Reanimating Nearl Commercial

Finally finished my board game trailer. For how much time I spent on it (way longer than I expected) I feel like it should be much better quality. I find it hilarious just because of how ridiculous it is. Weird voice acting, cheesy 80's rock, and animated lightning - great stuff. I'm presenting it tomorrow so I'll have to wait and see if everyone else is amused by its ridiculous, foolish charm

Here's a little piece of the action...

Modular Kit - Rock Material

This is the material for the 'Super Rock'. It has an intelligent material to retain texel density when scaled and it's vertex paintable. It seems really inefficient and messy which makes me think there is definitely a better way of doing this. If anyone has suggestions to cut out unnecessary and redundant steps leave me a juicy comment.

 I made the diffuse textures with pictures I took of rocks in Arizona. It was satisfying in a way to make a texture with nothing pulled from the internet.

Rocks n Junk

Did I go to Arizona just to get some sweet, sweet rock textures for our modular kit project!? No. But I was out here for break and saw some sweet rocks so I took some pictures of them. I have a pretty old camera but I think a few of the shot are usable for some texture noise overlays or something. Here is a little preview of some rocks:

Whaaaaat, are there shots of the ground too for texture reference!? Yeup.

Feyenuh Urtuhs

I am doing a Fine Arts - Sculpture minor. Here are my first two fine arts pieces ever. They were super fun to work on. I've done woodworking stuff my whole life because my dad had a woodshop in our garage when I was growing up. He is a proponent of hands on stuff and I think it's a good quality for people to have; knowing how to build stuff. All of the stuff I did growing up and this fine arts stuff definitely helps with my 3D work too. It's a different but the same, y'know? There are a lot of concepts that carry between the two disciplines.

Modular Kit - Set Dressing

Just some progress with my set dressing. My map is huge... I'm probably going to have to cut a lot of it out. I lost about 6 hours of work, which was my fault, I think. I'm not exactly sure how it happened but it did. Because of that I'm a little behind where I want to be, but I still feel pretty good about it. I haven't messed around with the lighting too much yet, but here's where I am so far.

Eh, that last one is pretty dark. Sorry about that.

Modular Kit - Awnings and Rocks

I previously made 30-something awnings with all sorts of different colors and patterns. That was bad. I deleted them all. I replaced them with 4 white awnings, all of which have MICs to handle diversity. The whole awning is one SM so I alpha'd and lerped some stuff so only the cloth would change colors.

 Here are the two rocks I made. They are just low poly planes. I tried to use a method I saw in some of the UDK rocks.

With those two rocks I was able to throw together this big rock wall in 10 minutes with some decent variation.

After those rocks I tried to make a super rock. The super rock has an intelligent material to retain texel density when scaled up and down.

The super rock also has the ability to be vertex painted.

The super rock was just an experiment but I am going to try to throw together a better model, and some better textures and put it in my kit for some more rock diversity. 'Cause you can never have too much rock diversity...

The Lens of Emergence

I just realized this was still a draft and was never posted. So with further delay, heeeeere it is:

We had to pick a lens from The Book of Lenses and then apply the questions to our print and play game. I picked #23 The Lens of Emergence:

     How many verbs do my players have?
     How many objects can each verb act on?
     How many ways can players achieve their goals?
     How many subjects do the players control?
     How do side effects change constraints?

How many verbs do my players have? Verbs: Customize, move, jump, attack, defend, draw wild cards. Based on wild cards players can swap class tiles so I guess swapping could be a verb too. I added some different movement mechanics for certain classes. While I didn't introduce a new operative action I applied an existing operative action to a different class. In my game there is a class that can jump over friendly units. There are also secret tiles that, before I implemented the jumping mechanic, had no unique attributes other than they face down and their true identity was hidden. By giving the secret tiles the same jump mechanics as the jump class I added a verb to those classes.

How many objects can each verb act on? Apart from attacking, the verbs only act on friendly tiles.  Movement and jumping are only used on friendly tiles. When attacking you can only attack the enemy. If you have a +attack class tile the attack changes and you get +1 to your die roll which changes the combat mechanic. It might be interesting to implement some kind of checkers mechanic, where tiles can jump over enemy tiles. That way I'm adding complexity to the jump mechanic, allowing the player to do more with one operative action.

How many ways can players achieve their goals? In my game there is one goal: Retrieve the correct secret tile from your enemy. Each player has two secret tiles. One of the tiles is your "king" in the sense that if it is captured, the game is over and you lose. You can choose different strategies to achieve the goal but there is really only one way to actually win, and that is defeating the correct secret tile in combat. You can choose to customize your platoons differently to take an offensive or defensive strategy, you can rush the wild card spot in the middle of the board, you can flank your opponent, or charge them head on. There are many different strategies to achieve the goal.  Maybe I could add something like controlling the wild card space for x number of turns will win you the game also? I don't really like that idea but something along those lines could be interesting.

How many subjects do the players control? Each player controls two platoons of three units each. So at the start of the game they are controlling 6 total units.  The tiles in each platoon must stay connected, so even though you are controlling six units, the six units are making up two big groups you are controlling. A player can never have more than six units but can definitely have less. I have messed around with the idea of adding one more platoon of three units and making playing space bigger and adding one more unit to each platoon, making it two platoons of four units instead of two platoons of three. A requirement for the game is a 30 minute time limit, so for the sake of brevity I think I will keep it where it is at two platoons of three units each. It does make it fun though when you have the extra units to play with.

How do side effects change constraints? The book uses the example of checkers and how moving into different squares changes the game space. This idea of an evolving game space was an concept from early on I wanted to keep in my game. In my game constraints are changed the same way they are changed in checkers, as far as moving spaces. When you move a space you are threatening you opponent by denying them spaces to move into. By attacking and drawing some wild card you can change constraints by eliminating pieces from the game board, not only evolving the playable space, reducing the number of units your opponent has (or possibly the number of your own units).

Print N Play - Done

Finished my board game. There are a couple of things in the physical version that didn't turn out exactly how I wanted to, but other than that I'm pretty happy. I ended up with a simple, enjoyable game. I learned a lot about how to make things fun for a lot of different people.  Play testing was key for tweaking the game and learning what people like and don't like.  Every time I watch someone play my game, I get new ideas on how to improve my game in all aspects. It's a constant learning experience. It was a fun project but I am glad it is over. Here is a game in progress:

This is my painting for the box art. Filthy peasants...

And of course, the print-and-play PDF version:
Reanimating Nearl

Modular Kit - Another Shield

I also made another shield. I started messing around with the material editor a little bit and it is great big fun. There's SO much stuff you can do.

Print N Play - Why can't I hold all these...

Game tiles. A lot of them. Solid oak beauties. Not too much work left to get these done. Only thing I'm worried about is getting an appointment for the laser cutter, since apparently GWiz isn't an option any more.

Modular Kit - Medium Props

I had awnings for my medium prop. I modeled four different variations and textured each model eight different colors. So I have 32 different awnings. There are still some different variations some people want to fit their level specifically. I should be able to throw a couple more together to appease the masses. Here are the four different variations.

I also messed around with the UDK Cloth PhysX quite a bit. That whole system is cool, but very finicky.  So, in addition to the static awnings, I have a few skeletal meshes of awnings. They still need a little tweaking but I got the basics down.

Print n Play - Storytelling Illustration

We needed to create an image that visually communicates the core mechanic and theme of our print and play game. In my game each of the two players has either a head or a body and the goal of the game is to capture whichever part you don't have so you can reanimate the corpse, like a Frankenstein monster. So if you have the body piece you want to capture the opponent's head piece.

I am going to mesh the ideas together of these two drawings for my image.