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Flying Dragon

The game Flying Dragon is a single player casual game, the story is based on a dragon flying over a Chinese garden and tries to collect dragon ball within limit of time. The game provides aerial perspective for player and the objective for the game is trying to collect dragon balls and avoiding enemies. The target players are from 8-60 year old and everyone can play it without spending time to learn the instruction. The source of inspiration is from the film Avatar. The core game mechanism is to use W, A, S, D and mouse click to control the dragon to fly and shoot. The art style is Chinese traditional art with unrealistic elements. Each game play is around 2mins and player can enjoy the beauty of Chinese architecture and garden.

Project Week 10

User interface design

For the user interface design, I have summarized following principles. 

1 Consistency for style and design. 

2 Navigation within a screen. 

3 Navigation between user interface items.

4 World messages and label effectively. 

5 Keep interface simple. 

6 Keep moving forward. 

I think no matter for game user interface or web browser interface, these rules could be applied to both of them. For the portfolio webpage of my game, I want to keep as simple as possible and try to provide users a whole perspective of my game by a few clicks. 

I think it is the purpose of portfolio webpage. 

  

Project Week 9

Final render

These are the final render of my scene. I think it is a valuable experience for game design. During the process for making game, I have learnt many skills and techniques. I think these skills are very useful to apply for game production.

I think there are still many things need to be improved, even though the game is not perfect, but it is a good start for my career.

Project Week 8

Game industry research

China's video game industry brought in $13 billion in revenue in 2013, a 34% increase over 2011's $9.7 billion figure.

Client-based PC games: 64.5% of revenue totaling with approx. $8.7 billion

Browser game: $2 billion

Social game: less than $1 billion

Domestically developed games: 30% year-on-year growth, with $7.8 billion

Console games: only generated $15 million in total revenue, but China began to reconsider to end the ban on the sale of game consoles

Online game market: represented more than 90 % of the $9.7 billion revenue, with $9.1 billion, while mobile gaming brought in only $520 million.

The Chinese game market will grow to $21.7 billion by 2017 with a projected annual growth rate of 12.4 %.

China’s game industry is booming and has a large demand for game designers. I believe client-based PC online games would play a significant role in next 5 years because despite largely being manufactured in China, console games are not allowed to be sold. Even though mobile game is fastest-growing part of the market, but it still has a long way to go to unseat more traditional platforms in China. Social game’s market share is still low but it has great potential to grow.

Project Week 7

I have summarized most common errors for UDK game design, to  solve those errors, I have found solutions. 

• Map lighting needs to be rebuilt!
• Paths need to be rebuilt

Rebuild the paths and/or lighting. 

• Static Mesh component '[Some name of some pickup or teleporter]' not lightmapped...

Click once on the object, and hit F4 to bring up the properties window. 

• Map should have KillZ set.

Set KillZ in the world properties.

• Nav '[Object]' has an invalid GUID.

Rebuild paths to solve this error.

• Terrain is currently unsupported on mobile platforms.

Not important.

• Node is on an invalid base.

Move the object back to an acceptable position and the error will resolve itself.

• Lighting is not "Production."

Rebuild lighting at production quality, but it's not necessary.

Project Week 6

For the play test section, there are 5 people who took the play test; the general feedback is positive and meaningful.

  From the demographic aspect, most people are between 20-30 years old and half of them are female.

 In terms of genre of game, most players have ever played flying game. For the game interface, most players think the interface is not bad, but it can be improved. For the level design and game environment, most players believe the environment is enjoyable but still needs to be improved. 

They have provided some suggestions about  my game environments and art style. Most players have basic understanding about Chinese architecture style, most of Them like Chinese architecture style like watching document films about Chinese traditional architecture. 

For the texture, most players expect a harmony for the color tone of the buildings, they suggest the wall should not be too colorful. For the texture of water, most people suggest the color could be darker. For the level design, some suggest the path could be diverge towards different directions. For the dragon design, they like an elongated dragon such as snake shape. 

Project Week 5

  For the terrain design, representing the real world is not a priority; I want to add my fantasy elements to the scene. Since the scene reflects the natural environment in China, the town is on the edge of mountain and there is a river across the town. 

   UDK Landscape is compatible hardware tessellation and offers a very different but much more powerful material editing system for terrain design. 

   In a nutshell, the Landscape material system is really just an extension of the Material Editor. 

   To blend these two textures together, I need two nodes introduced with the Landscape system. These are TerrainLayerWeight and TerrainLayerCoords. Each texture layer needs to have a unique name.

Project Week 4

Hue/Saturation enables me to adjust the hue, saturation, and lightness of a specific range of colors in an image or simultaneously adjust all the colors in an image.

Besides the hue and saturation, there are other ways to adjust the overall color tone, such as Brightness/Contrast, Levels and Color Balance. The Brightness/Contrast command is easy to use and can be used to adjust the overall brightness and contrast of my image. The Levels are a more sophisticated way of adjusting the brightness and contrast, a histogram graph reflects the light and dark pixels of my image, by moving around the sliders I can determine where the lightest and darkest points of my image are.

Project Week 3

My game is First-person perspective shooter game. The player experiences the action from the back of dragon. The dragon can shoot from a wide range and fly all over the scene. However, I would like the player to enjoy the game art meanwhile, therefore, I would give player a significantly long reaction time and there would not be any enemies to fight back against the player. 

Despite my game is a combination of art game and shooting game rather than a pure first person-shooting game, there are many shooting games could be good inspiration for the style and level design such as Call on Duty and Battlefield. Even thought the art style of these games are different from mine, but they provide me good examples for the design of game terrain.

Project Week 2

Week 2

Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang province, the city have been given the name Heaven on Earth for its natural beauty and abundant cultural heritages.

The West Lake is the most natural beauty of the city. Solitary Hill, the Tomb of General Yue Fei, the Six Harmonies Pagoda and the Ling Yin Temple are most famous attractions of the West Lake. The broken bridge is the most elegant and romantic site in West Lake area.

Since my scene is based on Chinese architecture style in east part of China, the reference of West Lake would be a very useful source of inspiration for my terrain design. 

Project Week1

Importance of color palette

Color palette is used widely across many game designs.

Traditional color palettes usually consist of five colors within a specific scheme, but this is more of a guideline than a rule. In game design, color palettes can consist of any number of colors as long as possible if they follow my preset rules.

It's obvious that not all color schemes are going to look visually appealing with every single game's theme. A color scheme should be used to strengthen the mood I try to convey. All colors on a computer can be defined by three numbers: hue, saturation and brightness.

As my game tries to mimic realistic world in China, I must apply some dark colors to emulate the wall and river. 

project week 10

Finally, I have got the most part of the leve design and I feel tired after over night. I have finished 90% of the texture but I did not set the lighting because I want to use emissive light in the dark instead of sun light, so I put the lighting to next quarter. I think I need to create my own material for the water and also I need to refine the terrain by adding some vegetation and rocks.

I have gained many experience for level design in this quater and I am looking forward to learning more about 3d character design next quarter.

 

 

project week 9

This week I was working on another level design piece. I have tried to use emissive light for night environment. Emissive light is an additional color source that is added in the final light of an object. This is only because when we want a object simulating and giving off its own light, just add emission light to get an effect on object in a scene. The effect of emissive light is pretty good, I enojoy it more than sun light.

project week 8

This week I was working on UDK of those static meshes. I have figured out how to reduce poly counts to avoid lagging.

I want to import well polished models and use a varriety of different meshes, however, it has caused a little bit lagging. Therefore, I try to replace some of the different meshes with ones I use more frequently in the level. It might not look as nice, but I can use normal map and specular map to make it look different. 


Normal maps allows me to keep my file size within my budget, while still being able to have assets that look like complex 3D models with the kind of detail I want.Using normal maps can save me a lot of time as well. With CrazyBump I can actually adjust  normals to show more or less detail from the reference image.

 

 

project week 7

This week I did another play test to get ideas from others.

For the play test section, there are 6 people who took the play test; the general feedback is positive and meaningful.

  From the demographic aspect, most people are between 20-30 years old and half of them are female.

 In terms of genre of game, most players have ever played flying game. For the game interface, most players think the interface is not bad, but it can be improved. For the level design and game environment, most players believe the environment is enjoyable but still needs to be improved. 

They have provided some suggestions about  my game environments and art style. Most players have basic understanding about Chinese architecture style, most of Them like Chinese architecture style like watching document films about Chiense traditional architecture. 

For the texture, most players expect more details to be added for the buildings. For example, the environment needs to add more vegetation and rocks, the main character needs to be well polished, the water color should be grey or dark blue. There should be  some dirts or darks spots on the surface of wall.  

 

project week 6

This week I continue to work on the texture, I have discovered new tools for the texture, such as clouds, texturizer, offset and gaussian blur.

Cloud is a  filter that is really great for adding extra texture to my work, especially for developing a nice smokey effect for the wall.

The Texturizer filter is similar to the Clouds filter, but with a few more options. There are four different types of textures – Brick, Burlap, Canvas and Sandstone. I can also adjust the scaling of the texture, the relief and the direction of the lighting.

The Offset filter is a useful little tool for shifting the position of pixels on the canvas. I will often use this filter when creating repeating patterns in Photoshop.

 

project week 5

This week I work on the tecture for the buildings. I use brushes to paint the houses as well as the fliter tool of photoshop to simulate the paint effect.

You can use filters to clean up or retouch your photos, apply special art effects that give your image the appearance of a sketch or impressionistic painting, or create unique transformations using distortions and lighting effects.

I have used different tools such as film grains, paint daubs, poster edges, sponge, accented edges etc. These tool helps me to convert a realistc image into a painted artwork.

 

project week 4

This week I have created new temple for the scene. Temples symbolize the long history and rich culture of China, and are regarded as valuable art treasures. There are many different religions in China, such as the Buddhism, Christianity and Islam introduced from other regions, as well as Taoism and Confucianism, the native-born religions. Of course, temples or houses of worship of different religions differ.

 Chinese temples are well kept cultural artifacts of every dynasty. And temple culture has influenced every aspect of Chinese people's life such as painting, calligraphy, music, sculpture, architecture, temple fairs, folk-customs and many others. The following are typical religious architectural styles in China.

The European churches often use complicated spire, arched domed roof and stained glass window to convey religious morals. Every detail of the buildings tries with intentions to express the opposite of the Promised Land in Heaven and miserable world on Earth. However, in a different way, Chinese temples want to express the concept of the integration of heaven and humanity, that is, human beings is a part of nature. Followed by this idea, many temples actively embrace themselves into nature. The building integrated with nature is exactly the embodiment of the integration of heaven and humanity. This is to explain why many Chinese temples are located in mountains and forests.

 

project week 3

This week, I have created a small water town. The water town is small but should be interesting for gamer. The water town has resident houses, hotel, restaurant, boat, bridge and fisherman house. The dragon would fly over the water town and player would be able to get the whole perspective of the town by controling the dragon.

All the streets of the town was built aside the rivers and streams, and the streets link to the bridges. There are ancient structures standing nearby the river, great scenery will be seen from those structures. The most funny thing is that the convenient transport is not vehicle but small ships.

I try to keep the buildings to be low polygon and mark them with different colors. The purpose for that is I must export them in to smal pieces and compose them again in UDK.

 

project week 2

This week, I will continue to work on the level design, I try to emulate the environment and architecture of a water town in East-Southern China.

 Zhouzhuang is one of the most famous water townships in China, situated in Kunshan City which is only 30 kilometers (18 miles) southeast of Suzhou. It is noted for its profound cultural background, the well preserved ancient residential houses, the elegant watery views and the strong local colored traditions and customs.

Zhouzhuang is surrounded and divided by lakes and rivers, 14 stone bridges cross the rivers, showing distinctive views of the water-town. Twin Bridges which comprise Shide Bridge and Yongan Bridge are the most famous and is considered the symbol of Zhouzhuang. I think this piece of environment would improve the visual enjoyment of my level design quite a lot.


 

   

 

project week 1

For this new quarter, I want to continue my project and refine my work. I will finish the modelling and insert functional game mechanism. I'm not sure if I control the dragon for shotting or just getting close to object. For animation part, I want to keep it simple, so I will just flutter its wing and tail. Since the focus of the game is on art, I think it will be enough for the game play.

For the level design, I will expand it and add more buildings to the level, the layout would be different from the prvious one.