David Mccall here I am in Senior Capstone this class is a 1-Year course I actually started it the second half of the year, so I ended up getting on a team of talented individuals that had been blue-printing the game out the first year and were just starting to get in the design process during the semester I joined.
The game that my team was in the process of building was called Ninja Royale which got renamed later to Avatar Trials: Ninja uprising, this game takes your Xbox360 avatar and puts him in a level where you have ninja physique and you allowed full control of your character where they can run and jump and do parkour stunts off obstacles. The main goal in the game is to get your Avatar to the end of the obstacle course as fast as possible and have the ultimate time.
Team Members Include:
Ross Marabella - Project Lead and Marketing Director
Paulo Matos - Animator
Max Locher - Lead Artist
Derek Young - Artist
Adam Durant - Artist
David McCall - Level Designer / Concept Art
Thaddeus Beck - Programmer
Blake Sleight - Programmer
Ron Romero - Programmer
Zbynek Dusatko (Also known as Z) - Programmer
James Hulse - Programmer
Mavin Martin - Programmer
12 Combined minds in this group we were able to work together and work as a team
In Senior Capstone we have a group that was made up of artists and programmers we were then grouped together with our certain skillset, meaning that artists were grouped with artists and programmers were grouped with programmers.
Every class we would have a 10 minute stand up meeting letting the class know each task that we did over the weekend or in-between tuesday and thursday.
After our stand up our teacher talk about whats coming up in a couple of days and what we have to look forward to.
We have two teachers in Senior Capstone, including Kessler and Roger, they are both really great teachers and they always keep us updated on whats new and whats happening in our groups. They are both easy to work with and talk to.
My first task in Senior capstone was to come up with a level that would be simple and easy for the chracter to work with, basically we just wanted to blueprint out some designs so we could get a look at the playground where our character could roam.
Above are two pictures of what I designed in unity. In the beginning of the semester we wanted our game to be design around quests and and obstacles revolving around it, we wanted our game to be more like a popular game called "Assasins Creed" in the pictures above you can see little scrolls throughout the entire map which at the time would give the Ninja certain attributes.
The playground level evolved a lot in the beginning working with Max our artist lead in the beginning was a lot of fun, because we all had different ideas and Max wanted us all just to come up with ideas and we brought everything together and worked as a team.
In the beginning of Senior Project we had two groups, which one was made of artists and the next programmers.
As an Artist not having much skills with free hand drawing and using photoshop as a main tool. I excelled in level design as the class went on I was put on production making different levels.
One of my favorite projects I was put on was making a big city that the avatar was able to roam around and do quests. The pictures shown is the grand city I made in Unity that we decided to scrap but i enjoyed every second of it.
I still felt that the pictures were pretty vague in so I talked to Ross at this point and asked him what he was thinking about the current blueprint, I talked to him and he really wanted some high points and low points where the character could jump on top of buildining and roam across the map and have the ability to run on connected buildings, which came from the emphasis on our mindset of the game Assasins Creed.
where the character was freely able to get on top of buildings and move freely to the next building by obstacles such as wires,boards and side panels off buildings. As I am a avid player of Asssasins Creed I knew where he kind of wanted to go with the design aspect.
The design of this level was going to have a main dojo where it was the tallest building and was somewhat unreachable and scale downwards to smaller buildings and a few random taller buildings where the player could climb to the top of and admire the view or look around for quest items.
The level I came up with is shown here:
This picture was just a teaser through a long catacomb that gave you a glimpse of the level and I took this shot to make it feel like you wanted more.
The top-overview of the level I created showed the bases of what stuff we had in our level, at this poing i wanted to add more buildings and left them a little higher and not leave so much space in between buildings.
This
picture is a view of the the graveyard where we wanted the one of the
quests to be the whole idea at this point in the game was to have the
player go to this part of the city and find or dig up ancient scrolls.
Another idea of this was to be able to encounter some type of enemies in
the graveyard at night time.
The
graveyard was there to resemble the fallen great ninja warriors who
were there and had become heroes when they had fallen. It was a honor to
be buried in this place graveyard and only the few and proud were to be
able to be buried in this place.
In this
picture it is where the ancient scroll of Wuzu was to be held and it was
heavily guarded by the guards of the city and no one was suppose to
even walk up to the gate without being looked at suspicious. We wanted
to have a mission where you were to sneak past the guards on a quest and
capture this ancient scroll and find out it's hidden secrets.
The next to shots so a top view and side view of the the City.
Side View
The small building above we anted to represent some type of portal where the player can get to a different level in the sky.
After showing this level to the team they really liked the idea but
wanted it kind of broken up into quadrants and they wanted everything
closer together.
As the game
progressed we wanted to to move away from the models that were created
by Kelly because our Prison level was having issues with lag and there
were a lot of things we had to change. So we decided that we would
scrap all of the design created by Kelly and move on to an obstacle em
phased based level.
I
began scrapping ides together on what we wanted to do because with the
game how it was at this point was to hard for the player and we had to
get it a little more player friendly.
Immediately
after this task was given to us I threw together some blueprints on
where we wanted to go with the game. We jumped on Skype and began
throwing out ideas on what we wanted to go with the outlook of the
game.
The pictures below include some of the ideas we focused on that I created in Unity.
After Accumulation of Ideas we got Max went ahead and started building the level from all of our ideas and we went from there.
We
wanted to have a skylevel in the game that we didn't end getting to add
but Max and Ross put on the project to make something so i came up with
these ideas and kind of ran with it.
After the
submission of the Skylevel blueprint we again decided that we wanted
something else. So with the help from Rodger and Kessler we decided to
drop the quests and the scrolls and base all of our attention on
creating a level with obstacles and keeping the focus on Parcour.
We
all submitted ideas for level 1, 2, 3 and all of ideas were submitted
to Max and max looked through all of the levels and mixed everything
that each person submitted and built the levels based on that.
After level one was complete we went ahead and started play testing.
After play testing began we just ended up fixing bugs and other stuff we had a cut on more incoming artist work and that is when hardcore gaming began in our game and getting our game Finally submitted to Xbox Live :)
