Welcome to the Jet Theory blog! We’re a group of five students at Vancouver Film School’s Game Design program. This blog is a documentation of our journey as we progress through two projects: Continue reading...

Aloha, jet-fans!

Today we’ve got an exciting update for you! Anyone remember our enemies? I know I do. They’ve been -plaguing- me for a while now! (Snicker-tee-hee!)

Ok, but seriously. On to business.

We decided to delve into the world of Zbrush– 3.0, specifically– to get some normal-mapping goodness into our enemy model. I’ve discovered it’s actually not such a bad program to get a handle on. In fact, it’s quite fun if I do say so myself. Anyways, I just wanna show a couple things here about how detailed Zbrush can actually get.

This is one of the earliest screen caps I have of the process. At this point I was amazed at how detailed it already looked- and it wasn’t nearly finished yet.

And here’s a shot of the enemy’s plagued arm during the early stages. Not half bad, eh?

After exploring the program more and discovering these ‘SDivs’ (which basically adds more polygons to the sculpted model), I was able to add in TONS more detail.

And with the help of my trusty steed (Intuous 2 Wacom tablet), this is the outcome!

Voila! Now onto the technical stuff

Thanks for stopping by!

Un destin incertain

Hello World,

“It’s been such a long time, I think I should post more often!” (Boston’s altered lyrics)

Well, here’s some music for ya. Again, it’s just a sample and I’m thinking of having it inside our courtyard. I really like the sound of the piano but spent TOO many hours trying to come up with a decent string sound and that was all I could do. Sounds too binary for my taste but…what can I do? …psst….any cellists out there?!

This is a post LONG OVERDUE. I’ve been planning it forever but was overwhelmed with anticipation!
Yes you want this, you want this bad. Don’t lie.

The Courtyard - our first game-play area - has to be a lot of things. It has to have an intuitive flow so that players can have fun in it with little guidance. It has to have visually stunning areas that showcase our art talent. It has to be the meat and potatoes and then some, because chances are it may be the only area the industry guests will actually play through. Design is all about keeping the target audience in mind, and our target audience is a group of busy people with very little time!

Needless to say, the Courtyard went through many many iterations and even a near-complete redesign. In fact, it’s now been divided into two smaller sections.
If our Courtyard could speak, this is what it would say: omfg stop poking me. But after some thought it would follow with: thank you I’m a much better Courtyard now.

How it began:
Rewind to the very beginning: Sasha and I held intense discussions and drew many scribbles to figure out how we wanted our courtyard to flow. Sasha’s design philosophy is that the player should always be able to see where his goal is before he gets there. My biggest concern, always, is that game-play elements need to be introduced in bits and pieces.

Level Progression Document:
Based on our two major design goals, we outlined in a document what we wanted to see happen in the level. Even in a very small student team like ours, quick docs like these are a good way to keep everyone on the same page.

Original Layout:
Based on the doc we sketched out a rough layout (that didn’t look quite as pretty as this one).

First Whitebox:
Then we made our first whitebox map

First Prototype:
That map file got its first pass of kismet (UT3’s visual scripting app) sequences.

At this point our level became a testable prototype, which was awesome. We had many of our mentors and friends run through it and started tweaking problems right away.

Refining the Prototype:
One design issue we quickly identified was actually a result of two other design decisions.
1. We avoided putting in player-killing obstacles.
2. The flow was very linear.
This meant that once a player failed and fell out of their linear path, they would have to return to the beginning and start over. How frustrating is that?? I would rather die and respawn at that point.

To deal with this, alternate paths were added as ways of ‘getting back on track’. This meant that even if the player did fail at some point, they would have fun overcoming their failure.

The Scope Hammer:
Having our prototype running early gave us the luxury to test early, plus a chance to step back and ask the difficult question: is this what we want what we really really want? The answer that came back from our collective voices in our heads was (mine sounded a lot like Baby Spice): well, sort of. Our level still had a lot of issues, some due to the constraints beyond our means. First of all, it was too long. It would take an average player nearly 10 minutes to get through, and considering that our game was scoped to be around 15 minutes long in its entirely it was just way too much time spent in a single area. Secondly, it required too many assets. The player was progressing in a neat uni-directional path, plowing through game content in the fastest way possible.

Redesign:
An aha moment came while playing through Tomb Raider: Anniversary. The player path in Tomb Raider always goes in spirals - the player always comes back to where s/he started, but with a different vantage point. With this in mind, we worked out a new layout for our level. Maintaining our original goals and visual spirit from our earlier whiteboxes, we put the Courtyard in a blender, chopped it up and added some twists. The first half of the area was broken off and given a new label to make sure we gave it a different visual and thematic treatment, and the player paths were bent into spirals.

It soon became clear that the redesign added a lot to our game in all fronts. Not only did it solve the issues we had in the last design, but the winding paths added mystery to the game’s atmosphere, and allowed some great visual moments we couldn’t pull off before.

P.S. Thank Yous
Shortly after the redesign we had a group of Grade 10 students come in and test our game. Guys, I promised I’d email you our blog link, sorry it took so long! I just wanted to make this post before I sent it out and that took a while. Thank you to all of you and especially to Carol for having the patience to finish the whole level through multiple deaths and falls.

The first thing players see (and judge!) our game by are the graphics. We want to wow visually right from the start: this is what the player sees within the first minute of gameplay.

The lab (the zone you start out in and return to for upgrades and tutorials) has gone through an intensive redesign phase over the past few weeks. But seeing it improve over the iterations makes it all worth it. Here’s a quick history of the first room..

Whitebox 1: enter, get gun, leave.

Whitebox 3: ooh, shiny. We were trying to find a unqiue style to match the character.

Version 4: Complete reset - we developed a method using material operations to transform the textures from epic assets to a metallic white (yes its more than just the normal map :P) and filled a massive test room with ideas.

Version 5: The Space Opera. Uhm, yea.. The lab was broken up into individual sections so we could distribute the learning curve throughout the game more easily.

Version 6: We wanted players to see the monastery environment more quickly and emphasize the contrast so we anchored the platforms in it and gave the players the freedom to enter / exit at will. The silhouette (minus the bubble) is designed to look like a microscope;the lab is like a futuristic microscope that sees through time.

Version 7: The 3 architectural styles in 6 weren’t consistent so we created variations based off of each.

Version 8: Making it prettier…

Version 9: Tutorial messages added: players have to move forwards, turn around and pick up the spawning device to be allowed to leave. Playtests showed players needed more direction.

Version 10 (work in progress!): based on the feedback we changed the order and content of tutorial messages, set them to display on the HUD and reduced player movement freedom. We built this version by first blocking out a very narrow and linear path for the players to take using collision volumes. Then we started filling in the volumes with visual elements. Doing collision first forced us to make sure the visuals only serve to enhance the gameplay experience.

Previously Flux and Fugue, we’ve changed the name of our game to Synchrony and we’re sticking with it. We spent the longest time (over 3 months..) brainstorming names, waiting for the one that would jump out at us and we could all unite against - like with Jet Theory or Rodent Run. However, that moment never came, or rather it came at 5 different times to us and we each had a different favorite. We couldn’t put it off any longer so we put 5 names on a list and got whoever happened to be in the game design department to give their vote and Synchrony came out on top.

Now that we’ve got a name and are in the middle of development, expect a lot more updates.  :D

Ok all!

We promised a finished piece of art for Madeleine, and here it is!

Comments, please! You’ll get cookies.

Nadia

Hello everyone!

So as some as you may or may not know, we’ve decided to give our scientist Madeleine a major overhaul in the visuals department. All we have are turnarounds right now, but hopefully we’ll be busting out some nice action shots of her real soon.

Here she is!

Thanks!

Nadia

Hey guys,

Here’s the concept for the cemetery in both night and day. The day-time concept is the more accurate of the two, but I liked them both so I thought I’d slap ‘em up here!

Thanks everyone!

Nadia

Hey hey hey!

So we finally finalized a final character (hehe, I’m so clever). Her name’s Madeleine, and she’s the scientist in our game. Complete with a Tron-erific future suit, she’s gonna be one tough chick to beat!

Ugh, you wouldn’t believe how many iterations we went through Anyways, that’s it for this update! Thanks for stopping by!

Your friendly neighborhood 2D & 3D Artist,
Nadia