New Tutorial!

This one is the extensior of my other grass tutorial. Once the grass is done and imported into UDK, how do you make a wind effect on it without manual animation?

Coma: a mind adventure

It's been a looong time, but that doesn't mean I stopped working. Since the last post, a lot happened. The "Icebergs" ideas, with the buttons and lut's merged together... and this is (for now) the result.

The crowdfunding was reeeeaally good, and I must say that working with Dani Navarro again is a pleasure. His contributionss to the script and narrative of coma are mind-blowing!

Working with lut's and gameplay

If you want to make a good game, you better do a good gameplay, but if you want to make an excellent game, you need to offer cohesion between the gameplay, the visuals and the narrative.
In PrIL (Project Interactive Landscape) this is going to be achieved by offering a visual representation of the dynamic macro-changes of the scenario. For example, if you need to activate the rain to make something grow instantly and then been able to climb to that cliff, you will get an instant rainy day, but if you also need the night so you can travel fast, you will get the combo night+rain, and we want to make sure that every state is really symbolic and unique (cohesion between gameplay & visuals).

LUT’s helps a lot in this process; doing a color correction directly in photoshop and the take it back to UDK is… amazing. Unreal matinee is also a good tool to achieve this “modular climatic design”. In the case of the fog, we want full fog when the “fog event” is on, but we want also more fog than usual when the rain is on. How do you achieve that? Unreal Matinee.

When the fog event is on, I animate the fog density parameter; from 0.05 to 2.5. For the fog of the rain, instead of animating the fog density parameter, I increase the Z location of the exponential fog density. In that way, the same effect is acquired but using two variables, so you don’t need to worry about hard transitions or problems between 3 values of fog density. Keeping stuff in a binary form always helps to put some order.

The button dilemma

Dev_Ice is no longuer Dev_ice, now it’s going to be Interactive Landscape. And the player will have to solve puzzles with macrochanging the landscape (fog, night, rain, etc, and you can also combine them). The other day I had an “eureka” moment and it helped me a lot to solve a lot of conceptual gameplay mechanics. As Valve would say: we assume stuff that we think it’s true but it’s not and that limits us. The core of this games is; the player has to transport objects in order to activate events for macrochanging the scenario. My mind automatically associates do something change with and object > Button pressed, ergo, I need buttons (you can see them in those screens, the blue shapes in the floor). Well, I discovered that this was a huge limitation because the levels are big natural desolated landscapes (not apocalyptic) with diffuse limits of the map. Why? It just doesn’t make sence that the player has to puto those interactive cubes or balls in exact places of the scenario. Doing a button means to create a whole infrastructure near the button so the button makes sense there, and that is not cool. My solucion? Goodbye buttons.

Now the players needs to put those interactive cubes or balls in areas (defined by ruins, natural stones suspiciously in circle, etc, but big areas, not buttons. Also, this creates “good” mechanics because the player also triggers the event when entering in the area and that is awesome to feed the exploration. If the player seens something natural strange him will go there. And even more than that! It also helps me to create new puzzles. Imagine one of this areas in a hill and our interactive object is a ball (ball>hill>balls slides>ball doesn’t trigger the event). Time to think!

Working on mobile apps in Chainapps

Those pictures are from 3 months ago. Great day! Theck introduced me to some friends of him who were looking for a designer to to mobile games (Android and Iphone). We're doing two games at the same time and we began the project 8 month ago. It's been a while, because the process is very slowly (it's not the central project of anyone) but it's good to see we're not stuck, just going slowly (on purpose).

Programmers, programmers everywhere!

Designers, designer everywhere!

Wires, wires everywhere!

The most important part of a creative process

I'm the guy who wears the red shirt, working on a carnivorous plant