Finally! A look at Carnival

So I'd been holding off on showing off screenshots of Carnival for a while. But now that the Senior Project Fair is over, I may as well show off where it stands. I was going to post a video as well, but I think I'll hold off on that for a bit. At least until I've got some rather major bugs sorted out and a few extra animations and particle effects thrown in.

Be sure to check out Marie's blog as well. She was responsible for all of the character, armour and weapon textures, and definitely bumped our overall visual quality up a couple notches.

 The two trainer screens - currently missing skill descriptions. The icon designs were done by Lee Pakkala, the UI elements and background by Marie Deslauriers, and the two trainers were illustrated by me. I also was responsible for adding the interactivity in Flash with Actionscript 2.0 and connecting it to the Unrealscript side of things.

The gear and abilities loadout screens, just before a player enters a server game. Currently missing weapon/armour descriptions, and more specific details. Icons are dragged across from the table on the right and dropped on slots on the left. Armour and weapons are equipped in real-time on the character preview. The player can also click and drag on the preview area to rotate the model. The armour and weapons were modeled by Lee Pakkala. The character mesh was modeled and textured by Marie Deslauriers, who was also responsible for painting the weapon and armour textures.

Some in-game screenshots. I tried taking these on my own, holding two controllers and hitting the screen capture button as quickly as I could. I would have liked to use our spectator camera to angle the shots more effectively, but unfortunately one of the major bugs we are currently experiencing made that impossible. The environment was modeled and textured by Nick Zou, although I retextured certain pieces (most notably the walls immediately surrounding the arena, and the structures into which the doors are set). Animations were posed by Hana Ameerah, Shahd AlFakhry and Nick Zou. I was responsible for taking those poses, tweaking them to ensure that they communicated their respective actions effectively enough, and also set their timings. Again, HUD UI was designed by Marie Deslauriers and the icons were the work of Lee Pakkala. All of the programming - game mechanics, HUD, networking, as well as the construction of levels, animation trees, particle effects, etc. were handled by me.

Hopefully if I am given the chance to work on a project like this again in the future, I will be able to disperse the programming and game-engine-related responsibilities across more team members, instead of taking them on myself. I would have also certainly liked to have worked on more of the art and asset creation, but unfortunately, I did not have the time.

Carnival UI

It's ten at night, and I've got a group meeting with my senior project advisor tomorrow at 1:00PM. Looks like I ought to get something related to my section of the work done. Needless to say, I haven't been spending enough time on senior project this week, but the work that I have done has more than anything been related more to other group members' tasks. For example, testing out rigging and skinning on the character models, and sifting through one of the environments (that had way too many edges simply lying around doing nothing, and was not built to UDK scale).

So tonight, I'm going to try and bring in a Photoshop mockup of the game's login screen into flash and have it running in UDK. I'm a bit uncertain as to whether or not I'll be able to run it on my laptop and demonstrate it during my meeting but... That's unimportant for the time being. So instead, here's the design mockup!

Initially I was rather bothered by the fact that I had to work with that logo (credit goes to Marie Deslauriers). I'd made an alternate version, because I felt that the logo was lacking contrast and wasn't particularly readable. Still, general opinion sided with Marie's version, so I went ahead and did what I could to bring some contrast in, and keep the stone texture from overpowering the other elements on the page. Here's a comparison between her version of the logo and mine - they definitely cater to a different sort of game, mine (the right side) being somewhat more cartoony.

After a fair bit of critique from a handful of people (mainly Khuyen), I ended up changing a few details (as you can see below). That was mostly for my own sanity, since I genuinely did like the design, and wanted to see it brushed up as well as it could be - even if we weren't going to use it for the game's UI.

Anyways, it's time to get myself acquainted with Scaleform 4.0, and reacquainted with Actionscript 3.0. Thank goodness the November 2011 release of UDK includes support for Scaleform4, because I was not looking forward to having to deal with AS2.0. Not at all.