Towards the end of the project we haven't posted much, I'm going to be posting a few things we have completed.

Finished grass and long grass tilesets

Cave and mountain tileset

Boat deck tiles

There are seaweed and new shell tiles, rock tiles, palm tree tiles, crab tile, flower tiles etc. that I don't have a copy of anymore so I couldn't upload.

-Josh

IMAGE DUMP

havent really posted my progress for a while so im going to show some before and after pictures and just some of the newest finished tiles, here we go!

Ok, this is a cropped part of the woodland area obviously not finished yet hence the white areas. Next!

 

in a rush here so the image may be a tad bit small, this is my original tree before i realised it wasnt at the right angle for our game so i had to sort of squish it and angle it more, which will be shown in a sec.

heres the little munchkin tree which is a bit more angled and smaller so it fits better. more will have to come later. toodles!

-Luke

Ryanisamoose

Over the past few weeks, we haven't had many blog entries, mainly because of half-term. But partly the reason was because we've been doing a lot more work on CryEngine3 and less sketchbook work and less singular documents.


We've done quite a bit of the map, the only real problem is figuring out how to do certain things, the way we want them, such as shaping the terrain in the correct way to the maps and the film.

We need to do a few write up documents and evaluations and some more sketchbook work, which will hopefully turn up on here at some point soon, but mainly we're focusing on the map and 3D work.

Ryan has modelled and textured Wilson and imported it into CryEngine, and has been playing around with the size he needs to be.


And thats pretty much what we've been doing.

-Adam and Ryan.

Boats

Captain's log, Star date 9522.6

It's been a while since my last entry... Or any entry for that matter. I'm starting to wonder if it really is just me left... just me and my work.  I'm staying optimistic though, I know that someone WILL post work soon, at least... I hope.

Anyway, with that out of the way, here's a boat I did.#

I know what you're thinking. Too small, right?

Correct, I messed up the resizing and instead of it being x400 it's x100 the rest aren't though... I promise.

20 minutes later, "boat2" was born, I added windows, some shadow and a nifty little life preserver.

And this brings us to boat3, I added some smoke, planks and also change a few little things.

So, It got late. I was going to start with the washed up, shipwrecked version of the boat but I didn't have too much time. So, what I have done is mess around with a few colours and added some seaweed to get a rough idea of what it might look like.

These are I think, x300. I put in the other boat beneath it without smoke (it wouldn't fit) so you can kinda see the differences. I'll finish this, at some point, in the future, sometime. But for tonight I think I'm done.

Captain James T Kirk... signing off.

- Josh

Some more rock face tiles, I think this is all we will need, so for now the rocks are done. Next will be the inside of the cave.

- Josh

Some rock tiles I started for the mountain.

- Josh

The Wilson texture that me and Ryan worked on from the original volleyball texture, this is what we're going to be using for now, for the Wilson model Ryan is working on. When the entire model is complete a new texture might have to be made to accommodate the torn parts of the ball.

-Josh

I forgot to mention that the sand tiles have been chosen, they were one of the first things to be done, the top will be light sand the middle will be damp sand and the bottom will be wet sand, to ease the transition to the water.

And a little while after that I completed the entire sea tileset, I put the shape of the waves from the sand below the water so you can see them faintly to give a better transition between sand and sea.

It's a bit small because I saved it as the wrong size, the same as the sand tiles coming up.

When I had the sand and the water the next order of business was to do the transition between the two which took quite a while because there was some tricky corner tiles to do.

-Josh

I started a rock tile for our mountain and decided that it was looking a bit boring, so I created a few rock plants to go in the cracks in the mountain, here's one of them.

This is fully coloured

Here are some leaves that I decided to do ready for the plants I'm going to be creating, they're not coloured yet, just different shades of green so I can tell the leaves apart.

These are not fully coloured

-Josh

So, these following blog posts are going to be filled with quite a bit of work as I haven't updated in a while, I decided that the sand tile was a bit bland when used EVERYWHERE, so I decided to make a rock tile to help break up the boring repeated sand tile.

Then, what I found is that using the same rock tile OVER and OVER starts looking a bit repetitive too. SO! What I did was create multiple rock tiles, now it's starting to look a lot better.

Now I thought, this is starting to look good but the wet sand looks empty so I put some rocks on the wet sand but it just didn't look right, SO! what I did was create some shells to go on the wet sand tiles.

-Josh

Different Version's of Maps.

I've started and completed the Points of Interest and Item's map, and plan to do a Wildlife map, and Cave systems map. I've also completed some write up to help support the Points of Interest and item's map, including locations and explanations of what certain items do. It's the same scale as the Natural Geography map so the distance is the same.

Write up:

Points of Interest and Items map notes:

This is a list of some of the items and points of interest we’ve decided we want in the game, certain items have uses and some are useless, and almost all of the points of interest are from the film and have been left behind from Chuck Noland just slightly altered

Items:
FedEx Debris
FedEx Packages
Wilson
Ice skate
Ice skate spear

Points of Interest:
Tree Statue
Caves
Waterfalls
Cave Paintings
Amelia’s Crashsite
Help Sign
Rivers

FedEx Package Contents:

Useful Packages:

1. Leather Pointed Shoes

2. Walkman and CD’s

3. Playing Cards

4. Arts and Craft’s Kit

5. Ladies Clothing

6. Jar of Boiled Sweets

7. Poncho’s

Useless Packages:

8. Broken GPS (Reference to the director)

9. Smudged – Island Survival for Dummies.

10. Slinky

Western and Eastern Islands:

They will both have small caves inside the rocky outcrop, with an air pocket inside so the player will be able to swim underwater find the entrance and get inside and find certain items inside such as, Mushrooms, Moss and other rare hidden items that could spawn inside a closed of moist cave. The Eastern island will have a FedEx Package inside and the Western island will have a FedEx package just north in between it and the main land.

Amelia Earhart’s plane crash:

Disappeared on June 2^nd 1937 (Age 39) and was announced dead 2 years later, she disappeared over the Howland Island whilst she was attempting the first solo circumnavigation of the globe. Amelia was already renowned for solo flying across the Atlantic Ocean, and she also held many other awards for aviation.

She flew a custom Lockheed Model 10 Electra plane and has had many pictures next to it; her spouse was George P. Putnam.

We’ve decided our island is the perfect location for Amelia’s plane to of crashed on, she will be on the southern island with her plane crashed and she will have died on impact and have all of her equipment left on the southern island, she will be near a FedEx Package.

I plan to do the Wildlife map when Luke's research is completed and the cave systems map on Thursday or before Thursday. At home I'm going to start work on both maps and do some more concept drawings for things we will need to model.

-Adam

Sketchbook update

 I have taken some pictures from the file josh linked in the previous post and printed them out. We then all put the pictures in our sketch books and wrote a brief description of what is in the screen shot and why they are good for us to use as reference.

Here are a couple of the piuctures that all of us stuck in to our sketchbooks.

 -Ryan

Third attempt..

My third attempt at the water, I'm going to leave it for now and work on everything else.

- Josh

First and Second attempt at pixel sea

I started this yesterday morning but forgot to post and then touched it up a bit yesterday night and today, I'm still not 100% happy with it though so I may change it again.


                                                                         First attempt

Second attempt

- Josh

Map continued..

I've fully completed the map now, including a key, scale and a section of information explaining how big each area of the map is individually in length and width. We tested the size of the beach in CryEngine, having one half of the beach as 1 mile long. The results were quite shocking from one end to the other constantly sprinting it took about a day and a half (in-game time) to reach the end. We knew straight away everything had to be scaled down, So we decided if everything got scaled down to about 33% of the original it would probably still be big enough to let the player have enough content, without boring them with constant sprinting.

The map I drew was a basic natural geography map, it shows the size and scale of the map and how the areas are split up and a small section between each area that would be a transition e.g. the beach and jungle we'd have the sand right up to the edge of the trees with some palms coming out onto the beach to not make it look like, there's a block of sand and block of trees. Also some of the rocky areas around the coast of the island have some parts big enough to be explored, I've included three mini-islands one with a small jungle and two with small rock areas that will have caves.

I plan on drawing up another couple of maps, one for points of interest and where key parts of the map will be e.g. a waterfall or a clearing in a jungle, and another for where items and key resources will be, which I will draw in the near future and post here.

-Adam

Developments on Gameplay

We all spoke to Drew on Tuesday (20th Sept), and decided a few things about the game didn't make sense, or just didn't work well enough, so we decided to change a few things. I wrote down notes from the conversation and there is a few things we have definitely decided to change.

Conversation with Drew:

- Change to the main characters story, from a local fisherman on a small trawler because the open sea would be too deep for the size of boat we were thinking about, we've decided to make him a solo sailor circumnavigating the world, he's already been at sea for 90 days, and checks in every 12 hours. A storm hits and the character is swept overboard and his boat carries on the way it was headed and he had only just checked, he had his life preserver on with his basic equipment. After 12 hours passed he didn't check in, but because of how far the boat had travelled in the storm, chance of being found in a search is very low. The main character wakes up being washed upon the shores of the island.

- Basic equipment such as; a Knife, his life preserver, cigarettes, a Zippo Lighter, a GPS, Flare, Glowsticks, Whistle and a Flashlight.

- Coconuts that have fallen from a tree and left out in the sun ferment, and if drank make the player drunk, the more consumed the more drunk the player gets, this will be a good way of teaching the player they have to think about what items they are getting, and how they are using them.

- We want the intellect and originality of the player to be a large part of the game, and make it so if you do something in a clever way, and a way that makes sense it's easier, an example of this would be if a player found out that coconuts ferment, they would know they need fresh coconuts from a tree, so they would have to find a way of climbing the tree to pick the fresh ones out, if they decided to use no items to climb the tree, it could start a mini-game that makes you have to balance, whereas a player that would create a harness some how to support there weight, they would be quickly able to climb the tree with no obstacles.

-Adam

The Map

After Luke drew up the draft map, and we all decided on where everything on the island is from the film, and expanded the island slightly, I took the map home with me to draw up a larger size map (A4).

I've just completed the map, and wrote out the key, all is needed is to decide the scale of the map. I've also wrote notes from all the conversations which I'm going to finish typing up by the early hours of thursday.

-Adam

Goals for Thursday

We've all set some goals for thursday,

Ryan is going to be using the CryEngine to make a mock up of the map or just to practice using the software.

Adam will be re-drawing the map to a larger scale and hopefully type up the notes made in class.

Luke and Josh will be creating ATLEAST 1 piece of pixel art each out of the items we have decided upon.

- The Team

Modelling so far..

I've started modelling the fishing boat that our character would be on in the 3D version of the game, i've pretty much got it finished, just waiting for simon's help.

In the mean time, i've done a few drawings and development sketches and research on how the boat would work and look, I also wrote notes on the 2D side for Luke and Josh.

I'm going to start doing more sketches for the 3D side, and then start modelling some other assets.

-Adam

Sprite Resources

http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_making_fighting_game_sprite.php
http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=218

Some great resources for character sprites.

- Josh