At one point during the game’s development, we were planning on having the Destrozar shoot bullets from its smaller side turrets.  I made a bullet texture that I used for both the bullets and the particle that emitted when the bullets hit a surface.  The bullets themselves were just three or four intersecting planes with the material assigned to them.

It was pretty cool having Destrozar relentlessly shoot at you, but we ended up not including the feature in the final build.  That said, the functionality was still in the game, so I turned it back on for the sake of the video.  I also made it so the shooting was continuous and endless, because why not? 😛

One of my Grapple tasks was to work on the minimap.  Originally, I was simply going to outline the borders of the mountains and buildings, but I quickly realized there could be some problems with that.  There were many areas of higher elevation that covered navigable ground below them.  The most noticeable example was a large platform far above that covered the ground below it–ground that Amina could (and would) easily and commonly walk on.  If I used this platform as part of the map’s border, and Amina were to walk below it, it would look like she were breaching the bounds of the level.  Likewise, the game’s multistory buildings had the same issue with their multiple roofs.  So the question became, “How can I design the map so that Amina never hits an ‘invisible wall’ or breaches a wall?”

One idea I had was to outline different borders at different elevations.  Then perhaps in game, all of the elevation layers would be visible in the minimap with those closest to Amina’s height being the most opaque and the ones farthest from her height being the most transparent.  The opacity of the different borders would constantly change as Amina grappled through the level.  This way, all of the borders would always be visible on the map, but only the most relevant borders (those at Amina’s height) would be emphasized.

So how could I accomplish this?  I had the level in Maya, so I needed to adjust the near/far clip planes of the top camera.  That, however, quickly proved to be a hassle that I didn’t want to deal with… at least not by guessing and checking the clip plane values.  It was taking far too long.  If only there were a way to visualize the clip planes’ positions, then I’d at least be able to see how far off my guesses were…  I couldn’t find a way, so I made one myself (if there is a native way in Maya, then I feel silly >_>).

I created two planes and tied their Y positions to the values of the camera’s clip planes with simple expressions.  Now I was not only able to visualize the clip planes, but I was also able to move them directly (versus typing in a value, hitting enter, typing in another value, hitting enter, etc.).  This setup made the whole process infinitely easier and faster.  I could simply sandwich the area that I wanted to outline between the two planes, and I would get just the lines I needed without the outlines of objects above or below that area covering the lines I wanted.

With this setup I rendered out the outlines of different elevations in the level and then drew over them in Photoshop to give the map a hand drawn look.

Unfortunately due to time constraints, we were not able to try out the map transitioning between elevations.  Regardless, this method did help in creating the final map, plus it was a neat and effective solution (I thought :P) to a problem that I had not only encountered in this task but also in the past (and likely in the future).

Here is the work I did on Grapple’s minimap and its icons.  The minimap took more work than I was expecting, so I made a neat little setup in Maya to help with that.  The icons were more straight forward–one for Amina, one for power lanterns, one for objectives, one for a lantern thief holding a lantern, and one for a lantern thief not holding a lantern.  These were all mock-up icons, so they are not the final ones used in the game.

We had thought about making a new grappling reticle, so I have a sheet of redesign concepts for that (we ended up just having it change colors depending on what was being grappled to).

We also wanted a way to see the lantern thieves aside from the beams of light, especially since we had so many tall buildings, and it wasn’t uncommon for the beams of light to be occluded by the buildings.  I came up with a design, and tried out a bunch of color variations for it .  The design felt too Halo-y for me, but I had to move onto other tasks :-/

After we had tried and discussed a few other options for conveying damage and Amina’s health, we decided to try some kind of red flash onscreen when hit.  We did have our hesitations with that option as it is so overused by games, but we tried it anyway.  Maybe we could push it more towards blood/dirt/oil getting onto the camera or something…  At first, I just made a blood splatter image  in Illustrator so that we could see kind of what it would look like.  After that got fairly good feedback, I made a more grungy looking image to replace it.  Then in the shader, I was able to give it a dissolving effect when it appeared/disappeared.

This is a flyer I made for the big, joint public playtest we had for our Capstone games.  Members from each team went to UCF one day, and we set our games up in the student union for people to play, test, and give feedback.  We handed these flyers out to get people’s attention.

The smaller image (with the date, time, and place) was the actual flyer.  We cut out the individual games from the larger image and placed them on our tables to label which area was for which game.

I did not create the logos or character art (artists below).  I did, however, assemble the pieces from the different teams, lay them out, and give them some nice backgrounds 😛

Warp Derby: Ryoma Tazi

Pitch Jumper: Jen Melnick and Kyle Prichett

Eshcerreal: Miguel Espinoza and Caitlyn Trout

Grapple: Karen McCarthy