The model itself is pretty low landing on 3350 polys (6592 tris). The guns were made from the toy Nerf Maverick and has a polycount of 2440 polys each (4823 tris). Both guns and main model uses 2048×2048 Diffuse,Normal and Specularmap. The guns could of course be lower but it’s nice for the close-up shots, I also tried object-space normal map for the first-time, noticed that I didn’t go well when mirrored and I learned why, it came out with less baking errors though. It was a great learning experience for the understanding of normal maps.

Bigger pic here

Workflow Pictures

Lost Island is an adventure / action / survival game (hardcore) played in first-person-perspective with rpg-elements. The game is quite simple, It’s up to you to survive a certain number of days on a deserted island waiting for rescue. The island is rich in plants and nutrition. It is a tropical island and much like the island found in Crysis. Graphically I’m thinking a dense jungle mixed with some savanna and old warehouses as evidence that people has been there before.

Intro:

Your eyes opens slowly, you hear a strong wind blowing . You see the railing you are leaning over, when you look up you see the ocean, it’s a really beautiful. The sun is slowly sinking into the sea at the horizon, making the ship you’re standing on colored in a warm orange color.

You say:
* Relaxed sigh* it was a long time since I felt this relaxed.
* You get the opportunity to turn his head and look more at the surroundings.
* You turn your head to look at the surroundings.
- That’s a nice view, this sure beats staying at home.
* Someone knocks you on the shoulder and your controller rumbles
* You turn around, and see a man standing there, he is nicely dressed in a suit and in his hands he’s holding a cellphone.
- Excuse me, you’ve got a call.
* You take the phone and put it against your ear.
- Thank you.
* You watch as the well-dressed man walks away and put the cellphone to your ear.
* It is your best friend, he is a technical genius and seems to miss you
-Damn! I can not get it through my head that you went on that luxurious cruise! You should have taken me with you!
*Just when your friend completes his sentence the ship staggers and you accidentally drop your cellphone over the railing, the throw out your arms in hope of catching it again but the cellphone falls to the walkway on the lower deck.
- Shit!
* Now you get full control of steering and you can try to walk around and explore the ship you are on. You are on the upper “deck” and will try to retrieve cell phone at “lower deck”

*After exploring you make your way to the lower deck and find the cellphone. You put your mobile phone to the ear again and notices that he is no longer there.

*You sigh. You take a couple steps towards the ship’s front gazing out at the stillness, all of a sudden something big flashes past your eyes and brakes the ships’ front 20 meters ahead of you. Water splashes into your eyes and you have a hard time to perceive what’s happening. The screen slowly becomes a blur and debris is flying all around you and there are rubble everywhere. The ship is slowly starting to sink.

* You have 1 minutes playing time left before the next chapter, you are now aware of it however, during this time, you will probably try to get as far from the accident as possible, it might be that you run into the ship again and into different cabins.

Depending on which cabin you ran into in the corridors, you’ll see various objects / items. These items you see will be the things you’ll have available on the island at the beginning of the game, these items are however randomized and it’s rare that you’ll start out with the same items as any other player.

On the island:

*Everything is black, the only thing you hear is the waves and the wind gently breezing. Slowly your eyes open. You find yourself on a beach, you try to stand but your legs tremble and your body feels weak, so it takes a while before you get your feet. *control shakes a bit slowly as you stand up*

You turn around and look out over the sea, it is quite empty, you see a lot of garbage lying around, you see an axe laying there beneath all the debris. Ahh, It’s the axe you saw in the cabin before everything went black. You go and pick up the ax, the sand shows your footprints and it’s wet and messy. Since you have nothing other to do you start to explore the beach for more useful objects. You’ll find some food and a first aid kit. You also find an old backpack that you store your newfound items in. There is not much left to do on the beach, you do not know where you are and you do not know if there are any other survivors, you look up from the beach and you are greeted by a wall of tropical trees, it’s dense jungle indeed.

You make your way up the beach, and into the jungle. You walk for a while in the dense jungle, you see rays from the sun penetrate the top of the trees. You hear yourself walk through the bushes as well as bird and insects, as you move foliage out of your way.

You approach a clearing and you see a rusty old shack, you walk up to it out of curiosity and find that it’s empty and has some equipment inside. There is a radio and other smaller things scattered about. It seems like there hasn’t been anyone there for a long time. On the wall you find a map, a very old map. The map is colored yellow and has lost some of it’s color. The map shows an image of a big island, you keep the map since it might be of use to you so you keep it.

** Here the adventure begins for the player.
Is the map you have a map of the island? It could be a map of another island, you will need to go to higher altitudes to be able to identify landmarks on the map to confirm it.

Features

Since the game is a survival game, I would place great emphasis on the “survival” part. I would prefer that the game should be entirely without HUD in addition to a compass and maybe a 90 ^-degree field of view instead of the usual 75th That it is hungry, tired, and so on marked by subtle changes in your vision, colors and motionblur.

One thing I think would be interesting is that your character needs to sleep. This also means that you will either have to find a shed or a cave or build up some kind of shack up in a tree. Every choice has its’ pros and cons, though some are clearly better than others.

A big thing about the game is to explore, you go the whole island to explore and when you find new places and landmarks you can mark them or you map or let the game do it for you. You’ll be able to chop down bushes and trees, create tools and traps. You will also eventually try to create a fire, either by finding petrol or something similar. You could do it by hand but this will take some time though. One important thing is to find out what you can eat on the island, where the safe bets are usually fish or other animals such as rabbits and more risky things such as berries, plants and insects.

There are skills to learn as you play the game, some might come to you if you try certain things and some might be learned from journals/diaries/notes scattered about. In the end you can learn a lot of skills by trusting your wit.

Exploring the Jungle

When exploring a bit and you’ll soon notice that there are traces of other, larger animals on the island. These are dinosaurs. There must be dozens of varieties the races, ranging from T-Rex and Velociraptor to smaller and larger herbivores. All these leave footprints behind, but also other traces such as poop and markings on trees and trampled grass.

Being chased

Being chased is a main factor in the game, basically you have no chance against a T-rex or Velociraptor, not without weapons anyway. And that is why you often will have to flee. The best way to survive is to stick to places where you know they do not go as often and stick to environments you know. Eventually you’ll have to move out of the area, you know to take some risks and gather equipment or find other places that might serve better as a camp.

When you do go out of your safe-zone, the game will become harder since you don’t know any landmarks or the best routes to escape if something were to happen. When you happen upon a dinosaur that is dangerous and has discovered you, you’ll be affected by the adrenaline mechanic. The adrenaline mechanic enhances your vision when you are being chased, you see things more clearly, trees you can run and jump up on, you see branches that you can use to swing over rock formations. This mechanic helps you escape, it’s the fear that makes you stronger and faster. To explore new places means that you must be prepared, scouting the area beforehand and have food, tools and other things that might help you ready.

Hunting

During the game you will probably be able to create some basic tools and weapons such as bows and spears. These can help you hunt smaller animals as well as dinosaurs, combined with traps you might even lure the bigger dinosaurs. Hunting is beneficial for food and skinning. Skinning will help you create some basic stuff to wear that affects your camouflage, it might also hide your smell. A big part of hunting is the direction of the wind, tailwind can be very disadvantageous to you since most dinosaurs will pick up on your scent. Gathering dinosaur urine and poop might help as well to keep some dinosaurs away.

During your exploring you’ll happen upon books/notes/dairies that will help you, these will tell the story of the island and help you with tips and information about different parts of the island and it’s inhabitants. During your travels you will find notes and pieces of other peoples journals. There are two different type of journals the ones that give you information about what is and has happened to the island and the ones that give you information about certain dinosaurs and areas. The latter version of journals is actually connected to a multiplayer-functionality. When a player dies in your friend-list they will leave a part (like a page) of their journal at the place that they died. This page will be available for others on your friend-list to find for information. The information on that page will be added to the finder’s journal, if the player already “knows” the information he found then tough luck. The information on these pages can give information from specific areas, dinosaurs, plants or good hunting spots.

To save and to die

Saving can be made to do almost anytime, as long as everything is quiet and safe. Saving at your safehouse has it’s rewards though, if you make it to your safehouse and save you’ll start up the next time fully relaxed and energized. Your safehouse is your current home, in time you will learn how to protect it from intruders by using traps and other tactics to keep intruders away.

Dying is a part of the game, chances are that no player will finish the game without dying once. Dying in the game has a serious penalty, you lose a page of your journal. This might be a page of a new skill you’ve just learned or a page of good information about dinosaurs, geography or how to prepare a certain meal for food or plant for medical salves. These pages will ultimately end up in your own hands or in the hands of your friends. The pages you lose when you die will stay on the same spot until you find them or your friends does.

———

That is all I have of my design document so far, of course the real design document will have to be more specific, lining up every game-mechanic in the game and it’s importance and so on. But right now it’s only a concept, I hope I can create this game some time.

Check out the bigger pic here!

Killing your way to glory

For you guys and girls that doesn’t know what the series is about. God of War-series is a hack’n slash action adventure game based on Greek mythology. Here is a quick plot summary of God of War 1 & 2. The first game begins with the main character Kratos commiting suicide by jumping of a cliff into the Aegean Sea. As he plummets to the rocks below the players are able to see his life in flash backs. The story revolves around this character and his quest to defeat Ares the god of War. Kratos defeats Aros and is offered the new position as God of War.

The second game takes place some time after the first game, Kratos as the new God of War wasn’t accepted by the other members of the Greek Pantheon. Kratos still haunted by his memories of the deeds from his past he goes to aid the Spartan army trying to conquer the city of Rhodes, the gods are displeased with his campaign and decides to do something about it. As he arrives an eagle which he believes to be Athena in disguise robs him of almost all his godly power, and using Kratos power to bring life into the Colossus of Rhodes. A giant statue which soon is torn apart by Kratos fighting ability, Zeus then reappear as the eagle offering Kratos one more chance to be a god, Kratos refuse and Zeus slays him.

As Kratos is about to die he is saved by Gaia, the mother of titans who offers Kratos an alliance. They want Kratos to help them in their quest for revenge. Kratos flees from the underworld and start killing his way until his second encounter with Zeus where Athena saves Zeus by sacrificing her own life to save his. Athena reveals that he is in fact Zeus own son and that all the gods will deny him, defending Zeus so that Olympus will prevail. In the end Kratos swars that “if all on Olympus will deny me my vengeance than all on Olympus will die!” Kratos rallies the titans and Zeus rallies the remaining gods to his aid, Kratos returns to Olympus shouting: “Zeus! Your son has returned! I bring the destruction of Olympus!”

The game finishes with a the warning “The End Begins”.

I bet you guys can guess what the third game is all about, the game is the final chapter of the series and it’s about Kratos attempt to destroy Olympus. The first game was deemed epic, the second game was deemed more epic than the first. So I guess you need to find a new combination of words to sum how epic the final chapter will be. I propose Super Ultra Mega Epic.

Get ready for some action

I guess everyone has heard about the God of War-series, you all should know the gameplay of these games. Typical Hack’n Slash with QtE (quick-times events). The game is a combination of combat, platforming and puzzle game elements. Kratos will have several weapon types available for different types of combat. This game is also announced to have seamless loading, meaning no loading screens! (yay) and no need for HDD installation. The previous games has won shitloads of awards so these games are the real deal, I haven’t played them myself (I played the first one, never finished it though, don’t ask me why because I don’t know myself) but I’ll get a crack at the God of War Collection which holds the first and second game with updated graphics for the Ps3.

God of War III is set for release March 19, 2010 here in EU. So if you like these types of games I suggest you play through God of War I & II, to get ready for the epic quest of God of War III. I know that I will.

“Bigger here”

“Bigger here”

“Bigger here”

“Bigger here”

This is why:

In a world such as ours we are constantly aware of our emotional output and input. We get reminded every day of how much we are loved and how much things or people actually matters to us. Why do we value these things? Because all life is fragile, Human life is fragile and Things are fragile. There will come a day when my Xbox 360 will die and I’m sure as hell gonna get teared up.

There are several ways to get people to feel an emotional attachment to video-games, one of them is dependent on the time spent with the video-game. When a player spends time with a video game he/she is actually investing their time into a game then thinking that it must be worth the trouble because “I’m taking precious time out of my life to play it” and therefore an emotional attachment is starting to grow.

To get further down along the road of emotional attachment to video-games the game has to supply a reason to keep playing the game. RPGs are on the top when it comes to this part, where you create your character and level up together with it. This is where this formula comes into play: The player game rewards should be equal or more than the time the player invested into the game.

These things are basics when it comes to video-game design.

But there is also something other than that, something deeper. Sometimes on rare occasions we can feel an emotional attachment to the NPCs of a video-game. If we look at Mass Effect 1&2 we got great personalities throughout the games and players will find at least one NPC they like. The feeling of them being real however is disrupted by their their inability to speak to others and the fact that they seem to like to stand on the same spot all the time. The emotional attachment however to the NPC is real, I just wish it could be something deeper than that.

Now let’s take a look at Fable II.

Fable II holds the most basic game-mechanics found in a Western RPG. You create a character,you go on quests, you kill things, you level up, you get a hold of money, go back to town and buy stuff to make you look fancy. The thing about Fable is that Molyneux simplified the whole process. Less equipment, non-talking NPCs, communication system based on farts, simple fighting-system and in the end it’s also a really easy game right? Almost kid-like easy.

What I don’t understand is that how can Molyneux talk about emotional attachment when he has created a game, with no real NPC-interaction, no way to get to know the people around you, the only special character in the game is you and like three others. You actually fart until people like you, yay! great way to get emotionally attached to the game, not.

Let’s look at Fable II most inspiring and awesome feature: The Dog. The Dog in the world of Fable II is a friendly companion you find in an alley as a kid, some kids are bullying the dog and you knock them out. After that stuff happens and you have your furry little companion everywhere you go. It’s a nice thing. I really liked the thought behind the dog, but in the end it’s just a tool right? It’s a nifty way to find treasures and do some minor damage to enemies, in the end the dog won’t leave you and it will not die. It’s really hard to value something that cannot die or leave you, even if you would throw the poor thing right of a cliff or leave him limping from one part of the world to the other he still would think that you’re awesome and follow you and for me it makes the experience a bit poor.

This is Jenny, if you’ve played The Darkness you know what I’m talking about, Jenny is down-to-earth and the only thing that keeps the main-character Jacky sane. Jenny is a character we can relate to, she could be my friend or my girlfriend, she doesn’t say much but oh man she’s human. She makes me care.

I would love to see a game where at least one of the NPCs seemed human, almost infinite conversation options, advanced AI, a fun personality and a great partner throughout the game. I’ve played a lot of games in my days but in the end all NPC characters disrupt the feeling of immersion once they run out of things to say or do, and it makes me a bit sad.

I wish they would take the emotional attachment thing a bit further, why does a human value everything in his life? Because he/she is afraid to lose it, and therefore I wish to implement my idea of Hardcore game-mode when it comes to RPGs. It’s based upon the idea of value and loss and I’ll tell you about it in my next blogpost.

DESTRUCTION MADNESS!

This game resembles the original and is set in various environments from around the world. The biggest feature of the Bad Company series is the level of environment destruction. This time around the destruction in the game is dubbed “Destruction 2.0″ meaning a new version and extended destruction. It’s said that players can completely collapse a building this time around. In the first game you were only able to destroy covers, and blow out some of the walls whilst the supporting pillars of the building stayed intact even from serious firepower.

The game will feature single-player and multi-player gamemodes. The single player campaign spans around 10 hours in length featuring the same characters as the first game. The characters are the bad eggs of the Army named “Bad-Company (b-company)”. Unlike the first game the single-player experience is said to be a more linear experience allowing the developers to create more scripted and exciting missions, but still give the player the chance to plan how to approach certain situations.

The big thing of the Battlefield-series is the multiplayer mode, the game will feature several different mp modes. There are four playable classes (or loadouts) that the player can choose from: Assault, Recon, Engineer and Medic. (I love the medic class). All classes have their specialities which you can guess from the names, the one I find most interesting is the Medic-class, which can throw down health-packs and use the defibrillator to revive allies and kill foes at melee-range (yay!). From what I know there are three announced game-modes so far: Rush, Squad Deathmatch and Conquest. The squad deathmatch is match between four squads (four players in each squad) competing to hit the 50 kill limit. Conquest is the usual capture points and gain tickets experience. Rush is the original Gold Rush from the first game, putting two teams against each other, one team acts the attacking team and must detonate explosives on the defending team’s creates. The attacking team wins if they succeed to destroy all the defending team’s crates.

Using the new destruction 2.0 there will be some interesting ways to destroy enemies and crates by collapsing buildings on top of them. It’s going to be crazy.

Own thoughts

I love the battlefield-series, the game really shine when you get to play those matches where the teams actually play together as a team. If you have friends to join you when you play I bet you’ll have a good time. There is nothing like the feeling of being surrounded by enemies, hearing bombs and gunshots everywhere you go. It’s really great for the immersion and I always tell myself, I’m a soldier, my mission is to stay alive and complete my objectives. A dead soldier is a worthless soldier.

As an artist I must say the game looks really really good, when thinking about the scale of the maps and the game itself they really have done a great job with the visual art, the animations are superb, love it.

I’m looking forward to playing the game actually, though I hope that the game has gone through intensive QA to keep the game from serious bugs like those we could find in Modern Warfare 2. Oh yeah the game will also feature dedicated servers, which is great for the PC-gamers, congratz to you guys. I’ll be getting this one for the X360.

The influences for Replay Value

In the past there wasn’t that many sandbox games or open-world games. So developers had to create the replay value with simple choices to change the flow of the game or simply the ending. One example of this is Star Wars: Jedi Academy or later Star Wars games relevant to the life of a jedi. Throughout these games you’ll happen upon one or several situations where you have to choose to be good or evil. These simple choices are stepping-stones to each ending, and being one or the other tends to give the player access to powers of each side. Being male or female may have some impact as well.

The kind of replay value that I like is the one of Multiple Classes and restrictions. This type of replay value you’ll find in most RPGs, will you be a fighter? an archer? a mage? a rogue? etc. If we take a game like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion we see that the game offers a lot of classes but in my eyes botches the idea when not restricting the character to one class or the skills he/she has chosen. A pure fighter in the game can learn everything about Magic though it takes a lot more time, but it’s possible. I don’t really like that kind of multi-classing, see I believe in Immersion when playing, the chances that “I am” or that “I play” as a character that knows everything or is good at everything seems a little bit far-fetched. I like to take up “roles” when I play games, if I play a game like battlefield I like to act as the medic and my actions will reflect that choice. I like the replay value of games that has classes that make the game feel like a whole other game all together when playing another class. Strategies, missions, how NPCs talks to you, how they act around you.

I like games that have choices that matters, not during several particular events during the game but all the time. Which is pretty much impossible considering how many “paths” to the goal the developers would have to create. If we take the popular game Mass Effect 1/2 and look a little closer you’ll start to notice that there are only 5-10 actual choices that make a big difference more so in the first than the second. Most choices good or bad lead to the same outcome. Oh well let’s move on.

Let’s talk a bit about level-design, you know the old Diablo games? The Diablo-series is a series that is very high on my personal favorite list. The game had lot’s of different environments, classes that felt different and items to keep you satisfied. The support for cooperative and competitive play was also there. The games also had an interesting level-design, simple but very effective, for each playthrough the maps and enemy placements would be different. I loved that, and I wish one could enhance that to a better and bigger experience with some kind of modular level-design that does not feel “blocky” when put together.

More complex games hinder the replay value

I feel like with todays games growing bigger and more advanced a lot of replayability of the past is disappearing, you have voice-actors, motion-capture people, several writers, scripts that need to go through localization stuff. To change a simple thing in the script these days isn’t the same, a thing that would take ten minutes becomes several hours/days/weeks to take place in modern games. Sometimes I wish that everything could go back to a simpler time, I love voice-acting and it does a lot for the immersion of video-games but I didn’t need it before.

An awesome game like Baldur’s Gate had an awesome size = lot of quests to do, since the quests was only text with triggers etc you could add a lot quests to the game pretty quickly compared to modern games where you have to go through the whole voice-acting process, and what’s up with all the localization stuff? Hell when I was a kid there was no good games in Swedish I had to learn English, I played games in Japanese I had to learn friggin Japanese as kid, recognizing signs and what not until I understood what was wanted from me, imagine the hell of going through an RPG in Japanese as a kid, just a simple quest like “go get a potion and bring it back” would take a while to figure out. All games should be in English and just leave it like that, it would speed up the process.

The pinnacle of Replay Value

User created content, I mean levels, weapons, scripts, quests, GUIs, graphic enhancements etc. All the things that makes PC-gaming awesome should somehow be available for console-gamers as well. Plug in your X360 HDD to your computer, copy the files over, and let the game handle the extra content as mods. How much better wouldn’t Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1/2 be if you could see some user-created maps there as well? How the hell did they think the worlds most popular shooter (Counter-Strike) happened? User created content! Sure it would probably make cheating and stuff like that a lot easier to do but hell Fallout 3 isn’t Fallout without the constant search for food and clean water. I downloaded a mod for Fallout 3 and it was awesome, you got hungry, you got tired, you needed water. You could find all these things in Fallout 3 but they didn’t have any value, food, water, whatever. It wasn’t needed. I needed to raid peoples camp to survive, I was a true waste-lander.

I don’t say that I have the perfect answer, I’m not an educated game designer or programmer, but it should be possible in some way right? I want to believe that anyway. What kind of replay value do you guys like? and would you like user created content to be available for console-users?

The extraordinary game

I’ve seen Heavy Rain but I’ve not yet played the demo or something like that. To me Heavy Rain seems more to be a game centered around in-game cinematics and QTE (quicktime events) with limited actual gameplay. In an interview with David Cage 2008 he said:

“Heavy Rain is about normal people who have landed in extraordinary situations. I wanted a much more personal story. The first thing that came to my mind, as a father of two little boys, was that the main theme should simply be a father’s love for his son.This is not a game about saving the princess or the world. Its [sic] purely about a father’s love. The main story will revolve around four different characters, and we’re putting the spotlight on their perceptions. The question ‘what is good and what is evil’ is the key here, that will be just a matter of viewpoint…I believe heavily in moral choices, I’m going to use them A LOT. They’re not about being good or bad, but about finding the right balance.”

“I don’t want to do a big free-roaming city like GTA, because the flow of the story will then be hard to control. Nevertheless, I do want to incorporate big sets, with a crowd, heavy populated areas like a mall and a subway are going to be in there. Of course, the gameplay has got to make use of that aspect too.”

The games story revolves around four characters searching for clues about the Origami Killer. The Origami killer has had eight victims in the last three years, all boys between nine and thirteen, without a single lead.

Gameplay

The game has a rather unique control-scheme, to walk forward you actually press on of the triggers on the controller. It’s said that it’s like that because the developers don’t want their player to suddenly change direction camera changes location. It will also take advantage of the buttons analogue function etc pressing harder will make the character walk faster and works the other way if pressed softly. Another interesting game-mechanic is the characters thoughts function, any time in the game when you have control over a character you can bring up a small cloud of thoughts by pressing the L2 button and corresponding buttons to say or do whatever the character you’re controlling is thinking. It’s also said that sometimes these thoughts are a blur and selecting them at the wrong time will affect the character’s reaction, causing them to say or do something in the wrong way.

Quick Time Events are also a big thing in this game, all action sequences will be played out as QTE. If the player fails to accurately input combinations, the story of the game takes an alternative path and more mistakes might even lead to the characters death. If a character dies, the game does not end. You switch to one of the other characters you can control during the game with the previous character’s death affecting the story. If all four dies, the game ends.

Own thoughts

I’ve always been kind of skeptical to these types of games, it’s hard to define the line of “game” or “interactive movie” though I’ve always had my own definition of what a video-game is. Which I’ll tell you: “A game is a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude” even though the game is not a happy go bubble game, it’s certainly a problem-solving activity approached with enjoyment.

The game has been doing good, reviewers has given the game a 9/10 saying that the game is the freshest, most exciting, and might even be one of the most important games on PS3 so far. As I said before, it’s a fine line between a game and an interactive movie but clearly this game actually succeeds as an interactive drama game and it might be an interesting buy.

Here it is , there are some minor changes I need to do as well, some fixes and what not.

Bigger here