, and I'm afraid I will ruin the game, I don't want to make a "police story book with the murderer's name written at the first page"...

I will see how I can bypass this, because I could really love some feedback about the scenario.


Be well everyone!

Hello there, I know I haven't updated here for a while now. The reason is that I didn't had anything to post. The project was stalled completely and just recently I restarted my creative activities (well I was completely idle, what can I say, laziness...).

Anyway I'm back now and here are some renders from the recreated teleportation device. I hope I will keep up now and make some progress.

 

Also here is an older render from a random idea that popped in my mind few months back.

 

That's all for now, I hope I will be back sooner next time :)

Update 1, a new beginning

As I said, the new plan is to change a lot of things in the game. So here I start with the revamped level 1, the laboratory!

I completed the outside scenery and made a short looped animation that is gonna play as game starts.

Enjoy!

Here is a screen shot as well, with better details.

Finally, we have a destination!

The whole "Adventure Game Project" have became a complicated idea in my mind during it's development.
The idea started as the "step to take next" after my initial paperwork for my thesis in college and resulted in a blotware of random ideas.
Well I finished my thesis and graduated, the demo I developed was enough to show my work and the English teacher that came to examine me (thank God) was a gamer himself and not only he did knew what a Myst clone is about, but he actually played the demo without any help from my side.

OK so far, but I always had in mind to go farther with the development, after my thesis is completed and create a complete game that can be even sold as an independent developed one.
Because of that I always had in mind the creation of other places and universes that can exist within the game, I designed a handful of them actually.
The problem is that in the end all I had was good but random ideas. There is not any backbone to support the game's structure, all those ideas are not connected to each other, there is only the main idea that they can be connected through a teleportation event like the one that started the story.

In addition the only completely designed level (the first one, in the laboratory) was a crapload of newbie mistakes, staked on each other and made almost impossible for me to do changes afterwards.
The bigger mistake is that I designed everything as one file, one scene with everything around that I only have to turn the camera around and render pictures.
Well it is not bad as an idea, it sound really easy, right?
But unlikely how it sound, it was a bad idea. In combination with my mistake to add details that doesn't matter because of the distance to the camera, I ended up with a huge number of polygons (trillions to be honest) that made me unable to move smoothly within the scene and do changes or add new things.
The whole scene was way too heavy for my system, and I'm sure it could be pretty heavy even for a system with a quadro or firepro professional grade GPU.

The right way was to have one scene for every render I wanted to do, each time with only the objects that are really visible to the player, and without details that doesn't matter (for example there is no need to make a brick by brick wall if you see it on the distance, just a texture with bump mapping on a box can do).

Also the initial building, it was way too small for my needs. It made me to have no room for any puzzles or riddles at all, because I designed it before I think about what I want to have in there.

So now that I have typed down the past mistakes that I have to avoid from now on, and with plentiful of time in my hands, I decided not only to revive the project but to revise it as well.

I started to type down the story as a book, so I can use it as a guide for the game design. This way I can describe in detail every idea I integrate in the story and then follow step by step to recreate this idea visually.

Also I redesigned the first level, the new laboratory is a whole hangar like building now with plenty of room to unfold the story and create some interesting interactions between the player and the world

Enjoy a first render of it:

The Lab revised!

So now I finally have a destination, I finally have a plan to create a complete game!

Keep in touch, because the best part's of my game are on the way!

Project is revived

Hello there, it is being a while since my last update. A lot of things happened and in the meantime I also released a demo of the game.

I don't have any working links right now (I first published it back in June) but I will upload the demo again somewhere and give the links here.

So what happened all those months?

First of all I finished with my bachelor of arts and alongside a presentation of the game. I also presented the demo and I got a 7/10, not bad I guess.
After that I got my call to the army (here in Greece we have to go, we can't skip it somehow) but they decided to send me back home because I have a problem with hearing lose and they decided I'm not capable to stay at the army.
I cried a river for that... ok not really, I was quite happy to save me 8 months of useless army duty.

So I came back to Athens and started to getting my life back in the daily routine, then send out some CVs to find a job and now I want to get back in the work with the game.

I had a couple of ideas in the meanwhile and also thinking of rebooting the whole game plan.

It is unclear to me right now what I will change, but once I settle down my ideas and thoughts I will let you know.

It is not like changing much however, I wanted to try to put the game in Cryengine 3 or Unreal 3 but the time I need to learn this programs right now is a leap backwards. So I will stay with the pre-rendered scenes and try to assemble the game in wintermute game engine.

I will let you know soon about the rest of my plans.

See ya!

Long time no seen

Hello there, even if I don't post news, I'm not idle.

The project is still on the go, I have now a phenom x6 1095T to aid the final renders, and I work a lot in preparing for the final exams. Also I found out that rendering with ambient occlusion lighting is way faster than radiosity and still realistic enough to be acceptable.

You see the game is the project for the BA but I have to make a presentation and I will focus mostly on the progress in creating the game, than the game itself.
As a result the progress have slow down a lot and I just do renders for the laboratory, while I make some hand made artwork and other thinks that in a team working environment I could share with the other teams of a gaming studio.

I could like to share some of the artwork but I don't have a scanner at home, I will scan the images somewhere else and post them.

Also I type the book of the presentation which is another pain in the ass, and also I have to write a short version in English for the English examiner.

Come to think that I also have to make the presentation itself... damn, I work on this a year and yet it seems I have done little progress.



later!

Another idea

So while I'm waiting for the final renders for stage 1 to finish I made this:

I have no idea where I will add it (nice game plan eh? :P) but I will!

Also I arranged a couple of things and there is a high possibility to buy an AMD Phenom x6 1075T for X-mas, it will be a great boost for the renderings and for the whole project!

Bottleneck...

Still waiting for the renders to end...
I knew that the final renders will took up most of the time in this project but I really didn't expect it to take that much time.

So I keep working on somethings here and there but definitely have almost nothing to show up because all the work is been done under the hood.
However it seems that this "waiting" is giving me time to reconsider some things, like the menu screen for example.
The first attempt was this:

ok not really, the very first was a disaster with some shitty shinny looking font copping the font style from Riven...
Leaving the font aside this render here is... way too busy. All this rocks and grass and shit... really when you got a lot of tools you just want to use them all in one shot.
Just look at the buttons, all photoshop effects are in use... (ok not all).
After doing some yoga to find my inner graphic designer and some negative criticism from my girlfriend for how cheap and out of space the first title (well there was the font I mentioned and... many many effects...) I realized what I did and brought back in my mind the golden rule.
Less, is more! (But don't overdid it, ok?)

So renewed and bored to death from waiting the renders I came up with this:

Also I made an info screen:

And visualized some other ideas I had. I know more artists when they are to show some idea they draw it in hand or with markers etc, but hell I just find it easier to make it directly in Vue and then make changes here and there, or even rework the whole scene to fix things that went terrible wrong.

So here is a bridge I did and I hope to use later in the game:

And here is some other ideas for the stage 3:
The floating islands:

And this is some short of altar, which will go on the final and bigger floating island, it will be something like the final "portal" to end stage 3.

Still here!

I have to post an update for some time now, but I'm not idle. I finished the first stage, but I'm in front of a great bottleneck here.

Final renders. This is a big pain for me, because I calculated that the final renders for stage 1 will take about 2 months of render time. So far I have finished only the first 3 scenes, and there are match more.
I wanted to add animation here and there, for example when the door opens, but this is gonna take years!
It was to be expected with my low end computer, but really didn't expected to be that much. All these trees and grasses around the stage 1 are increasing the time it takes to render for good.

Anyway I work on the project by day and I leave the computer open at nights to do the final renderings, I try to save some moneys to get a 6 core phenom, but this is hard to do since I don't have a job.

So I have started to put things together in flash with low resolution images, I made the main music theme and I work on the next stage of the game.

I have made a new demo reel to show the progress so far, the music is the main them I mentioned above, enjoy:




Youtube messed the video somehow and it restart 2 times till it go as it was supposed to go, after the first minute.

Also here is a picture from the starting area of stage 2 (it will be 3, but the real stage 2 is really very short to count it).

Stage 1 is almost done!

Well it is time for an update.

I almost finished with stage one, there are a few things here and there to add (a phone and a wooden outside toilet which are ready as objects) but the rest are final.
I did had a great trouble with the surrounding ecosystem, the first try was that:

and as you can see while the forest is almost ok (there are not trees close) the grass is terible, small and not close to each instance of it, not to mention the grass in front of us, there is no grass in front of us!
This happened because I added a hidden object to stop trees from spawning in front of the camera, but I over did it.
I tried to make it better but I did it worst:

so I decided to remove the automatic ecosystem and to do it by hand, which is really painful with my low power system. After all the automatic ecosystem as material it was a pain in rendering and it was adding about an hour to calculate and more, if we consider that it was filling the memory and the swap file by up to 16GBs.

I also found some tutorials about optimizing the renders and they saved me a lot of time and they will save even more once I do the finals at 1280x800p.

So there is the final scene, I added about 20 trees by hand and after the second line of trees I used a paint ecosystem brush to add random forest. I used the same brush for the grass and made it much more realistic.

Enjoy:

This is final but I have to render it again in 1280x800 sometime later. I will do some small renders to start composing in flash and I will change them with the higher resolution ones afterwards.

And I made a low resolution video to show how the door will open:





I also made the intro for stage 2, where we land after our teleportation journey and the strange life form who will explain to us what happened. This is a loop:





It is a little dark, movie maker did it...

That's all for now!

Some early shots of the inside.

I have finished the laboratory building, and I'm making the surroundings now. Before that I took some "photos" from the inside. Somethings have changed and the shots are outdated, but I want to give a first impression on what we will see inside the building.

(Above)This is the entrance from the outside to the reception.

This is the door of the main laboratory, as seen from the reception room.

The door is open now, I'm planing on creating a preview animation to show how the door opens. It is made of 3 parts, the bigger at the front will slide down and then the other 2 behind it (which are half door size each) will slide left and right, like the automatic doors in elevators. So this is the laboratory.

And this is a closer view, the texture in the chair need some adjustment.

So this is the living room, a place to relax and spend some free time.


I also did some experimental renderings of the building to see if the ultra settings for rendering are really giving me anything back, or it is just adding extremely more time to render.

As you can see below, yes these settings make the whole scene much better and they worth the extra time.

Final render settings

and

Ultra render settings

The difference is clear.

Anyway I'm populating the forest around the building now. I will soon post an update.

The Laboratory, step 1

Hello everyone, I have decided to do less frequently updates. So far every time I made an object I was posting here. From now on I will only post about progress in whole scenes.

So here is the step 1 in laboratory's creation.

I got some help from my girlfriend (she is studying architecture in the NTUA university) to design the building, she made me a top view (actually she made for me the whole building but Vue doesn't import ArchiCAD files, neither ArchiCAD export in some format Vue can read) and I transfered the building in 3D into Vue.

Then I made a full automatic door to add in front and the lab's entrance, you can not see it here but is complicated and not easy to breach through, I will made an animation later to show that. I also made a device to add next to those major doors, with finger print recognition and an extra monitor.
Also I made a reception desk with a typically computer.

Then I added the teleportation device and a desk and few computer monitors in the main laboratory room. You can see it in detail here:

So the hard part is almost over, for the rest furniture in the building I will use ready items.
The next step is to make the natural surroundings of the building, I'm afraid that the ecosystem tool will eat up all my ram for that task, but it have to be done.

Anyway I will post back again once I finish this scene!

Welcome home!

Since the Adventure game project got a name, I moved everything in this new blog, to separate it from the other one which is for all my on going projects in general.

The new blog need a little tweaking here and there (some pictures for example are too big for the new layout), so be a little patient and I will fix everything soon.

Keep in mind that there will be no new posts for this game in the old blog, all the news and updates will be posted here from now on!

Have a nice Autumn!

The laboratory

Hi again, here I am once more with another update.

The whole project is on the go but the progress is short of slow. This is mostly because officially I'm on vacations and I swim, I get out and things like this and on my "free" time I work on the project and also trying to get familiar with open source programs, like gimp and inkskape. You see I really want to work exclusively on open source programs, for many reasons.

Anyway this is not the place to say why to use open source, so I return on topic.

I'm working on the laboratory, actually the first level of the game which will also be the "intro" of the whole story. I did had an accident with the first file I made with the laboratory, I made the "teleportation device" and then the saved file didn't want to open again, vue 8 was just keep on crashing, I also tried to open it in my desktop and no difference, crash on load. It was short of push back because I designed a mechanism to hydraulic open and close the device's door, and also linked the objects in a way to be used for easier animation. It took me about 4 hours and all are lost. At least I designed the mechanism in hand first and it will be easier to remade it.
After that I decided to design each part of an object separately and then join them in a new file, this seems like safer way to do things.

The results are this:

 

The main body of the device.

And this:

This is the window of the device and I made an aged alternative of it to use elsewhere:

Also I used the lamb from the preview post and joined all the objects together to make the "teleportation device":

All I need to finish the device now is to make the door and the mechanism to open and close it.

Also I made some handmade artwork with a BIC pen... I don't have any other mediums available here so that was the best I could do, another problem was that I don't have a scanner available so I shotted it with my macbook's web cam, the image is terrible but you can get an idea before I will scan it.

So this is the artwork for the teleportation device and the door mechanism:

and a plan from top view I draw to know what will go where inside the laboratory, because of the terrible quality you can't read what is what, sorry for that I will scan a better image soon.

Also I did a high resolution render to the device to see more details:

You can get it from here:

http://fav.me/d2ut7ub

That's all for now!

A little update

Hello! I finished with my college for this year so I'm enjoying a few days of vocations. However I still work on the adventure project.

I though of a name, since the game will take place in parallel universes, I though it might be cool to call it "Multiverse".

I was also working on the first scene of the game. The laboratory where the whole adventure will begin...
A disaster! I worked overnight to make the "teleportation" device, with some short of real looking mechanism to open and close the door, I saved the file and once I tried to open it up again... BOOM! Vue 8 crashes!

I was hoping that this is some short of problem in my macbook so I tried, full of hope to open it in my windows desktop, still crash...

It seems I have to remade it from scratch, at least I draw the mechanism in hand before go on with the 3D modeling, so it will be easier this time.

I also remade a scene which is not part of the current project, but it can be used for it.


It is some short of water well, the original is this:

and the remake is this:

Also I made a lamb :

and an attempt to add it on a wall:

The Island animation

I know it is stupid to keep working on the island without even a project plan yet, but I can't stop!
So I made the animation and did a small render to check things.

Scenario

Hello everyone I hope you are all fine, the latest events in Greece does not make me feel fine myself but well...
Anyway I fall behind a little with the project, I was busy with my studies and yesterday it was a bad day, and my morale was really really down, because of all that shits that happens in my country.
As I said a part of the scenario is already done, and all it was needed was to translate it. So here it is:

Our hero is typical scientist who works day and night in his laboratory and he tries to make a teleportation device.
The research in theory is moving smooth but the experiments does not, since so far he is not able to move an object from the place A to place B, or maybe he did, but he does not know where the hell this place B it is.
Another routine day in the lab and our hero is doing some changes in the device (think a box with a door, for the device), and one of the cats he got for experiments in the lab went free from her cage and pressed the activation button of the device. As a result our scientist (he does not have a name yet, maybe Gordon Freeman? :P) he disappears!
After a really crazy and surrealistic journey he lands in a strange place. The place looks like a desert but there is no sand, just an infinite plane. All of a sudden, in front of him appears that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU8iXPbC-oI and starts to talk to him.
The strange life form, explains to him that Einstein's theory for the parallels dimensions was right, except the part of how many they are, because there are an infinite number of them.
Each dimension is been over watched by it's guardian, like that life form who talk to us. The guardian have to make sure that there is balance in his dimension and in rare cases like now, to help any "intruder" return to his dimension without disturbing the balance and order in the other ones. The problem is that the connection between the dimensions are one way, what means we can not return back that easy. We must found a way through the other dimensions with the help of their guardians.
The guardian inform us that our life form will change in each dimension, like it did now (here it pop ups a mirror like thing and show us that we look like the guardian), and we must find the guardian of each dimension to move us to the next one (till we made it to ours).

After that we are been teleported at the next dimension. There we see that it is an artificial world where the only living beings are robots and computers. A small robot show up and says that the guardian sends him and he will help us to find our way to the guardian. This will be a dummy entry level to make the user familiar with the controls and in most of our way to the guardian we will do thinks that the little robot instruct us to do.
Next it is the island level which I gave shots a few days ago. From that on we are at our own and we have to use logic and tips around the world to made it to the next guardian.
When I say logic I mean for example that : "there is a boat, it seems clickable but nothing happens once you click. The reason is that it is useless without the paddle which is somewhere close but with smaller clickable area, so it will be harder to found it with a simple mouseover". In that scene with the boar if you can't find the paddle and move on the next area there will be a dead end, but if you look careful enough, you will see a tip, which says that you will need the paddle to take the boat, and go to the island next to that one you are!

This is it so far, I have a couple of ideas about other areas and I will make some artwork for each one of them soon.

Later.

The Island Wallpaper

OK here is a wallpaper from the island.
You can use it or distribute it for free as long as my watermark remains.
If you want to give it trough your site please link back here.

Enjoy: