Yasmin's Computer Game Arts Journey

Once I had planned out what my Battle Arena was going to look like and gotten the hand of how to model a bit better in Maya I was then able to build my battle arena!

Modelling Process

For this battle arena, even though we had to import it into Unity at the end and animate a camera around the scene, I decided to model my whole environment to scale within Maya, unlike my Game Walkthrough. I have already done a blog post on how I learned to 3D model in Maya, so look at that if you haven't already seen it, but I basically used these techniques to 3D model my environment.

I realised that I had made things hard for myself because I was trying to model everything inside a closed boat and wasn't too sure how the best way to go around this was but then I was told that the arena needed to be in an open environment so that made my life easier. Instead, I changed my design a bit to make the boat look old and rusted, as if it had sunken a while back. This also fitted with the steampunk look that I wanted to create anyway so I still stuck with my original steampunk / robotic design ideas for the windows, chest filled with nuts and bolts and other things.

I attempted to make very complex 3D models such as fish, underwater anemone and of course, the robot Josef from Machinarium. I also used ncloth to create a realistic cloth model over the table within the boat which I then combined into the table to make into a mesh.



Little did I know that these complex (and sometimes rather messy) 3D models would come to haunt me during the texturing process of this battle arena....

Texturing Process

I'm going to be honest here, at first I found texturing extremely daunting. Mainly because of the UV maps that I had created for myself during the complex 3d modelling of a lot of my objects. I had a lot of work to do, stitching them together and then using the outline image as a reference to create my own textures. I turned on the turtle option for baking and reset the settings and output file so that I could bake my UV map and use that as a visual reference to how it looks as well as exporting the UV snapshot for the outlines of the UV map. I could then open these both in Photoshop and start creating my own textures for that object. I usually did this by gathering lots of different source images, such as rock, moss and coral and overlapping them, making them tile and using the eraser at different opacity settings to blend them all together to make a completely new texture out of the combined ones. I also used the layers overlay settings to change how a layer could look when on top of others, either making it hardlit, or just using the colour from the image, etc. I found this technique extremely useful because I wanted to keep the Machinarium art style within my battle arena so a lot of the time I would look for images of the game and then copy a small section of the scene and overlap it over the whole of my image, choosing to only add the colour of it to the texture that I already had made.

This is the photoshop file for a barrel in my scene

What the UV map looks like after importing my handmade texture for my robot To apply a texture to the 3D model I simply opened up my hypershader window, created a new lambert, gave it a relevant name and in colour added a file instead and then included the image that I wanted to use. After that it's just a matter of dragging the chosen lambert and dropping it onto the model you want to texture!

How textures were before automatic unwrapping

Now it was time to create the flyby camera in Unity to whizz around my scene, but first, I still wasn't happy with the way it looked. It still didn't look like it was underwater to me so I added a water ripple asset from Unity Standard Assets to sit on top of the rocks so that the camera to fly down through the water, emphasising that this was a sunken ship, as well as some lights around the scene to make it look more blue. I added a light above the water ripples which was a light blue colour which shone down on the scene and some blue and green lights dotted around the battle arena. This now made it look a lot more scenic and gave it the Rapture feel from Bioshock that I originally wanted to include from my moodboard.

One I had created my storyboard, one sheet and walkthrough game map and interactions the next step was the fun part, to make the game!

The Look and Feel

I started off creating the3D models in Maya using the skills that I had learnt previously, by making just one model at a time I was then able to import this separately into Unity and have more freedom to move bits around within the Unity game engine instead of worrying about modelling everything to scale within Maya.

For this walkthrough game brief I was allowed to use basic materials to colour my assets but no textures so I made sure to be able to colour most things individually, making leaves green and bark brown, etc. I also added a skybox. This would help to add to the atmosphere of the game as that's what this whole unit is being marked on.



I also added lights and particles to add to the effect of the game as I had modelled some lantern lights to line to stone pathway, including both a light and a flame particle effect added to the realism and the old-age feel of the game as well as making it a great light source for the game as it was set at night. I added a script to enabled these lights to flicker when the player came close to the light to make it seem even more realistic, as if the flames were flickering in the wind. I could change the radius of these lights so that they shone brightly only on the objects nearby.


We needed audio within our game so I chose to have an old-style radio show to play on the speakers of the game, lined along the pathway to play an eerily happy country tune. By changing the 3D sound settings of this audio I was able to make it so that it went very loud when the player was near and quieter as the player went further away from the object. Having this knowledge was then very useful as I used it on a lot of different objects, such as the trees rustling, the fire lanterns crackling and, of course, the crying sounds coming from the well.


The Interactivity

For this game I used C# to code the interactions that I planned out during the storyboarding phase within it. We needed to have at least 3 interactions within our game. The main interactions that I had planned to use were: Doors opening and closing, being able to pick up an axe and use it to destroy the well within the game so I could jump down into the cave below and then interacting with the radio found within the cave as the source of the crying to play an audio clip that tells the player the "Wake up".

At first i was worried that I might have been a tad too ambitious, but with the help of the Unity forums and the internet (thank you Stack Overflow) it didn't take me long to start getting my head around the basic syntax of C#, especially since I have worked using Javascript before, and I went a little overboard on the interactions, adding the flicker script to make the lights flicker as well as scripts to trigger sound effects such as white noise when the player is in the beginning of the game in the house and triggers a light flicker and in the cave near the end. I also added more immersion to the game overall by adding a text UI to show the protagonists thoughts throughout the gameplay, from his bafflement when he first realises he doesn't know where he is, to his shouts down to the 'woman' crying in the well. I started the game by disabling the players movement and adding a dark image on a panel so that the player has to focus on the text that displays on the screen as the protagonist wakes up groggy, thinking he is in his own house and then gasps as he realises that he's not in his house anymore; the dark panel is destroyed and the player is then able to move again to progress through the narrative of the game.



The hardest part of the coding interactions for me was the whole interaction for picking up the axe, having it physically showing in front of the player, and the using it to explode the well. At first I wasn't quite sure how it was going to work or even what the syntax might be for this but after searching the Unity forums I found that I could use Destory (gameObject); to completely remove an object out of the world and instantiate as a way to create an explosion in the wells place as a game object to make it appear as if I had blown up the well. But of course I couldn't have the script on the well as this object would then be destroyed and I needed the same script to start the radio at the bottom of the well play the crying sounds so that it would sound more realistic and eerie once the player jumped down there so I attached the script to some rocks just below the well and make the collider box a lot bigger so that I could still click on the well for this all to happen. It might not have been the cleanest way of applying this interaction but it's the best way that I could think of.

Digital art is something completely new to me, I've always enjoyed doodling on paper before going to bed or to pass the time on boring coach journeys but doing it digitally without the physical pen and paper, without having to constantly rub out my mistakes or even worse, stick with them when drawing in pen, it just didn't feel right!

So before diving in with my digital art projects for Visual Design, I wanted to get used to using my shiny new drawing tablet by doing some of usual doodles on photoshop and simply seeing how they turned out.

After a frustrating first hour of getting used to not having to look down at my pen I was hooked! Digital art is so much simpler than having to draw on paper, ctrl-z makes everything a whole lot easier and quicker by deleting my mistakes in no time at all! I quickly learned how useful drawing on different layers can be when merging outlines with colour and blending in different tones.

I hadn't drawn with charcoal from real life for a couple of years until starting this course so am still very rusty at life drawing but I find that attending these classes once a week has helped me to understand my drawing style and become more confident.

A huge part of Computer Game Arts is 3D modelling through 3D computer graphics software. The majority of games nowadays have moved on from the art style of 2D pixels on a screen, with technology being far more advanced and enabling players to experience more realistic and true-to-life gameplay visuals. This is done through 3D modelling and these models aren't only used for games but can also be a means of creating 3D animation and special effects in films! So, with all of this in mind, I am very excited and determined to not only understand how to create these models but to put in a lot of effort to do it well so that I can have fun using it and be able to experiment with how my models can be used. (I've even noticed that 3D environments can be used to produce 360 YouTube videos, but more on that in the future...)

As I am creating both a Battle Arena and a Walkthrough Game simultaneously for this course I needed to create 3D models for both of them. The software that I'm learning is Maya, a well known 3D computer graphics software which is widely used to create interactive 3D applications ranging from games to animations and visual effects.

When I first started using Maya it took me a while to understand and remember the keyboard shortcuts and overall techniques on how to build object from blocks, extruding and manipulating wire meshes. It's entirely different from drawing in 2D art and because of this I found it difficult to start from a blank scene and create what I wanted from my mind.

So instead I started with a tutorial! I built this cartoon house from a series of YouTube videos that I had found and got to witness first hand the commentators thought processes as he was creating the house which helped me to understand how to go about customising the shapes and using the different tools as well as some very useful time saving tips such as using the outliner tool to group everything together instead of having to combine meshes all of the time just in case I still wanted them to stay separate to add changes, but was then still able to move things around as a group instead of individually. This also taught me to think ahead when creating my models to think about texturing and what will happen if I need to import it into Unity3D. For example, in the house above the door has a separate panel to add some depth to the texturing and I had to make the door separate from the house if I wanted to import it and animate to open and close for gameplay in Unity.

Once I had created this house I found it a lot easier to begin modelling the rest of my environment assets (the environment below is for my walkthrough game). I could reuse shapes I had created before and simply modify them to suit another asset that I needed instead of having to start from a basic object every time which saved a lot of time. Below I have made a gate, fence, cobbled path, well and a speaker in half the time that it took me to create the house (which was a day) just by reusing parts of it.


Josef from Machinarium - Character modelling
I wanted to give myself a challenge after having grasped the very basics of modelling and tasked myself with creating a 3D model of the robot protagonist Josef from the point-and-click game, Machinarium. (It's a cute and overall awesome game for those of you that haven't played it, and if you haven't, go do so, NOW!  :) )

I started from his tube body, changing the width divisions lower than 20 to make him look a little less smooth and more clunky to keep with the old steampunk art style and created the shape of the protruding pipes by extracting different layers out and repositioning them to make them thinner or wider, then redoing that over and over and over, the whole time being careful to try and create the curves that I wanted when I reached his head. I then used the multi-component select tools to select either points or lines of the mesh and move them around individually, or created more points and lines by using the multi-cut or insert edge-loop tools. For the eyes, arms and legs I created them separately using the same extruding method and then placed them where I wanted on Josef's body and merged the mesh together to create one overall object.

I'm really happy with what I was able to create and think he looks pretty spot on, a little chubbier, but a little podge is cute!

I became inspired by the first YouTube videos that I watched on learning how to create the cartoon house and how much it helped me to just see someone's thought processes when learning Maya and so have uploaded my own video on creating a ladder to YouTube. It's a simple object to create but through watching the video you can much easier see my techniques and understanding of the different tools within Maya to create the object as well as when things go wrong and how I go about fixing them, it's much easier to watch me create something that read about me babbling on about my learning processes through Maya (although you already have done so THANK YOU!) so if you need more information of how I have learnt to 3D model and how I create my models then have a watch :)

• When the player wakes up in a cramped cottage and exits through the door to find the cobbled path leading them through a small village outside lined with speakers.
• When the player noticed the well and hears the cries for help below, interacting with it will tell the player that the well is boarded up and they need to find something to break to boards.
• A little further down the path they will find the chopped up logs and be able to interact with the axe, holding it within their hand (this should be visible within the first person camera view).
• They then get to use the axe with the well and descend into the dark, cave-like place below to follow the cries for help.
• The last interaction is when they find the old record player and press the interaction button to make the record stop spinning, causing them to be surrounded by darkness apart from the words "Wake Up" appearing on the cave wall.

For my 3 minute walkthrough game I have created this simple storyboard for me to refer to when creating the game. As this game can be no longer than 3 minutes I made sure to keep it simple, however I did include at least 3 different interactions within the game for me to create through using C# in Unity3D.

The game will start with the player waking up in a small, cartoon-like cottage, preferably with some oddly upbeat music playing that the player can optionally leave on or turn off before leaving the cottage. Upon leaving the house they will then find a cobbled pathway with speakers and other cottages aligning either side, like a small quaint village with no people. The player can hear muffled commands coming from the speakers but can't quite make them out and the protagonist will have some text pop up narrating how he wonders where everyone is. Walking a little further down the cobbled path the player will then hear distant screams coming from a boarded up well marked 'Danger'. To open the well and see what the source of the screaming is they have to carry on down the cobbled path until they reach a fenced off forest with some cut down tree stumps, where they will find an axe and be able to pick it up and use it on the boarded up well. However, upon descending down the well into a dark and dingy cave they realise that the noise is actually coming from an old record player. The atmosphere in the cave is to be a lot more spooky and unnerving than that of the village to make the player nervous about approaching the record player and why these cries for help are being played. Once the player approaches the record player and stops it playing all goes suddenly black and a voice calls out saying; 'WAKE UP'. That is then the end of the walkthrough and the introduction to Coma!

For the Gameplay and Interactivity unit within Computer Games Art I am going to be building a walkthrough game using my own modelled assets and scene in Maya and then importing it into Unity3D to create at least 3 different interactive elements within the 3 minute walkthrough game. The aim is to create a certain atmosphere using only the greybox assets, lights, audio and of course the interactions themselves.

The game I have decided to make is called Coma. Above is the One Sheet for the game which explains in detail what the narrative if the game is as well as the more technical aspects:

The X (simply the blurb of the game):
When trapped inside your own imagination there's no knowing what lays around the corner. Can you follow the voices of your loved ones to find your way back to reality?

The 4 Pillars (What defines the gameplay of your game):

• No weapons to be found or used within the game.
• No health meter so cannot die. However the player can 'get lost within the coma', never returning to reality.
• Can't hold more than one object at a time.
• Collect drawings within the game to help the player recall how they got in the coma in the first place. These pictures can be viewed in the pause menu.

Using my moodboard as a reference I scamped out my game arena to visualise it before I start the 3D model process. I decided that I definitely wanted to make my arena underwater because I know that later on I will be animating elements of it and adding a statue; having the arena underwater offers lots of potential for animation by adding fish, bubbles and seaweed in the sea, swaying to the motion of the waves. I also still really like the idea of mixing the eerie elements of Bioshock with the simple and endearing cartoon-like design of Machinarium and feel that having the arena underwater will stay true to Rapture as I can play around with the exaggerated shadows like they did. Making a mechanical ship was more influenced by Machinarium as the game includes a world dull of robots and, because I wanted to copy that style of design, I wanted to make a robot-like sunken boat!

The boat will include objects such as a treasure chest of nuts and bolts, a bar area, barrels and oil containers, pipes and even a secret hatch leading the player to the sea surrounding the boat if I get enough time. I love easter eggs in games as they are a reward to players who spend time exploring and really getting the most out of games so I think it would be awesome if I could include one in my game arena (being the secret hatch).

When I include my statue in my game I'd like it to be sunken within the sea just outside of the game arena and in view through glass windows. The statue will look like it has been sunken for a while, with moss on parts and perhaps a little broken too.

I drew this simple one-point perspective drawing to demonstrate my skills when drawing with perspective in mind. One-point perspective drawings are created by drawing everything from a point on the paper by using straight lines protruding from the point.

I decided to draw a sci-fi scene from inside a space ship, with a window looking out to a nearby planet on the left and multiple doors columned on the right hand side of the drawing. Lights align the ceiling and arrows are aligned along on the window. This scene worked very well to show the different perspective of the corridor as I drew everything to become much smaller the closer it reached the point, staying true to the straight lines I drew from the point in the middle of the paper.



I then added a character within my scene to exaggerate the different perspectives even more as the robot is walking out of the foremost door.

Using water colour pencils I was able to add colour to the drawing, however I feel that I should have added more shading to exaggerate the perspectives more as that would help it look more 3D and realistic.

My Mission: To create a bad-ass original design for a robot!

The first place I looked when gaining inspiration for my very own robot was, of course, Machinarium! I've always loved the style of this game and fell in love with the little robot himself as soon as I set eyes on him, he's just so simple yet so freakin' adorable! I love how Amanita Design have cleverly used different rust-like colours to give each robot some depth and character about them, such as with the main characters girlfriend robot, who appears to wear a striped dress. This made me realise that I didn't want to go over the top with my robot design as it's the simplicity that draws me to these robots and, in my opinion, gives them more character as a lot of them are worn and rusted, with some even falling apart!

Machinarium robot sketches

My Robotic Doodles

Originally I was studying Digital Film and Screen Arts, with a strong passion for film in a new-age sense. Living in a world where reaching out to the other side of the world is just a keyboard click away I see the film medium as the best way to reach out to these people, through websites such as YouTube or Twitch we can easily reach out to one another, influencing and connecting with others lives through a screen and hopefully having a positive impact on them. This is the kind of film that I have a passion for; it's the social side, the interactive nature, the communication and impact that happens around the video itself.

However, since starting the course I began noticing that the interactivity that I so craved to learn and innovate with does not reside within the film industry already and so cannot be taught by a film-based course. As it's not the professional quality that I'm looking to delve further into, it's the impact that I can have on viewers and the community that I can create through offering a more interactive and immersive experience with my videos.

I love games. I've always loved games. They offer what films never have, a chance to become the starring role; to become truly immersed in the narrative by developing emotional attachments with the in-game characters and ultimately controlling the flow, or even nowadays, the outcome of the narrative itself.

So perhaps I've been following the wrong route and instead of trying to bring new interactive elements into the already well-established film industry, I could take what I so love about film and bring it with me on my journey through understanding and experimenting with the interactive and immersive elements that are offered to me within the gaming industry.

Plus, being able to create 3D worlds, draw 2D characters and put them all together using object oriented programming to tell an immersive narrative is pretty darn cool!

Photography is something that I have little experience with; a medium that I haven't explored. My areas of interest are usually fixated on evoking emotion through the interactivity of digital media, so where do I start when producing a photography project? Look for inspiration!

Mama and Grace - 1953. Where Daddy was killed.

Village Life in Vanuatu "We found this boy smiling at us from a hole in the jungle. A nearby adult explained that he'd just gone through his circumcision ritual, which meant he had to wear anamba (a huge penis-sheath), mud makeup, and hang out in holes for a week or so (this guy's English was about as good as our Bislama, so I'm not totally sure on the details)." -Ransom Riggs  By reading Ransom Riggs explanation of the photograph it seems a lot less sinister and upsetting, this shows how interesting interpretation can be as I was under the belief that this boy was upset and hiding.