Wolf Dev Diary #1

Hello everyone,

We are rolling into our last few months of classes, which means the massive final project is full steam ahead. I've decided it would be pretty cool to document our struggle in making a commercial quality "vertical slice" of a video game done with our extremely talented 5 man time. Our jobs on the project are as follows:

Zach Williams - Art, QA, Sound, misc
 Matt Macmahon - 3d modeling, misc
Clinton Ma - project lead, scripting, misc
Balraj Basi - scripting, misc
Nick Cattley - Level Design, scripting, misc

The game is called Wolf, it's a Film/tech Noire style first person shooter made with the Unreal Development Kit. You play as Vinnie "The Wolf" Morello. A mole for the mob entrenched within the oppressive totalitarian government's regime. The mob uses you for warnings and general information that the government may have on them. It was good while it lasted, but Vinnie has been discovered.

Vinnie isn't a pushover though, he just happens to have telekinetic powers, these powers make Vinnie extremely destructive and extremely valuable to the mob. It's up to Vinnie to clear his way through the regimes headquarters in an effort to escape.

As I mentioned, the game takes place in a film/tech noir style world. The time period, while never official resembles the 1930's but with technology far distant from our 1930's. Things like video walls, computers and even basic service robots can be found throughout the game world. The game will be almost entirely in black and white, try to think of it along the lines of sin city, High contrast with effective use of vibrant colors. We'll utilize the colors to really make the game appear visually stimulating while distancing itself from the UDK mod feeling so many games developed in this engine fall into.

So, Telekinesis. Yes, Vinnie can pick up and toss objects and even enemies with his left hand, with his right he can charge up objects and enemies with energy to the point where they will explode. This will make for interesting battles with plenty of wow moments. To add to that, we  will be incorporating an extreme level of aesthetic level destruction. All of our objects we create for the game will be destructible. Walls and pillars will chip away, debris will fall and the players will be left feeling extremely badass after witnessing the destruction then can bring.

That's not to say Vinnie is invulnerable. The totalitarian oppressive government did not get to where it is without breaking a few limbs. At their disposal are some extremely powerful riot troopers. Most will be armed with hand canons, some will be armed with something we like to refer to as "the spike" it's a heavy club, a taser and a spear all in one!

Concept art for our enemies

Ultimately, our goal with Wolf is to create a stylized, fun, power trip type of game. So, since this is my blog, I will be covering (for the most part) my experience with the development process form here on out.

Today, I had a scheduled job to take hand turnarounds. I took front side and back photos of each of my hands, edited them in photoshop and then fired them off to our 3d modeler. He's now on his way to creating the main characters hands which players will always view on screen.

Mock up of our game view including basic hud.

 I then went on to discover how to create proper looking particle effects in UDK which will spawn from a joint on our custom models. In other words, I made bloody particles which will spew out of our models when they suffer a serious wound. There will likely be several iterations, but for the moment I am content with it. Our 3d modeler will be playing around with incorporating it with his models in UDK sometime soon.

Tonight I'll be adding more content to the textures folder. I cannot afford a copy of a handy little program called Crazybump which basically would make my job a hell of a lot easier. Once I create an initial texture, I load it into crazybump and it spits out the other texture maps I'll need for our game (in this case normal and specular) So, I'll just have to stick to creating textures, making sure they tile and making sure they look good in black and white for now. Once I am back to school on Monday I'll begin finalizing them with crazybump....Unless any of you kind Internet folks wants to donate a copy to me. Hah.

Tomorrow my team has a meeting with a mentor at a pub downtown. We're hoping to get his insight on whether or not to remove the gun the player uses in game (see screenshot above) and adding another telekinesis power to the right hand instead (as described far above, a charge power that makes things 'splode) The team is a bit divided on it, but we've set a time to decide and with our mentors advice we will make a decision.

Finally, over the weekend, I will be creating a fancy schmancy single page poster for our game which will be passed along to our schools 3d students in the hopes of enticing one of them to collaborate with us. We are not in need of one particularly, but we can always use more 3d objects in game so we'll give it a shot. I'll also finalize our preliminary sound assets list which, you guessed it, will be passed along to sound design in the hopes of getting collaborators there as well...which we really do need.

I've written enough, back to work!

Cheers,

Z

Buy me a cup of coffee it helps the dev process!