Isometric Games - Final Project

 Research on Supergiant Games

We have been instructed to do research on isometric games and a company called Supergiant Games.

An isometric game is a game that is from a sort of top-down angle, this kind of perspective is used to give off a sort of 3D effect on the player.

Isometric games go far back as the 1980s and can still be found to this day. Some examples can be found below. The two examples I have provided include Daimonin and Super Mario RPG. Daimonin released a public beta in late 2003 and is an MMORPG which stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game. Super Mario RPG released in 1996 was published by Nintendo and unlike the other example is a singleplayer game but still follows the premise of an rpg as indicated by the title of the game having the word rpg at the end.

After doing our insightful research on the company we came up with the idea of our own game, Parallel Pathways. The general concept of the game is that you must change dimensions in order to proceed through certain areas of the game that may be blocked by obstacles or may be missing a bridge etc.

The player will be a character named Kim by default however the name can be set to whatever they may desire. 

Basic example of how I plan to implement the dimension mechanic, this is a rough draft and is subject to change in the future if need be.

The different letters on the compass stand for red, pale, black and white. These will be the four dimensions that you can travel to in order to traverse through the game. Granted we did not get around to implementing this as our time is very limited and we do not know how to use unity and suck and figuring out.

Examples of supergiant games

Hades is one of the games developed by SG Games. The plot of hades is that you defeat the god of the dead to escape the underworld of Greek mythology. It is a rogue-like that released in 2020 for 

• macOS, Switch, Windows PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X/S and iOS

The player controls Zagreus, the prince of the underworld, who seeks to escape the realm to get away from his unloving father, Hades, and reach his mother in the mortal world. His mother being Persephone.

 

Bastion is one of the first games made by Supergiant games. In the game, the player controls "the Kid" as he moves through floating, fantasy-themed environments and fights enemies of various types. The plot of this game is that the world had suffered some form of apocalypse event and "the Kid" must restore a sanctuary.

Transistor is a sci-fi themed RPG developed by Supergiant games that follows a character named Red who wields a strange sword and fights throughout a futuristic city. The game contains both real time combat and turn based mode. These modes are used separately throughout the game.

Scrum Sheet for 07/03/24 and 08/03/24

Progress 14/03/2024

GDD

I made concept art for what the player UI/HUD could potentially look like. This is entirely experimental as this is one of my first attempts of designing a UI/HUD. This is considered a prototype and should not be taken as a final edition. I hate this now that I'm looking back at it and i wish that i never made it. This thing is considered a problem and to fix it i never touched the photoshop file of it ever again.

E.G.O. is a type of personalized equipment manifested from an individual's mind and functions like a sort of rage meter, utilized for extremely strong attacks. This something we planned to implement into our game but never got around to due to the deadline we had being very strict and a distinct lack of experience with unity

Scrum sheet

Scrum sheet 16/04/24

Progress 18/04/24

Josh had worked on a sword concept, the sword which he took inspiration from is an ancient Korean Jikdo, the sword is/was used by Korean samurai when carrying out any battles that would require close quarters combat. It's name translates roughly to "straight blade". A problem that would arise when modelling this is that most jikdo's have a tassel on the end of the grip, neither me or josh would be able to model this as it is too complicated so to solve this we made a version without the tassel.

Progress 24/04/24

I opened photoshop and started to sketch out concepts of potential UI and other stuff that could be used in game somewhere whether it be vfx or anything otherwise useful. Most, if not all, of the stuff shown below is highly experimental and may not be used in the final build.

A concept i came up with for a simple enemy health bar that would be displayed upon the enemies head and would function like any other health bar, upon being hit the health would deplete and if it hit zero then the enemy would be defeated and reward the player for defeating them. Granted, the rewards would be very bare bones for weaker enemies but as the enemies get stronger the loot/rewards become more worthwhile.

This is a potential design that we may use as its simple but shows the player the information that they need such as health, light and E.G.O. All 3 of these of these things will factor into the gameplay to be used by the player. Light is used to perform attacks and ego is only usable after dealing enough damage and would drain while it is in use. It is also different to the UI I made earlier in the blog as this UI would be placed in the corner of the screen as opposed to being in the middle of the bottom of the screen.

Scrum sheet 24/04/24

Progress 25/04/24

Scrum Sheet

  

I began to work on the model for our player/main character, this will be difficult as I cannot model people very well and often struggle to make it look good but I am trying my best to do so. Here is all of my progress on the model and what I did in order to create it

I started by importing in an image of the character mockup I made in photoshop and put it into a free image plane, next I put in a cone and a sphere. I reduced the quality of the sphere to give it bit more of a human head shape as opposed to a circle.

I then added the body from a cylinder and added some edge loops to give it some definition and to shape the body for the rest of the character. One of the problems with this method is that one part of the body ends up looking high definition when the rest looks low poly which messes with the style of the game. In order to prevent this problem I removed some of the faces of the upper body and bridged the gaps to make it look low poly.

Next was the legs which consist of 3 parts each, 2 cylinders and a cube. The cube was used for the feet by flattening it out, adding a bevel and scaling certain parts to it. Next, to make the legs I took two cylinders and widened the first one to produce a thigh, the calf required the same process just on a smaller scale since it is smaller.

Scrum sheet 30/04/24

Progress 2/05/24

Below are the mood boards that me and Josh have put together in order to create a collaborative idea of what our game would/should include. In the mood board below, there are several items of clothing, there is a bamboo hat, a robe, a red tie and a grey buttoned dress suit. These are the clothes that we will have our character wear. Also included are a compass and 4 symbols, these will be used for the compass mechanic i mentioned earlier if it was not obvious. It also features a jikdo, our character's main weapon of choice.

The next mood board displays several different locations of where our game could potentially be set. There are several Korean structures included in this mood board as the game is set in Korea and would need them to pay homage to Korean swordsmen as well as the character we made valuing the art of war and battle. A problem that arose when making this was that it was hard to find images of Korean shrines as most of them are unphotographed in good quality. To combat this problem we took the images we had and had them enhanced by a website to improve the quality of the image. This ended in a success as the images we had chosen, originally to be low quality due to compression, were made more clearer by the digital enhancement.

Progress 03/05/24

I started off with the handle of the weapon/jikdo, this was achieved by taking a cube and scaling it lengthways and extruding the end faces I then took the faces from one end and extruded them to create the tsuba (hand guard of an Asian sword)

From there i extruded the face that was on the tsuba, I made it slightly shorter than i needed it to be and you will see why in a minute, I took the face on the bottom of the sword and scaled it until the edges pretty much became one. This is to produce a sword like shape.

Remember when I made the sword slightly shorter than it needed to be? this is why. I took the face on the end of the sword and extruded it twice into two segments, I brought the edges on the end segment together to create a sharp end to the sword similar to the sharpness on the bottom of the sword.

For cosmetics, I made a sheath for the sword. This was made by taking a singular cube, scaling it outwards then extruding a face that was in the middle. Then for some finishing touches I added a bevel to the sword and the sheath to try and improve the quality of the meshes whilst keeping the size to a minimum.

However just one sword version was not enough so

 Josh decided that he wanted to create a version of his own.

 In order to begin he made a concept sketch for the sword.

Next he started in blender with a cube which he then scaled lengthways and then shortened it in width to produce the blade part of the sword. there are edge loops on the sword for where the handle will be created, but that is for later

Following this, the end piece of the blade is shaped to give it a sharp edge that would be used for cutting, because having a dull blade is terrible and it wont cut. In order to make the blade sharp Josh moved the edge at the end of the cube slightly backward to produce a diagonal face.

After that, josh had applied an edge loop to the blade to give it definition which is called a grind and the sword that we chosen has only a pointed edge and not a flat edge unlike a lot of sword in the modern day.

Finally was the grip of the sword, Josh created the hand guard from faces around the blade and extruded them in order to create it, with the remaining faces Josh extruded the last face out to create the grip/handle itself. He then manually added a bevel to the grip for extra little detail.

Final Rendered Product

Progress 08/05/24 and 09/05/24

Trello

We made a trello to help organise who had to do what and when it was needed to be done. It changed slightly over time as we completed more and more stuff on our project. One of the few problems with the trello is that it was often disregarded by team members. To overcome this we started using the trello more often.

Making environmental buildings

I will be making a shrine to be put in the environment and to possibly be explored by the player, though I do not know if we would be able to do this with how little time we have left to finish the project.

I start with adding several cylinders, all equal distance from each other and placed in a plus formation. This will be the basis of the building that I am making for the environment in our project, it is based off of a Korean shrine or the gyeongsang shrine.

Next I added a cube on top of the pillar foundation of the model. I flattened the cube and then added edge loops to the cube where I then extruded out the faces that were created by the edge loops and then added a bevel to the build manually as the bevel tool did not help the best with doing so.

The next step of the modelling process was to duplicate the pillars below and scale them down to fit under the roof of the shrine. I kept the height the same as the pillars below, I only changed the width of the upper pillars.

Next came the roof of the shrine, I have only added a flat, scaled cube as of writing this due to hardware limitations making maya very difficult and annoying to use but in regards to this I made a pair of ladders that would be used in order to access the shrine.

Scrum sheet 09/05/24

Progress 10/05/24

I finished the roof of the environmental shrine model that josh has asked me to make for the project. This was the hardest part pf the model as it took me a good few minutes to rack my brain on how i would try to actually model the roof.

 I  eventually found a way to do it and it was through takes the roof, adding edge loops and pulling the squares up that were formed by the edge loops I had created. This was a lot less harder than I thought and took very little time but i still ran into complications such as maya crashing whenever i tried to move more than one face. To overcome this I deleted the prefs folder inside of maya which caused it to stop crashing after a while and thus allowed me to continue on with modelling the shrine which would be used for our environment.

Post mortem

WWW

The models that were made for this project were good and well optimised and did not take much time to make since they were simple and easy to create other than the roof for the shrine. Other than that everything was smooth when it came to modelling everything. 

EBI

It would have been better if we had a better understanding of unity and were not consistently down a team member. The lack of help we received also played  a good part in our distinct lack of unity work.
Another problem i ran into was certain computers either not having maya/photoshop or being too poor of quality to run these applications which heavily impacted performance which i had to overcome.
Final Thought

Upon reflecting on this work, the skills/work i would wish to carry onto the next project are 3D Modelling as i wish to improve the way i model by reducing polygons and my problems within my creations, Concept art as continuing this would allow me to make clearer designs and sketches for my team to understand/comprehend and thus implement into unity.

Extras/Posters