Week 1 - Introduction

Upon entering semester two of our course Games Development, Red Ember Games are bringing our ideas to reality by developing the game "Haven". During the previous semester the team developed the concept of Haven creating an idea and brought our idea to life with a paper prototype and mood board.

Also during this process we decided upon the art style that would be used in Haven. We decided on a modern trending art style called "Poly Art". To get used to creating 3D assets in this art style, Conor and Garreth spent this week generating models. After getting used to the art style, Conor and Garreth can then begin modelling environmental features in the coming weeks.

Below are sample models created this week:

What is Poly Art Style?

Poly Art Style or Low Poly Art Style is vast becoming a new trend in the games developing world. Poly Art Style uses a minimum amount of polygons to create world models. Rather than smoothing out the polygons, we render each of the facets of the model leaving a box like appearance to create something more abstract instead of trying to represent reality. The models created using Poly Art Style are modern, fashionable and approachable to all ages and it is also very cost efficient on our GPU's.

Every 3D modeller takes a careful approach when making assets to use the least amount of polygons whilst achieving the quality they want in that asset. With Poly Art Style, there are no anxieties about this as the asset can be created using a minimum amount of polygons and adding maps such as normal and diffuse to add a higher degree of detail.

With Poly Art Style, although it has simplistic features, lighting, texturing and shadow effects are used to create a beautifully sophisticated model.

Here are a list of games that use the new modern art style:

Toca Nature:

http://tocaboca.com/app/toca-nature/

Shelter 2:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/275100/


Why use Poly Art Style?

Poly Art Style is a modern trending art style that is distinguishable by its box like appearance. We chose Poly Art Style because of its approachable characteristics. As Poly Art Style is child friendly, it is suitable for our target audience of children ages 8-12 years plus.

Below are some images to describe visually what we want to achieve for Haven. As our game is set on a tropical island, it is important for lighting and colour to be vibrant and colourful. With Poly Art Style, you can see from the images below, that flat colours and shadows works perfectly. The lighting is bright and compliments the colour palette that Haven uses which is soft and gentle colours. The aim of creating our environment for Haven is to have a beautiful island capable of being used as a relaxation source.

Environmental & Creature mood Board:





Level Design Mood Board:

Normal practice to create Poly Art Styled Artifacts?

• Create a basic primitive in a modelling package. 
• Turn off “smoothing” to lower the polygons. 
• Use “Editable Poly” to modify the shape as desired. 
• Use “Extrude” to add more polygons as needed. 
• Use Modular Modelling to add features to the model such as leaves etc... 
• “Attach” all objects together. 

In our team there are two 3D artists. With this, it is important to set a specific art style as a guideline when creating our assets. The mood board could then be used as a referral when determining the look and feel we wanted to achieve in the game.


Island Generation

To get started on the island's development, Nicola created a terrain in 3dsMax and Mudbox that would be inevitably used as the platform to add our environmental assets. Previously, Nicola attempted to procedurally generate the island in Unity, However this came with complications and with a narrow time scale opted to sculpt the island. This was to be scoped to an appropriate size, large enough to enable some exploitative game-play, small enough to polish for our eventual beta. The layout needed to be interesting enough and subtly lead the player around the island so that they complete the chosen quest for implementation into our game. It was decided that the terrain would also use the art style chosen.

Below is an image of the first iteration for the base of the island: