Reddit AMA!

Hey guys! Just decided to do an AMA on reddit!

Feel free to post and ask me anything about the dev process, promotional attempts, Tips, tricks, plans for the game, zbrush questions, whatever!

Here is my Reddit AMA post!

Cheers!
Barry

Ashen Rift Call for alpha testers!

Hey guys! Go to the Ashen Rift Alpha Signup page for the details!

Please share, Spread the word and enjoy.
Also check out the new Higher quality play-through video.

Thanks for all of the interest everyone.

Barry.

Weapons: Part One

Hey everyone!

I’ve got two things of good news!

One! I will be presenting the game in person at the East Side Games office in Vancouver BC on the same day as the contest deadline, the 8th of October. So come on down and play it! let me know what you think!!

Two! I just finished the Double Barreled Shotgun!

It is the third weapon you will pick up in the game and its pretty gnarly!

Double Barreled Shotgun In Game

Let me know what you think!

I look forward to meeting you guys down at ESG on the 8th! Come check it out!

Cheers!

Barry.

GIF Gameplay update 001!

Been toying with some gameplay and AI elements… Man I have so much more to do! Please note that the shotgun is a temporary asset!

Really fun to see it in GIF form, Let me know what you think!

Jon Jones and Ground Textures!

About a week ago I actually managed to bang out 5 new ground texture sculpts In Zbrush within about 2 hours, After that I found time here and there to bake the textures while doing other things, like cooking or sleeping, Resulting in 5 rad textures which should blend together quite well!

Repeating Texture Tiles

That was what I thought anyway… I quickly ran into a strange problem (which many others seemed to have run into, with no known solution), my textures were blurry only when applied to the terrain itself! this seriously ate up a ton of time…

Soon after I lost all hope, I found out that Jon Jones , one of my best friends ever was coming to town, and that I was picking him up from YVR! I had to leave the terrain as it was for the duration of his stay so I could get the most out of my time with Jon!

Jon works at Avalanche Studios in NYC was in town for XDSummit, he was one of the speakers. During his time in town Jon introduced me to all kinds of amazing people from all around the world, and he also play tested my game! This officially makes Jon Jones the first play tester ever!

His reactions were very reassuring and he seemed to respond well to my overall goal for this project! I like to think he enjoyed it, even tho it really is quite basic overall… The thing that stood out to me the most about his reaction to playing it was that he had not noticed that I was using the free version of unity, thus I have no shadows and very few lights available to me, hopefully it was my art that distracted him from noticing the lack of cast shadows.

Good guy Jon Jones eats sushi In Vancouver, I have Proof.

Jon eventually had to leave town, and life went back to normal, soon after I found myself attempting to fix the blurry texture issue, banging my head against a wall, wasting time and wondering “WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?!” until I FINALLY figured out what was at the root of the problem!

Turns out I had to replace the standard Unity terrain shader with the Advanced Terrain Shaders V2. The instant I imported this package to unity my textures displayed properly. Without this shader my 2048×2048 textures rendered out as 32×32 or 16×16, the texture was so blurry I could barely tell which texture was which. I am so pleased that somebody had a replacement package that fixed everything for me! This is just one of the many reasons I love Unity and the Unity Asset store.

After sorting that out, it took me some time to figure out how to define a new shader for the terrain itself, which would enable diffuse/bump, but finally got it, and the results are fantastic!

WIP Unity Editor Terrain View

Now to actually take the textures beyond a simple Normal map and Ambient Occlusion Bake! Soon this will look much better (I hope anyway).

Also I would be happy to walk anyone through fixing the blurry terrain problem if you’re still struggling with it, just leave me a message and I’ll help ya out.

For more Information on Jon Jones please visit http://www.jonjones.com/

The Grunt Creative Process!

The Idea behind the enemy soldiers to my mind is that they were all once human, and over 20 or so years of eldrich influence these people have twisted and become strange and confusing beasts. I will get into the story more later, this post is more about the grunts art itself.

I had all sorts of ideas floating around in my head, and too much reference! Really I should have just stuck with what was in my head and not looked at any other artists work. In the beginning I struggled with all sorts of silhouettes and shapes in Zbrush, Using dynamesh as a sort of concept sculpting method to quickly turn out basic shapes. Sadly because of all of the artwork and reference staring me in the face from my second monitor, all of my ideas and style fell to the background and I totally lost all interest in what I was designing, the excessive reference killed my personal creativity entirely…

Late one night after putting the design off for way too long – while I was crunching away on some nearly over-due assets for StreamLine Studios, I had 5 to 10 minutes between responses with my art director, so in order to not fall asleep between midnight and 4 AM, I managed to fit in 3 or 4 mini sculpting sessions! the result of less than a half hour of work was a mostly completed design! And you know that feeling you get – when something just starts to feel right, how it inspires you, your heart beat increases and you get totally jazzed up, Well that happened to me. Here is what I had come up with that night.

The First 30 min of sculpting for the Grunt

So the next day I woke up at 9 AM after 5 hours of sleep, too excited to sleep and I Finished off the design and had a 90% finished HP sculpt.

Early Grunt HP

Add some more soft skin wrinkles here and there and this thing is final, so maybe another days work on it, tweaking and refining details.

Nearly Final Grunt

I think the only thing lacking in the above image is the final lower leg wrinkles, otherwise this looks like the final, I’ll do some better showcase images at some point, no time for that during the competition tho! I shouldn’t even be taking the time to write this post! :O as if my schedule wasn’t busy enough!

Grunt LP Final

This is the final Grunt Low Poly mesh with AO, Cav and Normal map rendered in the 3ds max viewport. The mesh could use a lot of poly-reduction – but considering my time constraints, I have more important things to do – this looks good – good enough for me!

Grunt Wire Frame

So It wasn’t too much longer (maybe a day) after this point that I had rigged, Animated (just an Idle and a Walk) and Textured this guy, Although the texture is far from final and the animations are temporary (because he is not holding his weapon yet), regardless, I had him In-Game and moving about with a texture within a week of starting! Quick’n dirty.

Grunt AI Test

Here he is! In all his (WIP) glory, Walking towards me using the Rain {Indie} AI systems and Unity’s epic Mecanim Animation system. I’ll do a better breakdown of all the steps I took to speed things up, Like using the 3Dsmax CAT animation tools, a highly under-used system which works flawlessly with Unity3d! and tons more, I’ll also cover lots of the texture creation process. That’s all for now tho!

Thanks for reading!

Barry Michael Collins

First Post!

Hey Everybody!

So a number of weeks ago my friend Oussema pointed out the TornadoTwins Game Challange hosted by CG Society . At first I had some Major hesitations, such as – would I have time? I do work full time on contracts, but largely my hesitations were based on my massive ignorance of how amazing Unity is.
I quickly downloaded the free version of Unity and started fooling around, within a few hours I was hooked and making my plans for the game I would make for the 90 day challenge. Within a few days I had a full battle plan and some major headway.

I Wish I had started this blog sooner in development! but there is still lots to talk about and lots to do! Here is an example of how far I have already come!

Grunt in Game

Its been around 40 days now since I started and man am I exhausted! I work 12 to 16 hours a day between this and contracts – just to make enough money to cover my bills and make some progress on my project… BUT it is SO worth it, I have learned SO much about unity, which is amazing, and scripting/coding in general. This project is really giving me a chance to do things I rarely get to do with contracts. So far the experience has been invaluable and will forever change what I do with my spare time and new ideas! 🙂

So over the course of this blog I intend to write posts about the story, the making of this game and general development progress… There are tons of things I am learning so expect lots of rad Tutorials, examples, whatever I can… Oh and Lots of art!

Feel Free to follow me on Instagram! @HyPer128 and @FoxAndSeagull

Or Add me on Facebook – Barry Michael Collins

Don’t forget to check out the gallery below too!

Thanks for reading!

Barry Michael Collins