Month: November 2017

This week I finally made the idea of Alice in Wonderland works. Last week, I tried to make a level based on the experience of Alice but failed as Slade crushed so many times and I settled down with the idea of a world full of bug and bad signals. Luckily, the decoration script works much better than the texture system. For this week, I simply worked on the project I left behind last week due to the lack of the time. All ideas were planned and most of the textures were already found last week. All I did is to relearn the texture system and decoration script.  The key element, the well, actually appeared in my last week project. It was the strange exit circle which is covered by the green exit sign. The hallways with different height were also in my last week project.

As I worked with the world of Alice, I realized that the project I did last week and the week before can also be part of this week. Since I am able to create my own decoration and texture, I am free to make the level of my house looks really like the room I lived in. Also, the ability to implement my own weapon, keyboard, makes the bug room makes much more sense. The keyboard fits perfectly for both debug purpose and the theme of Alice in Wonderland.

 

The biggest problem I encountered is the inconsistency of texture. Since I am really bad at photoshop and drawing, I tended to google image and change their size to make my texture. However, doom really makes the color become weird or gives the item an outline. The lack of ability to produce my own sprite also makes my weapon and monsters failed to move smoothly. In order to overcome this problem, I will try to use some sprit from other games or learn to use photoshop.

The strange outline compared to the actual picture

I really wanted my project this week to be more gentle than my previous projects have been – and more gentle than doom itself is (it does not take much though). I knew from early on I wanted to eliminate any sort of combat in the level, and was trying to think of different interactions that could be positive instead. I was also reeeallly hung up on using deer for some reason (I didn’t quite intend on the relationship between deer being the most hunted animals vs the setting of target, but I did really want an animal that was often vulnerable and gentle around humans).

As for the setting – I wanted it to be grounded in reality but also explore an open space. I liked the idea of deer guiding the player around different abstract spaces, but I wanted the initial one to be something both familiar but subtly surreal. The idea of target came to mind .. sometime really early in the morning too. I thought of how being inside a target can seem like a liminal space due to its overwhelming brightness, signature colors and layout, and massive assortment of products. The interior of the target can be anywhere or take place in any time of day. I also thought this would be a perfect opportunity to make the level’s textures and physical layout true to target stores. The stores usually deal in the same floor texture as well as clear flat lines in its layout, something that wouldn’t be too hard in doom. I went through a lot of pictures to get the different floor textures right:

Initially, I wanted to add a lot more textures/sprites to populate the shelves of the store, but I liked the feedback everyone gave on how it was nice to be a slightly more abstract representation of the store that still allowed the player to know where they were. I had a lot of fun making this level and hope to expand it!

This week I really wanted to try and create something extremely different from Doom — something wholesome with a lot of cute animations in a very small area. My goal was to think small for the map design, but fill the area with a lot of sprites and animations.

Here’s my first sort of “brainstorming” for the level. I started out knowing that I wanted a large tree with some sort of bird animation on it, a frog sitting in a pond, some plants and flowers that the player could water with a watering can, and the “enemy” sprite was going to be some sort of cute animal following the player around.

This is what it turned out to be! I think my favorite animation is the bird poking its head out of the tree every once in a while.

I ended up hand drawing almost everything in this level on a piece of paper, and then editing those drawings in Gimp to have transparency. Here are some of the original drawings:

As well as some failed attempts at drawing…

Although it is extremely tedious, I really wish I had the time to hand draw everything, because I feel like the things that I drew digitally stick out like a sore thumb — the sky, the water, the grass as a few examples. I also wish that my drawings did not end up so pixelated in the final result after spending so much time on them!

Overall, it was really neat to see my drawings come to life in a video game and was also really interesting for me to create something cutesy and wholesome out of something that originally was the complete opposite.

For my project for week 5 I created a map called Light.  Here is the quick play though:

I wish it could have been longer, but due to issues with getting it to work with chocolate doom this is what I presented in class.

It is intended to make the user experience light being split from a prism, as seen below:

The use is introduced to the level with a sliver of light, drawn towards it.  Everything is completely dark except for that light until the player reaches the triangle at the center of the map, where the different colors of a light beam are introduced.

Here is the layout for the map.

As I get better at modding Doom, I would love to be able to add glitches to my levels such as forcing to player to no clip out of the map.  This was my original intention for this level, and I plan on adding this functionality in my later creations.

Overall I am finding the process of converting Doom into a custom game through adding new textures to be fascinating, and look forward to using more tools to alter Doom.

Since our assignment for this week was due on Halloween, I decided to make my mod Halloween themed. Most of the textures I used for this assignment I found online and just opened them up in Photoshop to resize before importing into Slade. When I was creating my map I wanted to mostly experiment with walls/line edges and also learn to make a door! To make it easier, I only made one door and copy and pasted it to three different locations on my map. I also played around with transparent textures on line segments to make the bats and spiderwebs in the spiral hallway.

My favorite room is the secret with the ghosts where the walls scroll. I thought it was a cool feature because it adds movement to the map.

For next week, my personal goal is to make a bigger map. My maps have been pretty small so far and since I know how easy it is to copy, paste and rotate now, I was thinking of maybe creating some symmetrical map? We’ll see.

I honestly had a lot more fun making my Doom level this week. I think it was because of a combination of a couple things. One, I was a bit more comfortable with Slade and knew a bit more how to deal with its shortcomings. And two, I was able to incorporate a design that was a lot of fun for me — Zelda!

My map is largely inspired by the first ever level of the Legend of Zelda on the NES.

This time around, what ended up probably taking up most of my time is getting my textures prepared and learning the photo editing software called GIMP.

Generally I would have to take a really tiny screenshot of a texture from Zelda on google, and then copy and paste this texture onto a layer in Gimp, being sure to make sure that it all lines up correctly.

Sometimes while resizing images, I even had to re-pixelize to sharpen them back up.

And, what probably took the most time of them all — creating a transparent background for some of these objects, which I think for the most part turned out pretty good!

The textures aren’t perfect, but I still had a lot of fun drawing inspiration from Zelda. It was cool to really be able to incorporate some of my own ideas into this game! It started to feel like something I created and designed, rather than something that was created for me and I was just editing.

This was the first texture I made for my level (and really, for anything ever). When I first sat down to work on this week’s project, I honestly thought I was just going to make a hand drawn level with some basic textures to make my weekend a lot easier. But making textures turned out to be the longest part of my project, and although a lot of that time involved navigating through GIMP and retexturing everything until it looked “perfect,” I learned two important things from this experience: one — I do not want to be a video game artist — and two — being part of the art design process, even if I’m not the one drawing or texturing, enriches the design process of a level so much.

 

The aesthetic principles of the level depend on the ability of the artist to imagine the style of the level, but also to integrate a particular style that matches the tone of the game and the image of the company producing it. Although video games are not an entirely visual medium, the visual components of a game can determine whether or not the game is worth playing. Where gameplay determines the genre and fun-factor in a game, the graphical content determines the pace of the game, the first impression before a person is able to engage with it. Graphics do not define how good a game is or what a game is in general. They provide another layer to the video game experience that separates it from other game types — the video component. And of course, this is common knowledge. I knew this coming into this class and far before deciding I wanted to make games. I find it interesting, though, how the pieces that combine to create a whole graphical world are often cast aside in favor of a short judgement on the overall project. Few people go through a game looking at each individual texture even though game artists can spend months drawing each individual surface viewed throughout the game. To me, that is amazing, and something that I now appreciate even more than before.

This week we are required to replace all texture in doom to create a new level. What I planned to do initially was to construct a level which mimics the world of Alice in Wonderland. In order to show the plot, I planned to have a well in the first room. And after the player falls into the well, he will be transported to a normal size room. After this room, he will enter two room that looks identical but one with a very low ceiling while one with a very high ceiling to show how the size of player changes

However, it is obvious now that I did not accomplish my original plan. The texture system of Slade is very confusing to me. Once I added something into the Texturex, I could not delete them otherwise the whole wad just does not work. And the fact that the color will change strangely also made wonderland impossible as the blue turn into gray, making the atmosphere very strange. In the end, Slade crashed so many times that I was so pissed off by it. I realized that I could not finish the wonderland and decided to do a bug land, a level full of different wrong signal image, to show my frustration and depression.

(The green texture which is gray in the actual game)

(The texture that is too colourful for Cholocate Doom)

I tried to reuse as many elements of the wonderland design as I can. I did the two connected rooms with different height ceilings and the reused the idea of well at the end of the exit(which unfortunately did not work). The problem I entered with my bug land is that one texture I used was too colorful for Cholocate Doom to handle and it just crashed. I tried to remake the map but it turned out that it can only be shown in the GZDOOM. For the next week, I will try to connect the bug land with the wonder land since I really want to do a fairy tale style doom level.