Garshasp Development Blog » Environment Art

New screens

syros — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:10:57 +0000

So we decided to come up with some updates at the far end of the production phase.

As you can see above we got new beauty shot for Garshasp with his mystical mace. This is our in game model rendered in 3ds max along with some paint over that our concept artist “Soheil” has done on it.

And here are some in game screen shots which came out right from Iranvij, our Level editor tool. I managed to grab some props too.

Hope you like it.

World Creation Paradox

fassihi — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:31:32 +0000

For months we saw ourselves come to the same major question whenever we wanted to plan for the level creation tasks. The question was basically, “Where should we start from?”.

There are always at least three main poles which need proper attention in order for a well balanced output, these are 1- Visuals (Graphics) 2- Game Play (Fun factor) 3 – Technical Feasibility (coding). If you want to create a level which looks great, is really fun to play and can be created considering the technical constraints or project constraints, then the three elements seem like they form a closed loop and it would be hard to decied where exactly the process should start from. Should we worry about the visuals first? Should we see what we can achieve technically and constrain the rest or should we consider the fun gameplay elements and then add the other layers?

There seems to be no strict answer to the above issue and after lots of discussions, we came up with a specific methodology to perform which we are following currently. Seeing a presentation from this years GDC from the Bioware team which was used for Mass Effect 2 strengthened our selected methodology.

What we are doing currently is to come up with the general visual concepts first, prepare the first phase for the level map which is 2D and then a 3D spatial map using boxes, fill it with the first stage of 3D models, play test the crude (un-textured) level in the game and implement the necessary code features and then re-iterate the loop by polishing the concepts, the 3D elements and gameplay testing and level design tweaking. We have planned for four iterations. So far it seems to be a good choice although we need more time to really be able to tune the methodology and level development pipeline.

This task is very critical since it requires very close collaboration between members of different departments. Its quite fun also.

Environment 3D contents

syros — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:27:50 +0000

As far as our phased Environment building is still in it’s second phase, i should point out one or two issues. here is the pros and con’s of this method in my point of view;

Pros:

-If you are able to guess what was in the designer’s mind when drawing those lines on paper or a 2d digital image!!!, you won’t get a headache making meshes for the first phase of 3D environment contents.

Cons:

-If you are not able to guess what was in the designer’s mind when drawing those lines on paper or a 2d digital image!!!, you will get a headache making meshes for the first phase of 3D environment contents.

this two main factors of the phase two, resonant with each other to the point of total agony. the main issue is that he should have some meshes to test the game play but he don’t know yet what exactly he wants. may be all these words have one big reason:

“don’t work late at nights, especially alone, with music turned off!!”

and a word for the game play designers testers: as far as making just a very rough 3d sketch of the Environment, I have seen the huge amount of time needed to make these enormous levels PLAYABLE , apart from the final 3d contents.

should we revise the plans???