Game Report - Nuko

Nuko

Group 20 (Alexandra Valencia and Cameron Wetzel Hillman)

The asymmetrical battle game, between the lawful United Nations and evil Villain. The villain seeks to bring four nuclear components to their secret bases scattered across the globe by way of shipping, smuggling, and bribing their way through trade routes. The UN must delay the Villain by blocking, searching, and disrupting those trade routes long enough for the Villain to run out of money and shut the operation down. It is played by way of placing and playing cards along with moving pieces towards specific goal spaces. This game is intended for strategy game enthusiasts in their 30's.

Alexandra accomplished many tasks. She created the game board, printing out the map and attaching it to a board along with a plastic portion for writing with a dry erase marker.. She also printed out the final version of the game cards and pasted them to note cards to provide additional strength and survivability. I (Cameron) worked to design the board's layout, as well as the game's functions and various types of cards. Alexandra certainly did the brunt of labor towards creating the final game.

During playtesting, it was very difficult to get players to understand how the game was played. Only two actual playtests were done, as it took too long for the two players per game to get in flow. More playtests were done between the designers than anyone else.
In addition to those problems, the general rules had to be changed several times in order to rebalance and make the game actually fun.

Outside of playtesting, an issue I noticed was how there was little communication between I and Alexandra, due to limited class time interaction, and that she lives elsewhere which made scheduling work time together not possible.

For the future, I would certainly appreciate having more group members and easier contact, not to mention being able to work more than 4 hours a week in the same room. Me personally, only having one person to work with is unreasonable, even with such a small scale project.

Dining Scene - Final

A Beachside Restaurant at Dusk

Inspiration:

Being from San Diego, I have been taken to many eateries by my parents. That would include those located directly in view of the beach and ocean horizon. For my scene, I wanted something classy that overlooks some kind of oceanic thing. I started with the idea of eating on a ship deck, but the criteria of the assignment asked for an indoor scene, so I reluctantly added real walls and a ceiling. I personally believe a restaurant is classier when the layout is limited and the kitchen is hidden, though that's not usually the case in real life. I took elements of small hipster spots and combined them with the larger refined locations. Most of the objects were intended to fit in such a classy beach theme, but without properly remembering the exact look I was limited to stock images that came close.

Objects:

• Table (board, legs, and supports)
• Silverware (fork, knife, and spoon)
• Napkin (for silverware)
• Plate
• Drinking glasses (martini and whiskey)
• Pitcher filled with water
• Candle (candlestick, square jar, sand)
• Podium
• Painting
• Lights (hanging ceiling globes, wall-mounted cylinders)
• Structure (walls, ceiling, floor, and window)

Textures:

• Hardwood floor (Textures101)
• Silver – for silverware (DeviantArt – SweetSoulSister)
• Rubber – under table leg (Photos Public Domain)
• White wood – table legs and supports (Pintrest)
• Bamboo board – table board (Wikimedia Commons)
• Dark wood – chair legs, podium, ceiling light frame, painting frame (Pintrest)
• Purple paint – walls (Cameron Wetzel Hillman)
• Grey paint – ceiling (Pintrest)
• Brushed metal – wall light base (iStock)
• White glass – wall light glass (iStock)
• Abstract fabric – chair (TextureX)
• White fabric – cushion (Textures.com)
• Porcelain – plate (Walmart)
• Ocean sunset – background (Max Pixel)
• Sand (Inspiration Hut)
• Ceramic – ceiling light base (gen4congress.com)
• Nylon – ceiling light (Country Brook Petz)
• The Kramer – painting (artexpress.ws)

Problems and Solutions:

1. Time: I am a slow worker, especially with creative assignments. I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at nothing, or attempting to keep my mind occupied to not become too stressed about the deadlines. The nights before weekly ePortfolio checkups were quite difficult. I just had to sit for tens of hours and do nothing else.

2. Upon completing my scene, I noticed that I was at well over 80 thousand faces. I either needed to delete a lot of faces from a lot of objects, or delete several objects entirely. It was disheartening to see my scene lose detail.

3. I wanted to have more interesting textures, but the amount of time I spent on everything prevented anything cool. I chose to do no more than stock images found on the internet to drive a steam train through the pipeline, as I was not interested in wasting effort on simple elements no one would notice.

Time Frame:

• Planning 2 hours
• Modeling 15 hours
• Texturing 15 hours
• Layout 3 hours
• Lighting 5 hours
• Rendering 5 hours
• Total 45 hours

References:

Ambient Occlusion Set-up - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75JFUwA5XL0

Dining Scene - Update 2

This next phase of my project has much of the final placement of objects. The purpose of this update is to showcase the lighting. There are 3 sources present. The main source is from the environment, namely the sun, which is present as a background texture. The other two sources are a series of hanging lights and wall lights across the room.

It is possible that the light values will be changed to accommodate texture work. That will be apparent when the textures are finalized, after which point the project will be ready for shipping. As it is, I think the way it is now is right.

The objects present are essentially complete. They all have UVs and are ready for texturing. Some other objects may be created to create additional visual interest. One object created is missing from the renders, a menu. I could not adequately decide where to place them at the moment, so I left them invisible.

While there is a decent amount of work left before completion, the project is on the right track. Here are two more renders to fully present the entirety of the scene.

Dining Scene -- Update 1

After much effort, two important models have been fully sculpted and unwrapped. I believe I am on track to have all objects finished by the end of this week. 

This table went through several revisions. I had two different references that I wanted to follow initially. After the blocking phase, I attempted to build both separately. The model you see here ended up being more visually interesting while being simpler to construct, having less polygons and no circles.




There are only three unique pieces, the leg, support beams, and counter. The leg is duplicated three times across the structure, and the support is duplicated twice. I intend to have dining sets and chairs placed in each of the slots between legs, and I can easily modify the amount of slots by adding or removing legs and supports.

This chair had more complexity and visual flair planned. There were arms with a bulbous design, and the cushion had a bow to tie it to the chair, both of which were based on my reference. They were decided against to save the effort and polygons.

For the texture, I plan to have a wicker style, though I foresee complications with seams. If I cannot solve it in a reasonable time frame, I will go for a soft fabric. The cushion will in both cases have a distinct cloth look to be clearly separate from the chair itself.

Here I will provide the reference materials that inspired my objects.

These references are generally what I hope to emulate with my completed scene, with the silverware, location, and knick knacks on the table.

Dining Scene - Blocking

For this project, I will be creating a deck overlooking an ocean scene with a few tables, chairs, and restauraunt materials. The deck will be hardwood, like a ship's deck, and its barrier will resemble a ship's barrier. The barrier will also have glass panes between the posts, and decorative lighting along it. Tables will be a rustic wooden material with potentially wicker chairs. Plates, drinking glasses, utensils, and decorative elements will have an oceanic/nautical theme.

Items:
Wood tables
Wicker chairs
Silver dining utensiles
Glass plates and drinks
Cloth napkins, tablecloths, and seat covers
Hardwood flooring
Metal railing with posts and glass panes
Decorative hanging lights

Grocery Shelf

This project features several different objects, most with unique textures, and more or less specifically designed per object. There are 8 different objects. 4 objects are boxes filled with various goods. The other 4 are containers are glass or metal containers filled with various liquids. These objects are placed on a shelf. The shelf has two levels, a base, two diagonal sides, and a back.

Some objects were designed to have a theme. One theme was soup in objects that are increasingly unsuitable to hold soup. I took care to make these objects distinctly different in their structure, even if I reused elements of the texture.

To flesh out the shelf space, I duplicated the objects and placed them in what I thought was a natural-looking manner. The project called for certain minimums of object types, but the act of creating them felt cheap, so I attempted to touch in some creative element. Unfortunately that cut into other, more important design elements.