U46 Evaluation

Scenario

The National Space Centre based in Leicester is the Uk’s Largest planetarium with a unique 3D Simulator Experience and an iconic 42m high Rocket Tower. Recently, the company's partners have negotiated with the owners of the rights to one of the earliest video games made, ‘Spacewar’ and Leicester University have set up a competition designed to draw new customers to the museum facilities. The competition is to make a video game which could be played in one of its six interactive galleries.

Spacewar! is one of the earliest video games and was developed on the PDP-1 computer at MIT in 1962, fifteen years before The Golden Age of Video Games. It was also an important early prototype of computer graphics techniques that later became standard in the industry.

Leicester University has set the competition on behalf of the Partners with a pre-entry qualifiers brief. It’s your job to produce a digital response for an up-to-date videogame level using the 1962 retro video game Spacewar as your inspiration. The winner would then use a 2D game engine to build the game. The competition is designed to attract a new audience to ‘The National Space Centre’.

This was a project which i enjoyed doing and got done surprisingly fast. the game idea i came up with was to have to space ships player controlled 2 planets which would be the bases with the goal to destroy the other players planet with your ship and while this happens the planets will be obrbeting the central star. one of the ideas i came was to have the missiles effected by the planets gravity to add more challenge to the game.

i desided to try and go for a pre rendered art style both for speed and to make the game look diffrent from what i expected most people will go for i.e retro 16bit etc. the first parts i made was the planets where i made a earth like and saturn like to make them easy to distinguish between in game and i animated them and rendered them however my first renders at 100x100 were to low so i uped it to 500x500. i only made the hd earth like a gif so the saturn like is the old 100x100 version.

i like how the planets came out though the earth like could have done with a better texture.

next thing i worked on was the spaceships i did these by 3dmodeling them in 3dsmax then painting them in Photoshop 3dmode then cleaned it up in 2d mode. then i rendered it in 3dsmax.

i like how the ships came out though i should have turned the brightness of the light settings down on the first ship and on the 2nd i forgot to use the smouth tool which is why the main body dose not look right.

after this i made the astriods which was super easy i made a ball then just messed with the noises tool till i got the shape i wanted did that 9 times and got this.

while i do like them they dont fit 100% with the games art style but still do the job and overall im happy with them.

next thing i made was the star which was kinda a pain the texture was not too much of a problem but i couldent get it to glow in 3dsmax no matter what i tryed so in the end i did it in unreal engine 4 and then screenshot the star for use in my game which came out ok but not great.

next i worked on the engine animations and once i was happy with them i copyed and modified them for other ships and in the end the missle. i made 3 states Low Mid and High power each state had 2 slightly diffrent leangh flames which it would go between to make it look less static. i made these with the paint brush and smudge tools then just resized them for each state. you can see below it cycle between them all.

next i worked on the projectiles which was the red lazer and missle. the red lazer was just a red blob with the glow tool in photoshop to give it the effect i did. and the missle was a extruded cone textured in 3dsmax with the texture tools which was the first time i used them.

final asset i made is the explosion which was made once again in Photoshop with alot of smudge tool.

finally i did some more work on the ui and build a animation in powerpoint. this started off as experimenting with uis then emilio metioned i can make animations in powerpoint which turned out not to be too hard and in the end i made this.

this animation demonstrates my game idea pretty well though its a shame objects do not rotate on the path which looks odd but i dont know how to fix.

Feedback

Emilio Helped me by answering all my questions with U46 lO1 and was very patient as well as gave me great feedback so i could find out what i was missing.

Emilio also helped me animate my project in Microsoft PowerPoint which was very helpful and the animation you see above is the result that is the first ever 1 iv done in PowerPoint.

Emilio also gave me good feedback helping improve my idea and letting me know what i should improve on my sprites and animations helping me know where to focus my effrts.