Chinchillachan and the Staircase of Destiny

[kay_Eva]

Hello, I haven't been on 3d forums for a few months because I took some time to study coding. Recently, I feel that I have gotten to a point where I know enough about coding to make a simple game. So I started to think of a SIMPLE game I could try to make on my own for the sake of practice. And at the same time I happened to meet 3 interesting persons recently who are both funny and passionate about gaming. So I decided to make a game whose premise is based on their lives.

The game is about a 20 something girl with repressed memories. She was traumatized as a youth by a family member but she has always forced herself to forget, by telling herself, "Just forget the past, just forget the past". Until one day a chinchilla falls off the fireescape of her building where she lives and lands on top of her head. This forces her memories of her past back into her mind. "There was a game... of sadism and incomprehension...It was a computer game...I wasn't forced to play it, but somehow, I wasn't able to stop...I remember... mountain paths... a castle moat...and...there were staircases"

And when she says, "staircases" the chinchilla starts to speak. I will spare you the dialogue, but they get transported to a fantasy world where both Chinchillachan and the girl must confront the evil behind the staircases.

If the plot doesn't make sense to you, then GOOD! You've passed the sanity test

Gameplay wise, the game is a simple platformer with simple platforming puzzles and nothing that a newbie coder would get too confused about. Visually, I am also a newbie there as well, so I will be taking this project as an oppurtunity to practice basic modeling/sculpting/texturing stuff as well. But this time I am trying to complete the project as a whole rather than trying to make perfection of ANY sort - However getting some critiques might not be such a bad thing. Sometimes I look at my screen so much that I start to hallucinate things. Like last night I could have sworn that one of my model's legs was longer than the other...but the symmetry plane is on and... well, if you see something that's really bad do tell me, cuz as I said, I think my eyes may be playing tricks on me along the way as I stare at my screen so much.

I will post the project's progress here. So you can feel free to critique or share wisdom. I will try my best. This game is going to be freeware. And it's simple enough to where I can finish it. I think that gameplay wise it should take about 15 minutes to complete. It is going to be a simple platformer as I said, but with cutscenes. Cuz I love cutscenes. But as I said, the focus is the project as a whole, not perfection of any particular aspect. If I tried to make it perfect, I'm not sure if I'd even be capable of finishing it. But yes perhaps your critiques could make it better than what it would be otherwise!

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Okay first up, is "The Girl" herself.

Age: 20 something

Height: 5 feet 6 inches

Right now, she is fairly light with a detail level of about 140k triangles. I think I will have to up the detail level now. I've already separated the area of the neck and head to a different layer of the voxtree. So I will probably put the detail up to about 300k triangles just for that area before taking it higher.

[Tony Nemo]

You are off to a good start!

[L'Ancien Regime]

I'm impressed. I've made a couple of attempts to learn Python and failed so if you can code a game, any game that's pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

[moska]

hey!

are you using unity? that a good one to start! and what language you learned?

the girl looks good to me. finish her.

[blackant Master]

actually, i fink she's look more of a woman from30-40 years old than a 20 girl...

i fink you should dress her differently, with more modern clothes

[kay_Eva]

@Tony Nemo and Regime - Thank you

@Moska - I'm not using unity and the language I studied was the scripting languages Python and Lua, I'm not perfect with them, but finally figured out the things that I didn't know before that are important for game development, just the simple task of swapping and storing information between classes is what had been holding me back in the coding department, but finally grasped it recently

@Blackant Master - thanks for the input. The clothes she is wearing are mostly there for me to understand how she looks clothed. I think her in game costume will be a simple high collared creme colored dress blouse with one button open at the very top. And then a pair of big legged shorts that come down slightly below the middle of the thigh.

I said before this was a simple game project. And simple it is. There are only 2 humanoid models needed for the game and both will be based on the current girl model I'm working on right now. Then there is a chinchilla model. And after that, it is all inorganic things. I was thinking that cubes are all the rage nowadays so cubes will play prominent roles as the antagonists of this game - smart huh?

I am currently here with the girl model. As I stared at this model I wanted to push her further and further towards toughness. And I took screenshots of the many many iterations of her face and one of them I pushed to the point where it looked like it had tiger's blood because she had Charlie Sheen's scowl on her face. I liked it, but I thought that other people might misread her as overly masculine or angry. So I dialed it back and she started to look a bit like a Disney princess.

It looked OK I guess. But it wasn't natural for me. I was thinking myself away from my natural sensibilities. So I just went back to a Charlie Sheen scowl version and applied a few insights I got from the Disney version and this is where she currently is.

I look at the model one second and I love it. The next I think I aught to change everything. So yes, this is what it means to eat failure for breakfast. I didn't need a sculpting video to tell me that though. But I feel good about the direction its taken. Needs work.

I posted 3 of the same head under slightly different lighting. Right now I'm in surface mode but I'll have to go back to voxels once I pinch and smooth and refine this surface mode. And then go back into Surface mode for the final I guess.

[LJB]

Good start Kay

I did a little paint over hope you dont mind. Looks like too much fat here, We need to be able to read the Skull a little better in those areas.

[kay_Eva]

Hey thanks a LOT LJB! That was exactly what I needed to see/hear. When I stare at a model long enough I kind of get a warped lens. The truth is that I had a feeling this would occur and that's why I saved about 50 versions of the same face as I was sculpting. I went back and looked at the earlier versions and realized that I had the cheek bones more "normal" and the proportions of the face generally more what you'd expect of a female face, but then I kept pushing it further into a series of not very well connected extremes. If you want to see what I was probably sort of aiming for (I actually saw this pic after your reply) check out this link: http://fav.me/d494v4m - this is what I saw in my mind's eye but didn't have the skills to get it right so far

And my lack of understanding of the face caused all kinds of problems because the various features on the face ended up being disconnected from each other unlike the megaman illustration and you were right it was because the checkBONE was in the wrong location which makes it seem like fat. But then there are also the forehead and eyes and all sorts of things.

So I went back to an earlier version and payed more careful attention to the cheekbones. It's not as detailed as what I was going for but I think it works. I would like to return to the other version once I have a better understanding of anatomy, but for now I'll stick with what is working for me. Actually I'm making this game as a "gift" to some people so I know that I can't allow myself to stand still.

Anyway, I'm going to add details soon, but here are the proportions which took me a while to find them.

[kay_Eva]

I tried to show some wrinkles. I used the build brush in surface mode. Then pinched some of them.

If this point of the model had a theme song it would be, Boombdaboomdaboom boom, super bass (repeat)

[Tony Nemo]

"Boombdaboomdaboom boom, super bass (repeat)" begs an animation when the model is complete.

[kay_Eva]

Very fast in game render. I'm excited! The autotopo mesh is so smooth. I didn't put the correct settings for the face, but just about everything else mesh wise is ready for animation. This was just a fast test. 3d Coat did a perfect bake and autotopo.

[kay_Eva]

Just a quick DY-NAMIC POSE! from an armature I spent 5 minutes or so making in order to see the deformations.

The deformations from autopo are really good. And the auto weight paintings from blender are really good too.

I need to work on the model some more.

[shape shifter]

This all looks very cool you work at a very low res to begin with but your final model looks awesome it must be a pretty fast work flow for you:) great boots by the way and I like the character alot:)

[kay_Eva]

Thanks shapeshifter, but that's not my final model, it's more of the first draft. I'm not in a rush, because I want to see whether the LiveClay updates will come out soon so I can take full advantage of LiveClay before I finish if possible. Because I need all the help I can get.

Anyway, I started making some textures, here is the first one, I will probably post about 10 more in my next post. That's my personal goal for today.

It is a brick of some sort. Probably not the kind of brick you'd see in real life. But I like the patterns and the colors. There is no dirt or wear and tear as there probably should be. But I can edit that today. Or leave it as it is. I haven't decided. It's not just the texture, but how the texture fits in the scene. I've been looking at other games and a lot of their textures are simpler than it might seem.