Polycount are running a new 30 day challenge to redesign, model and texture a Street Fighter character in 30 days. The rules are fairly simple, and I’ve chosen to work on Thunder Hawk.
Some time ago I realised that my ability to draw is somewhat lacking, and fortunately a dear friend has kindly offered to work up some concepts for me. These will be posted when he’s had the chance to clean them up.
I’m starting to hate Dead Rising. Some parts of it are excellent - a huge shopping complex filled with zombies, where you need to survive. Killing the zombies in hundreds of ways, finding and rescuing and escorting survivors. Even the storyline is fairly engaging.
Why-oh-why do I feel that the game is ruined by pointless boss battles?
Take the guy in the gunshop - You have to hide behind shop displays. He fires a shotgun at you 6 times, then reloads. In those seconds you can dart out, aim at his head (or try to, the Dead Rising gun aiming is a joke) shoot, then duck for cover again. To beat him you have to shoot him in the head about 20 times with the sniper rifle. That’s right, 20 or so shots to the head with a sniper rifle - he’s not a zombie, just a regular human who owns a shop that survives several shots to the head.
I’m not expecting realism here - the games is a zombie infested mall where you cure yourself by drinking orange juice, and learn new combat skills by taking photographs. So, realism is already out the window.
But there are several boss battles, and they are just TEDIOUS. You build up a nice momentum, hacking your way through hundreds of zombies with swords, sledgehammers, knives, all of whom are impervious to pain and die after a few hits, then the game slows to crawl while you fight a human. Hit them. Hide. Hid them. Hide. Repeat.
To me, the game reeks of lack of focus testing. What is focus testing? Focus testing is where you take groups of people with various skills and get them to play your game, then modify the difficulty of the game to suit them. You can’t use normal testers for this because after playing the game for a year or two years they know how to do everything. Normal testers know how to play the game, normal gamers don’t.
That’s the thing about boss battles, once you figure out how to defeat a boos, it’s not hard, just tedious, boring and meaningless. Boss battles serve to piss players off until they have learned a sequence, then serve to bore them.
10 days ago I wrote that Xbox Live Arcade is great for developers. Since then Jeff Tunnell from Garage Games has written a post on his blog giving some more information, and hinting at figures and used Marble Blast Ultra as an example.
He wouldn’t say how much it cost to develop, but hinted at between $100,000 and $300,000 as an average cost and then stated
I can’t give the exact figure, but the Marble Blast Ultra budget was at the higher end of the current budget range.
I’ve never known how much of the cash was spilt between Microsoft and the developer, but that seems to be based on the amount of work/help on the part of Microsoft.
“The publicly available information on this is that the distribution fees for bringing a game to XBLA is 35 to 70 percent, depending upon participation by [Microsoft]“
That’s 35-70% of the profit going to Microsoft, a much larger scale than I had anticipated.
Anyway, it’s a good read, so pop on over and have a look.
Innis04_RJ
Originally uploaded by Karmanaut.
This one taken by Alan Campbell. Flaming arrows on the ramparts
People are always posting images of their models online and asking for feedback. Unfortunately at times the model is presented so poorly that it makes giving feedback nigh impossible. The main problems are tiny images with no contrast on the model but a huge contrast between the model and the background. Hopefully this will give you some points on how to present your work in a better way - because you’d rather people commented on your model than on your shoddy presentation skills.
Firstly, make the images big enough to see - a 200×200 pixel image just doesn’t cut it. The bigger the better, within reason, but remember to crop the dead space from the image as there is no point in posting an 800×800 pixel image and only using a tiny part to contain the artwork. With larger images come larger filesizes , so you’ll want to optimise it (Photoshop and ImageReady both do this well). Compression can be a problem, but if you save as JPG with 60-70% quality you’ll probably be fine.
To keep people focused on the artwork, make the background a neutral gray colour. Bright colours are distracting, and very light or dark backgrounds made it harder to pick out details, edges and contrast. Why do you think most 3d packages use a neutral gray background by default?
If you are posting on a website or a forum, try to embed the image into the discussion rather than using text links. It stops people having to click backwards are forwards.
There is always a debate over whether screengrabs or renders are better. I prefer renders, since I can drop a few lights in the scene to pop out the details, but they take time to set up.
If you do decide to render then you’ll want have at least 2 lights, one key light and one fill light so that the shape can be defined. You need lights to to pick out the shadows so that the form can be seen. Skylights are all the rage, but without at least one directional light they can make the model appear flat. There is an excellent tutorial on 3d lighting at http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html which will help you understand what the key and fill lights do.
The lighting of a model is subjective, and depends on what you want to highlight - the geometry, the colour/diffuse textures, the specular/normal maps all require different presentation to pick out various aspects. It’s often much easier to read geometry when there are no textures applied and you have one or two solid colours. Colour/diffuse textures often benefit from very flat lighting, and showing off normal/spec maps usually requires a strong directional light. Experimentation is the key here, but experimentation takes time, which is another reason screengrabs are popular.
Whether you choose to screengrab or render, you really should use a perspective view - using an orthographic view will cause the model to look distorted as you’ll have no foreshortening or depth. Ideally you’ll also render or grab your model from several angles and either post separate images or compile them onto one larger image. As well as front/back views, a 3/4 shot is very useful.
Render/screengrab with and without a wireframe. The wireframes are essential if you want people to give feedback on the flow of your mesh, and they are easy to setup. The simplest method in many 3d packages is to duplicate your model and make the duplicate every so slightly larger, then apply a wireframe material to it.
Some final thoughts
If you want critique on a specific area, ask for it and provide a closeup shot of that area - remember you can crop it to just the part you want to highlight. Similarly if youwant an area to be ignored for the purpose of feedback, state that - but don’t be upset if people comment on it anyway.
…in Dead Rising. They can’t take weapons and only get in the way. Not like Burt and Aaron, real men. *grunt*
Come on ladies, fight the Zombie hoards. You managed it perfectly well in the Resident Evil/Biohazard games.
Or maybe it’s just the few females I’ve come across so far couldn’t take a weapon. Further gameplay investigation is needed.