Molyjam 2013

I attended to this years Molyjam in Düsseldorf (Germany). 60h without sleep with 48h of game development marks a highlight in my carrer of becoming a professional game developer. To focus yourself on the essentials and be as efficient as possible in a given amount of time was tough but rewarding.

The basic idea of our game was to create an continuously changing environment. We quickly had the architecture of the holocaust memorial in Berlin in mind and mixed it with the idea of an changing maze with completely random generated maze patterns.

This was a little concept sheet that I put together in the concept phase:

You can download the game here

In the middle of the jam, almost all work in terms of 3D was done so I took the chance and helped an other team with their project which turned out to be to most fun of all. You should definitely play it!

You can download the game here



Shrubberies

I came across the idear to use my construction kit to create some shrubberies. This is the result.

Adding some new stuff

Hi there, unfortunately, I forgot to take some concepts with me on my way home from university which made it impossible to work on our project tasks. So I took the time and made some generic atmosphere props.

The "construction kit" for my modular approach on creating vegetation.

 

Controls

This one will control the gate out of the ticket booth.









Working on the station

The concept requiered some more work on the station.
-adding a parking place
-moving the station closer to the road
-Adding some more assets

EDIT: Pls dont mind the rails crossing the road. This will be changed.

Creating a street in UDK

Creating a street in UDK was quite tricky. The texture limitation of the landscape system made it impossible to just "paint" it so I went over to create a static mesh for it.

To align the mesh properly to the terrain in maya, I had to export the landscape mesh. With 2mil+ polys, it was way to huge to be handled by maya but after reducing and recalculating the mesh in zBrush, it was ready to work with.

With this base, it was just a matter of align, extrude, align extrude, align, extrude etc.

This is how it looks so far. The next step will be a vertex painting applied to the edges to give it a more grungy look.

Update

Again, all the stuff piled up to just one update. So here you go:
-Retexturing of one building Interieur
-Applying emissive to static light assets
-Creating a second storage building
-Switching to highpoly

Most of our normals are done with crazybump which delivers quite a decent result but I started to switch to high poly modelling. Not only because of the normal map but also for using it with the ambient occlusion map for texturing. The reference and extra detail is just a pleasure working with.
This a a recent example of a heater for a kitchen scene.

A little explanation if you are not familiar with "normal maps". The idea of normal maps is to project the high detail of high poly models onto a game ready low poly asset. The normal map will be applied onto the model just like the diffuse texture which contains the colour information with an extra dynamic shadow of the normal map. If you cast a light over the object, the normal map will react to it and shadow the modeled details correctly, faking a more detailed surface.

Update

I had quite a busy weekend so there is not much that can be show today. I still want to make a little update.

The ticket booth will get a little storage building right next to it.

The new walls are now fully textured and ready to receive some furniture.

Together with some students, I went to see the WCS Season 1 for starcraft 2 at a barcraft in cologne. Even with not knowing anything about the game mechanics, my friends got quite fast into it and we had a great time.

Ticket booth

This is how the ticket booth looks right now from the inside but after discussing the design with my conceptionist, the whole thing will be rearranged. The storage will be moved into a separate building and a kitchen/toilet will take its place.

 

Ticket booth

Recently, I try to get more used in creating buildings and tiling textures on them. This one is a work in progress. I will post some pictures from the inside when the whole thing is done.

Finished grass

Finally, after one day of hard work, the grass is finally done. I stumbled over a a nice tutorial series which helped me to achieve a new level of foliage creation. So I walked out in the morning, took some photos and put everything together trough the day. This is how it looks right now:

I will probably tweak the specular and the wind but for now it does the job quite well.

Foliage WIP

Currently, I am creating some foliage for the coast-map. I am still new to the material editor so most of the material is made by a tutorial. I hope I can fix some of my current problems tomorrow including:
-lightning
-colour
-mesh compositing

Working on a new map for "F99"

After 3 weeks of experimenting and working, the map I currently work on, reached a presentable stage. This map is intended to be used in the student game "F99", a first person horror adventure with the spirit of the old resident evil games developed by a group of german game design students. I took the opportunity and applied for the job of the level designer and got the job. This is the result of 3 weeks of work. It is not much but I had to learn UDK from scratch while building this. I am kinda satisfied, though.

"abandoned island" - Day 4/5

Cryengine 3 screenshots

Diffuse map

"abandoned island" - Day 3

Sadly, I messed up the cavitiy quite a bit but most of this will be covered by water anyway. I guess I will stick with it.

"Carrier"

 

 Beauty Shot

 

  High Poly

   Low Poly

Today, I took the opportunity to take some compilation shots of most of the assets that will be used in a game project called "F99". Most of the textures are missing on these pics because I just hadn´t the time to apply them. Still a good feeling to see them all gathered in one place :)