Making Video Games – Part 1: PowerNode

Posted by Tom Campbell on 25/04/2011


PowerNode is a turn based strategy game based around an alternative World War 2. It boasts a fully featured multi-player for two to eight players.
It is a fun and competitive game that is styled after a traditional war boardgames, but with all the advantages that modern real-time strategy games bring.

As the Commander of an Army, you have the task of wiping out all other players on the map by any means or forcing them into a situation where they have no other option but to surrender. You have the ability to spend resources on units to fight for you, or new technologies to give you the upper hand in a fight. You will have to outwit our opponent and use the tools you are given to overcome the challenges that you will encounter.
You control the units on the board from a view similar to how a army general would shuffle pieces around a war board.
Each player takes a turn moving and making units take different actions in their turn.

The biggest feature that makes PowerNode unique is it’s resource system. Dotted around the map are control points which gave PowerNode it’s namesake. Controlling these ‘PowerNodes’ means you are able to send a beam of light in one of six directions around that point. If you connect that beam to your starting base, you will receive a bonus to the resource points you receive at the start of each turn. You can build structures and vehicles to redirect the beam in way you wish.

Powernode was created at the end of 2010 as part of a Mini-Game Project. We were given a total of 4 weeks to create the game from scratch. When I created the original concept for the game, it started as a mock-up of a board game that was created during another project.
The board-game version would have had a round board, and tiles to designate the units and buildings in the game.

After modifying parts of the game and making it work on a PC platform. The game was pitched to the class.

Three programmers and a artist put their hands up to work on PowerNode with me. A small team, but for the scope of our game we felt it sufficient.
Unfortunately after we started production one of the programmers who put their hand up decided that video games was not for him and left the course. That left us in a bind, as we were then by far the smallest team in the class (The next being seven people). Our inexperience with developing games meant we were uncertain about whether we could pull off the game such as it was.

Although we knew that features may need to be cut during production. We all agreed and said that yes, we will do it anyway and try our best.

Then game development happened. For four weeks we worked to create a video game. It went by in a blur, and at the end of it we found ourselves with our own really fun little game.

PowerNode

So we had created a game, and with only a few deviations from the first pitch. In only four weeks we had created a entire game, with full multiplayer and map creation. We are very pleased with the final product.

  • This shows the first three minutes of a game. With the command center to the top of the map with factories dotted around it. Units have been moved around the map top control the PowerNode and the commander is receiving a power bonus.

  • The control scheme was simple to use after the highlighted tiles were implemented. After selecting a unit, right clicking a blue tile would order it to move there, right clicking a red tile would attack the enemy unit that was in range.

  • Mirror-Tanks and Reflectors have been placed around the map to redirect the power back to their Commander’s headquarters.

  • Equipment can be built by a Engineer-Tank. These expand on the usefulness of infantry. (Left to right Artillery/BarrierShield/Reflector)

  • Powernode shipped with a fully featured Map Editor, which can save the maps directly into your game directory. You can just paint on terrain, and it works really well. A very nice feature that was implemented is map sharing, so any map that you create will be sent to any other players that connect to you.

Four solid weeks of my life can be found below. At 165mb, it’s a steal.

View the Manual

Known Bugs.

  • Unfortunately the game will not run on ATi cards, that was something that we were completely unable to fix. The game engine we used for this project was created by the programmers in the course, this bug was persistent all through the time they were working on it.
  • There is a problem with the particle system, and particles may spawn in irregular places when they are created.
  • There sometimes a problem with redirecting power across the map. Sometimes you will not be able to send it down a certain angle of a hex tile.
  • There is a bug with power being counted when it connects to your command center. You may get a massive boost of power to your total at the end of your turn.
    • Posted in 2010, Game Development, Game Projects | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

    Roundup

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 15/10/2010

    It has been a good few months since my last update.

    The schedule that I’m currently rocking in the course gives me little time to put together a post that contains a good chunk of information like I have been doing. This is because what we were doing each week started to get quite theoretical for a week, then we would be thrust into a summative for another week. We would then be left with a weekend to recover with, then the vicious cycle would begin again.

    Truth be told, no matter how much I talk about how little sleep I get and how crazy summative weeks are. I’m loving every moment of it. Right now I can’t imagine doing other than what I am doing.

    But enough talk –  have at you! This post will be a round up of what the last month has brought.

    Sculpting summative

    Working in ZBrush was.. interesting to start with. The ui and control schemes would bend your mind at times. But after a time, it became natural to use.
    The summative we did for this subject involved sculpting a bust and a base for it. As if the character was made to sit on a persons desk.

    The character I chose to do is Kimiko, based off this webcomic by the super-cool artist Dresden Codak. I chose this sketch by him as my starting point.

    As it is, this character is unfinished. I came across a couple problems when exporting from Zbrush and bringing in the maps to Maya, namely the Normals. This character is also quite high poly and is not game ready.


    Animation Summative

    Over four weeks we did animation and rigging. The first week was theory and practice of rigging.  On the second we did more rigging. I rigged the character above On the fourth week we had a summative
    For the summative a character was provided. We were limited to a total of 20 joints for the final exported sequence. Which meant, no fancy spin rigs and no fancy hand rigs. We were limited to this amount because the brief specified that we were pretending to develop for the iPhone platform.

    It wasn’t until after I decided my guy’s attitude was of a street fighter that we found out that he was modelled after a tennis player called Rafael Nadal. “Oh well” I said, now Rafael Nadal can kick people in the face.


    Level Layout

    For two weeks we did level layouts. On the first day I created a level for a capture the flag gamemode on a game in a similar vein to NeoTokyo.
    Script

    Over the next few days we each given someone elses level idea from the previous day a were told to remake it outselves. I was given a castle to make and a story to go with it.
    Script
    I had a presentation that went with this, so there is not alot of infomation written on the map. But a few things that are important are. A party is taking place in the castle, and there are alot of guards in the area.
    The level starts at mid afternoon, and as the player progresses through the map the sun sets and it becomes night. The sun’s location over the map is meant to be visually appealing as the sun will rise across the mountains, then settle over the castle lighting up the inner gardens, then finally set across the water.
    The castle is designed after the lord of the castle. It is very striking up close, and seems large. But only the front of the castle is grand and spectacular, there isn’t much to the rear of the castle.

    For the summative we had to create a level of city that was overrun with nature and populate it with all the infomation at that a level designer could just pick up the design and begin building the level.
    I wrote a script for this level, I also drafted a opening cinement script that explains the backstory of the game. Both can be found below.

    Script
    Cinematic


    Game Interface design

    On the first day we were given the task of making our favourite video game hud and interface, better. So I chose Stalker  - Call of Pripyat. Because I knew the interface could use a facelift.

    Original

    My edit

    Summative
    We were given the task of redesigning the game Montezumania’s menu and interface. I chose to do the story that I created for my level layout as the theme for these menus.


    After that brief trip back in time, we reach today.
    Today the entire class got together and discussed the game design documents that were entered into as ideas for our four-week minigame, I’m very pleased to say that two of the three game designs were designed by me. More news on how these progress as it happens.
    Until then, cya next time.

    Posted in 2010, Concept, Game Development, sculpting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Jaguar E Type – Unity

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 30/07/2010

    The task was to model and texture a vehicle using the skills we had. Then to create a real world simulation of the car in the game development tool, Unity. We were provided a track to test and the scripts power our vehicles with.

    The simulation side of the assignment was to use information like gear ratios, weight and engine RPM to create a playable vehicle that feels correct while driving

    I created to do a Jaguar E-Type. I chose this car because the design of the car has a great deal of interesting curves and shapes over it’s shell.


    Here’s the final result. You can see I had a little bit of fun with the design

    You can play the simulation game I created, online with the Unity Web Player.

    Click me to go and play the game!

    If the game starts lowering the resolution and quality of itself ( White textures and bright highlights everywhere ), then your current hardware is unable to cope with the number of cubemap reflections on the vehicle.

    Posted in 2010, Unity | Leave a comment

    Employment – UDK and Environments

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 14/07/2010

    Over the past week I created an environment of a abandoned office building.

    The task was to create a number of modular environment pieces that could be easily put together to create an environment by a level designer. This meant that we were to create models of structural pieces like walls, doors and stairs. They had to fit together correctly, and have textures that tiled. The second part of the task was to create a level out of the pieces we created, and put them together into one big group map. There was no overarching theme to what we were to create.

    The environment I chose to do was partially inspired by these photos. ( Warning, many large images behind that link )




    These are the individual pieces I created.

    Posted in 2010, UDK | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

    FN-FAMAS – Modelling & UDK

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 25/06/2010

    Last week my class was given a summative, which the task was to create a model of a weapon, texture it and prepare it for a game engine. We started on Friday the 18th and finished on Friday the 25th of June.

    The weapon we were to make was a FN FAMAS, a French assault rifle. It has a very curious shape and design, one that at the start of the project we (the class) thought was ugly. Though as the project progressed I learnt to love it, it’s almost as if it were designed in a 3d package itself. As all the polygons seemed to fit together, just right.

    Here is just some of the reference that I used for my model. You would be surprised with the number of images of this gun that I was able to find as reference, there was this one repository with over 1000 different images of the gun, with images on every little detail you could possibly imagine. Right down the firing mechanism in the mechanical spec sheets.

    The requirements of the project were
    Model:

    View model – 5000 polys (Quads)
    World model – 1000 poly (Quads)

    Textures:

    Diffuse map – 2048×2048
    Normal map – 2048×2048
    Specular Colour – 1024 x 1024
    Spec Power – 512 x 512

    Once the model was completed we were to bring it into UDK and set up the material on the weapon and make sure it’s scale was correctly sized compared to the ingame character.

    These are the models I created.

    The materials for my model. (Fun fact: My Photoshop document for these sheets was 700mbs big, which ate a whole 2gigs of ram when being edited!)

    Here you can see the Diffuse, Normal, Specular Colour and Specular Power. In that order.

    This is the final product,

    You too can play around with the weapon and fire off some charged plasma in the level I created for it, but first you will need the Unreal Development Kit

    762 MB .exe

    And then download the package files from here. Included in the zip is the instructions about how to install it.
    27,721kb .zip

    Enjoy!

    Posted in 2010, Modelling, UDK | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

    Someone set us up the bomb!? – Materials – Modelling – Props – UDK

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 16/06/2010

    Materials:

    As well as the materials for the column, we continued on with textures for another week. Here’s the output of a few days and a weekends work. Done as a project to try create many different materials on a single sheet and then to create the specific material texture components that will make the material look realistic when they are all used together.

    Reading left to right.
    Colour,Height,Normal,Specular,Colour,Specular Power
    And on the texture sheet
    Rubber tube – Car Air Filter – Copper – Bare Metal – Coal – Carpet – Plastic with a decal – Glass Brick.

    UDK

    I’ll start with saying, UDK is very cool. As can be quoted from class, ” It feels like it was made by artists, for artists”. The interface and shortcuts just make sense.
    Throughout the lessons that we were taught UDK, we learnt a new thing each day. So I started added something new to what I had done the previous day, here’s how several rooms I did turned out.

    And yes, knocking down a tower of barrels never gets old.

    You can also see fire that I created with the built UDK particle editer. Check back here soon for a update that includes a video of both of the particle effects, fire and grenade explosion.

    Prop Modelling

    What we learnt over the past few weeks, in terms of materials and ZBrush really came into play when we were given the task of creating an “Improvised Explosive Device” prop. It was a pretty sudden start to the week, but as Confucious say “Idle man who is forced to think quickly learn lots”. No he didn’t, I totally just made that up.

    Sketched up some quick concepts;

    Three days later, with a poly count of 2800, and a texture size of 2048. We have a game ready model of C4 satchels taped to Petrol can!


    Colour                                     Normal                                     Specular Power

    And In UDK. You can see that I am able to separate out each part of the object.

    Fun fact: Both the PSDs’ for the Jerry Can and Explosive attachment were each 200mbs!

    Posted in Modelling | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Clayface – Sculpting – Normal mapping

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 01/06/2010

    The week began with a bang.
    Set the task of doing an art test. One that a certain game company uses to test the skill of artists that apply for jobs.
    We had to model, uv, sculpt and texture this column within 2 days. While we were limited to the style and polylimit(1000), the texture details were left up to us to decide how they should look.
    Here is the original concept piece, including the colour pallet.

    I used Maya for the modelling, ZBrush for the sculpting and Photoshop for texturing.
    The process of taking a model from Maya to ZBrush was relatively easy to do. Albeit some errors with flipped normals and subdivisions.

    Over the period of a day, I sculpted the low poly model into a nice looking shape.

    The next day I baked the normal, painted the texture and cleaned up the sculpt. Then I lit a scene and rendered it off. ZBrush was tricky to get it to bake the normals correctly. so I used Maya’s built-in bake and transfer maps tool.

    The render.

    27,062kb .7z – Project files

    Posted in 2010, sculpting | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Preventing Carpal Tunnel – Level of Detail – Sculpting

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 28/05/2010

    On Wednesday,
    My class did level of details for the hand we did the day before.
    ‘Levels of detail’ are used in video games in order to reduce the amount of visible polygon data on the screen. As objects move further away from the player, the overall level of detail of the mesh is reduced. You may know this as ‘popping’.


    1,821kb .Ma

    On Thursday,
    We started learning ZBrush. Or rather, scratched our heads and fought with the interface. We were also tasked with creating a human skull. So I created a low poly human skull in a hour in order to make my sculpting easier the next day.


    130kb .Mb

    On Friday,
    We used what we had gleamed the day before about ZBrush, to finish the task of creating a stylized human skull. I was not permitted to use the skull I created the night before as idea of the class was to learn how the software worked. So I like to think of today as the day ‘How I learned to stop thinking, and love ZBrush.’ Because I do. It is an awesomely powerful program, albeit one with a very curious choice of interface design and keyboard shortcuts. Though with practice even those are becoming natural.I had bought a Wacom drawing tablet the day before, and this made using ZBrush much easier to sculpt in. Since the program is able to interpret pen pressure/tilt very well. My wrist is killing me though! It got a real work out today.
    Here is the skull I did today.


    47,070kb .7z
    Posted in 2010, Modelling, sculpting | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Thing – Hand Model

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 25/05/2010

    Another day another model.

    Today we learnt about subdivision surface modelling. Specifically different methods of modelling in this way, and how to do it.

    We were tasked with quickly modelling a hand. I did the base mesh in an hour. Then spent another hour optimizing.


    Included is the single hand mesh on one layer, and on another a lit scene with the coloured hand.

    Posted in 2010, Modelling | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

    And I’m back, from outer-space – Pipeline Overview – Quick Modelling

    Posted by Tom Campbell on 24/05/2010

    What is with the lack of updates you ask? Surely it’s not possible that our class didn’t actually have a summative due? It may have appeared that was not possible. But no, actually I’ve been on a week break!  So I caught a bus and left the city for a few days.

    Now that I have returned to Auckland, and to class. I have moved up a whole extra dimension, to 3D. This week we look at the pipeline overview of game artists, specifically the process of creating assets and preparing them for games.

    Today we did some quick models, and then were given a concept piece and tasked with modeling it.

    Quick models:


    Barrel – 5 mins
    Traffic Barrier – 10 mins + 6 mins optimising
    Park Bench – 6 mins
    Traffic Cone – 5 mins + 3 mins optimising

    Concept Model


    Originally my model had a greater deal of detail infomation on the surfaces.Smoother edges, stronger curves, etc. But I had to limit it down to keep it close to the 1500 poly limit. It is currently 1774 polys.
    Time – 3 hours

    ps: You may have noticed the download button below the images. This is something new I will be trialling over the next few weeks. Depending on how it received, I may be able to offer them in various formats.

    Posted in 2010, Modelling | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment