Wizard's Apprentice

Hello again all, this is another video game project of mine. I decided that as a level designer in training that I should show that I can build scenes with a variety of gaming engines. For this game I decided to use RPG Maker VX Ace. The nice thing about this program is that you can build a game from scratch; literally! They give you tile sets for outdoor and indoor environments and in the place of programming they have set up an event building system. This is awesome for those who have great ideas, but are stopped from making games by their lack of coding knowledge.

I won't give the whole story away, but I think a brief summary is necessary for understanding the context of my project.

STORY FOR (WIZARD'S APPRENTICE)

We start our story in the mountain village of Leadranach. Our hero, a common farm boy, wishes to leave his secluded village to seek adventures in other lands. In order for him to go forth on exciting quests he has to first help the villagers who will in turn help equip him for his journey. Our hero finally manages to get away from his dull village and happens upon an eccentric old wizard in the mountains. For helping the wizard with his crazy experiments the wizard helps you learn amazing new skills and explore the world. As you explore you will also gain new companions who will help you with your quests. However, in the course of your journey you will encounter a sinister dark entity that will reshape the very fabric of the world. What new skills and companions will you gain to defeat the evil corrupting your world?

For this assignment I will:

1. Build the Hero's village from start to finish.
2. Create 8 village missions for the player to get acquainted with their world before their quest begins.
3. Add music and sound effects. 

BUILDING THE HERO'S VILLAGE

Leadranach Village (With Interactive NPCs)

Leadranach Cave (With Enemy NPCs)

Hero's House (With Interactive NPCs)

Black Smith's House (With Interactive NPCs)

Town Guard's House

Carpenter's House

Town Shop House (With Interactive NPC)

Mayor's Manor House (With Interactive NPCS)

The first floor has three different rooms you can visit.

Banquet Hall

The Study

The Kitchen

The second floor also has three different rooms you can visit.

Anna's Room

Mayor's Master Bedroom

Servants' Quarters

Alright so I made all of the 17 environments for the Hero's village. I also had to design the villagers who inhabit the town; character and profile. I made 16 characters in all for the Hero's village.

Hero

Hero's Father

Hero's Mother

Hero's Middle Sister

Hero's Youngest Sister

Blacksmith



Blacksmith's Son

Shopkeeper

Carpenter

Town Guard

Mayor

Mayor's Wife



Mayor's Daughter

Mayor's Butler

Mayor's Chef

Mayor's Maid

After I made the 15 NPCs and 1 PC, I had to make a few quests so that the player would get to know his/her village before setting out on the main quest. I wrote the dialogue for and designed 8 quests. Just to get a general idea of what the quests are about I will just list their titles.

Leadranach Village Quest Titles:

                                  1. Harvesting Crops

                                  2. Produce Delivery
                                  3. Nails For Andre

                                  4. Miner Assistance

                                  5. Sharpened Spear

                                  6. Dress Delivery

                                  7. Cake For The Soul

                                  8. Fully Equipped

Lastly, I added sound effects and music into the game to make it more realistic. If there was a fireplace or forge in a building I added fire sound effects, I added water sound effects to the waterfall, I added a ticking sound effect for when a clock was in the room, and lastly I added a dripping noise for when you go into the cave. For music I tried to pick a theme for for different environments. I picked a specific music track for a person's home(quiet and peaceful), shops(upbeat and catchy), the mayor's house (fancier theme), and the cave(mysterious theme).

When I had people test play the game, it took people about 30 minutes to an hour to complete all of the quests. I think I am off to a good start. I will probably continue this project more as a hobby and to learn more about character development and story lines. If I have something more complete I might post it for others to play later.

I will soon post a blog labeled "Demo Reel" that will show some of the game play elements that were included in this game demo. 

Graveyard Game Environment

Hello everyone, my first project that I started working on was a mysterious graveyard scene in the mountains. Now remember, this is my idea for the game, but I will probably only be able to create one of the whole environment's locations.

My process was as follows:

1. Give myself 5 weeks to work on it.
2. Spend the first 1-2 weeks doing research and planning everything out.
3. Model and texture some environment objects for the scene.
4. Build the scene using Unity 3D and make a realistic looking environment.

First I did a lot of research and when I say a lot I mean ALOT. I did research on geography, different cultures, burial practices of those cultures between 1300-1700s, looked for lots of reference images, and made a story to go with the game idea. As you can imagine this took quite awhile since certain information can be tough to find. I finally came up with an idea that I was happy with. Dargavs in North Ossetia, Russia probably gave me my best inspiration and a vision for the game.

Just to give you some background so that you can follow along a little easier with my process, I will give you a brief summary of my video game idea.

STORY FOR (CITY OF THE DEAD)

The planet is at peace. The ten kingdoms of that world finally work together in harmony. A massive plague breaks out and spreads through the entire land. In an effort to stop the outbreak and save their kingdoms from annihilation the four largest kingdoms of the North, South, East, and West counsel together to determine the fate of the infected. It is decided that the infected must be outcast into Terram Solitariam, a harsh mountainous land located in the center of their world. The infected will be provided with provisions for their journey and then will spend the last of their days in Terram Solitariam.

Over 500 years has past. The land in still at peace after the great plague threatened the world. A mad magical scientist vagabond happens upon this massive mountainous graveyard and hatches an evil plan. He will attempt to reanimate the millions of dead gathered here and bend them to his will. When his army is raised he will proceed to conquer the world.

In the early developments of his re animations he doesn't have complete control over the individuals and monstrosities that he raises. You are one of these dead. You are snatched from paradise and brought back to the world of the living unexpectedly and against your will. You, a wandering skeleton, are charged with the quest of finding out what is going on and save the world.


Second I started to model some old weathered gravestone markers for one of the villages (I am using the English for my reference for this village).

Blocking out of some mountainous landscape:

Some early grave marker modeling, UV mapping, and texturing attempts:

I was told that my textures looked really flat and needed something more to make them "pop" (have more definition). Here is what I did from some of the suggestions given to me.

1. Bring models' UV into Photoshop.
2. Added moss to the textures and painted dirt onto their surfaces.
3. Take final texture into Crazy Bump to get diffuse, displacement, occlusion, specular, and normal maps.

Then the models looked like this:

I also modeled a plague grave stone marker:

(I'm not quite satisfied with this one at the moment)

I started to paint another texture onto my terrain and integrate some of my models into Unity:

The farther away from a portion of your terrain that you are in Unity the more blurring effect it has on your scene. Unity does this to save rendering power. The textures have a higher resolution the closer you get to them. I will try to integrate more textures later.

Here are the textured gravestone slabs in Unity. When I have finished placing them in different locations on the hill I will also use the terrain sculpting tool to add earth mounds next to them.

I wanted it to be pretty foggy so that it would be mysterious and you would be able to see just enough to continue exploring for clues that show up.

Part of hill.

Plague marker in Unity.

My 5 weeks are up, so I decided to continue on to my other projects. Hopefully I will finish the others fast so that I can get back to finishing this one.

I was finally able to get back to this project a week or so before my senior show, here are some of the changes. I will post a video at the end of these blogs in a post called "Demo Reel" which will show some of the game play ideas I was thinking of for the game, still very basic, but I am not going to give up.

This game would be more like a mystery game where you find messages and clues that would lead you to the next location. The portion that I programmed was set up so that by exploring the graves you would get memories of what had happened to you.