Week 7 8/23-8/28

This is the last week to work on our project for Alpha stage. Because of that, I had to spend more time with my partners in getting all our work up to date. I did manage to make three model for Beta. They are:

Dynamite

Knife

Tool shed

All in all, I believe our game will not go as smooth as expected when our group present in front of the class. Even now, we still have many bugs such as Ai path finding.

Week 6 8/16-8/22

 In this week, I spent most of my time with making models. In continuation from week 3, I gave my level design partner the building to use as reference when he create and place the his building in UDK. As shown below to the left are my partner version of the buildings, where as the right will be the new building that we will use for our game.

                                                                       Wayne Saloon

  Cat House

Jim's Gun Shop

   Sheriff

                                   








Only four building will be use for our town level is what my level design partner had decided. When I created the custom collision for the buildings I used .ASE file rather than .FBX because for some reason, my box collision I place in 3ds Max was not sent through correctly when I imported the meshes into UDK. Other meshes I had made for my level design partner are a wagon and a bench.

One last thing I did this week is rigged my gunsmith model from week 3. It was much easier this time because I had used biped . It not like I hate biped, I prefer to use bone because there are no constraint on the bone when doing animation.

Week 5 8/9-8/15

In this week I spent most of my time getting my Main Menu(as seen from week 2) to work. As shown below is a flow chart on how the Main Menu should work when it is finish. This is only a rough flow chart so there may be change in the future.

I am finish with the "Start New Game" and "Options" section of the flow chart. The "Continue Game" and "Quit" will be added later on when I know my programming partner is ready to add it to the game. It is not needed for Alpha but will definitely be needed for Beta, although "Quit" will probably be added in Alpha.

Other task I complete this week is creating static meshes of: crate,barrel,rocks, and grass. With the grass, I had to create an opacity texture to give my grass texture a transparent background. For my other static meshes I used normal map to give it bumps so that meshes look more realistic.

 
 

Week 4 8/2-8/8

In this week, my agenda is creating the HUD(head-up display) for our game. This was one of my hardest task so far. There were three things I had keep in mind when creating the HUD. They are: space, theme, and most importantly, originality. Below show the FOV(field of view), for our game.

My first step when making the HUD is creating an outline of what the HUD will be like. I created my outline in Photoshop. I had to keep mind my space and originality of the HUD. It was all about trials and error, so all I did was just create many images that I feel are neat that would fit together and a good amount of distances apart. Below show my outline I created.

This outline I felt decent. The spaces between the UI(user-interface) wasn't bad neither the amount of UI on the screen.This HUD would also fit a third person view. My next step would be improving this outline. I like the color blue and all, but I feel like it is too commonly use in games. I decided to change the theme color to black, and while at it, I added an SP bar because our group plan for the future would be allowing our character to use skill.

 I thought I would be done after this change from above, but when I import this HUD into UDK(Unreal Development Kit).as a test run, I saw the transparency with the bottom right hand UI was giving me some trouble. This area I intend to use to show the weapon and money. The problem with this UI area is the fact that black the shadow from the light does not fit well or rather, fit too well.I like the color theme being black so I decided to keep it black while giving some adjustment to this area. I manage to think of a new trick.

Having the weapon icon a plain color to show which weapon my character is using is a common trick with most game when weapon UI, and the color white also fit well with my black color theme. With this I am done with my outline of the HUD, or so I thought...

Image A

Image B

 When I show my group the HUD outline with the black theme color my group think it was good, however, they feel like rather than being black it should have a more wood texture style to match our Wild West theme. I then change my HUD from before to the HUD shown in Image A. I felt it was better to have kept the theme color black but it was me against three other member. In the end, I settle it with just combining both trait of the HUD together and it turn out as appear in Image B. I finish this outline off by adding text and cross hair.