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!