Class:
PIE 1 Art- Concept Art

Assignment:
Finish your Metroid ship redesign based on the winning value range/design from the previous assignment. Include color, lighting, and shading.

Votes of 18 students from previous assignment (design – number of votes):
Design 01 – 0
Design 02 – 0
Design 03 – 3
Design 04 – 0
Design 05 – 5
Design 06 – 1 (I THINK this is the one I voted for…)
Design 07 – 3
Design 08 – 2
Design 09 – 3

Description:
Design 05 from the previous assignment won. I started to color the ship in Photoshop, but I couldn’t get it to look right (particularly the lighting), so I moved over to Maya instead. I tweaked the model of the ship, I UVed it, I made the color and incandescence maps in Photoshop, and lit the scene in Maya. After rendering the result, I put it back into Photoshop and cleaned it up a bit, added the little alternate views on the side, and added the background. Since this was just going to be used as a render, I didn’t worry about fitting all of the UVs on one map. Rather, I split them up so that I could have good resolution for all of the ship’s parts. Though I suppose I could have just made one really big map… Hmm…

Class:
PIE 1 Art- Animation

Assignment:
Create a skeleton for a model in Maya.

Description:
We were given a lowres model to use, but we could use other models if we wanted. Since I have this Ganondorf model that I hadn’t rigged yet, I decided to use him :D. After giving our villain here some bones, I just put him in a simple pose for presentation.

Note: I did NOT create this model (I wish I did…). I did, however, create the skeleton 😛

Class:
Rapid Prototype Production (RPP) 1

Game:
The Decision

Assignment:
You will be split into teams of 4-5 consisting of producers, programmers, and artists. In two weeks, create a game that tells a story.

Description:
The Decision is a game about an unremarkable young man and his girlfriend who are down on their luck and are running out of money to live on.  One day, the girlfriend convinces the young man that they should rob a friend of hers, so they decide to pay him a visit.  Because the entrance to the apartment complex is boarded shut, they climb the fire escape on the side of the building, and break the friend’s window.  Apparently he isn’t home, but the girlfriend insists that there’s a safe somewhere in the room.  After finding the money, the two hear someone else’s footsteps in the apartment.  The young man realizes that this “friend” is one of the city’s most infamous drug dealers, Syd!  Syd is furious and chases the two out of the apartment, to the building’s rooftop, and across the rooftops of nearby buildings.  The girlfriend has had enough!  She pulls a gun on Syd and asks the young man what he wants to do.  Should they give the money back and let bygones be bygones, or should they just take the money and leave?

Originally, we wanted to have the player make several big decisions throughout the game that would significantly change the story.  The biggest decision (the decision that the game’s name refers to) would be the player’s decision at the end of the game to either give up or get away.  We had also wanted to tell the story in a non-linear fashion.  The game would begin with the last few seconds of the story (chronologically) with the three characters on the rooftop, the girlfriend pointing the gun at Syd, and her asking the young man what he wanted to do.  The player would make the decision, and the game would jump back in time to where the story starts (the young man getting a call from his girlfriend in his apartment).  The story would progress linearly until the player got to the decision again, at which point, the game would take over, remembering the choice the player made at the beginning of the game, and conclude with a cutscene dependent on the player’s decision.  If the player chose to get away, the girlfriend would shoot Syd, and the young man and his girlfriend would get away with the money.  If the player chose to give up, the girlfriend would shoot the young man, and Syd and the girlfriend would run away with the money (we had originally intended to more heavily imply a past relationship between Syd and the girlfriend).

We wanted the wording of the choices to be clear enough to convey the moral dilemma of this otherwise innocent young man while at the same time being ambiguous/misleading as to the actual outcome of the decision.  If the player were feeling greedy and decided to take the money, we didn’t want the player (or the young man) to expect that the girlfriend would shoot Syd.  If the player didn’t feel that what the young man and his girlfriend were doing was the right way to get some extra money and decided to give up, we didn’t want the player (or, again, the young man) to expect that the girlfriend would shoot her boyfriend.

Unfortunately, many of these plans were lost in development, mostly due to time restraints, so neither the story nor the decision are really as strong as we wanted them to be.  Regardless, it still came out to be a pretty decent two-week game.

We never made a web-friendly or Mac-friendly build of the game, but for those of you with Windows, you can download the game here. There’s no installation, just unzip the file, and run the .exe.

Controls:

• WASD to move (up, left, down, right respectively)
• E to pickup/drop objects and perform actions
• Spacebar to jump
• Shift (hold) to run
• Press Alt and F4 together to quit the game.

Credits:
Artists – Ryoma Tazi and Adam Grayson
Producers – Arlen Eldridge and Paul Weiler
Programmer – Evan Cookinham

Class:
PIE 1 Art- Modeling

Assignment:
Use Maya to finish texturing and lighting the Metroid ship redesign that you’ve modeled and UVed in the previous assignments. You may use one color map, one specular map, one emissive map, and one normal map. Each map can be up to 2048×2048.

Description:
I based the design and color scheme of the ship off of both Zero Suit Samus and Samus’ Fusion Suit. The scratches near the tail are intended to be from Ridley. Also, there are certain parts of the ship that really remind me of Feraligatr (unintentionally) :P. Maybe the Metroid character artists were big on Pokémon at the time…

Tris: 8,298 (I THINK the tri limit was increased, but I don’t remember…)
Maps: Color (2048×2048), Incandescence (2048×2048), Normal (2048×2048)

Class:
PIE 1 Art- Animation

Assignment:
Create two walk cycles in Flash using Flash’s bones. One animation should be a stationary walk cycle, and the other should move across the screen. These animations should be more detailed and complete than those in the previous assignment.

Description:
For this assignment, I wanted to use Kirby again, but I didn’t want to just recreate my PAP animation from the side, so I gave him giant robot legs.

Class:
PIE 1 Art- Concept Art

Assignment:
Use your one of your top three winning Metroid ship redesigns from the previous assignment and create nine different value range studies for it. Try stick with the ship that most looks like it would fit in the Metroid universe (from your top three). Use the value ranges to create designs on the ship as well.

Votes of 18 students from previous assignment (design – number of votes):
Design 01 – 3
Design 02 – 1
Design 03 – 2
Design 04 – 0
Design 05 – 1
Design 06 – 2
Design 07 – 3 (I voted for this one)
Design 08 – 1
Design 09 – 5

Description:
Design 09 from the previous assignment won. Since the previous assignment only called for a black and white silhouette, I hadn’t completely modeled the ship. Also, a lot of the shapes were “off.” What I mean by that is that the ship looked more or less correct from the angle that I rendered the image, but some of the shapes were distorted or floating off in space and whatnot, so I had to actually finish modeling the ship itself first. I then took the silhouette render (from the previous assignment) and the shaded render (seen below) into Photoshop and started assigning values and making designs out of them.

Finally, we printed these out (the last image below) and hung them up. Then we picked our one favorite redesign from each person’s work. The votes were tallied up, and whichever redesign got the most votes was the one we were to work on in the next assignment (in the case of a tie, the artist chose which one he/she wanted to work on). Which one do you like the best? 🙂