Game Jam: Toll Gate

Schools gone for a week and of course my friends and I had another game jam! We made the same routine, looking at videogamena.me  for inspirations. The first game names that came up would be our basis of the game. The game name that we got was:

Adventures of the car invaders
Extreme ghost world cup
Blasphemous Amish smackdown
Radioactive shotgun rave
Professional dessert - 2D impact 

The second and third names were really funny, we came up with some wild stories revolving around the names. We initially  decided that we wanted to make a game which is simple and has no violence in it so we took away the names that suggested violent gameplay so we were left with options 1 and 5. After some discussion we chose name 5.

The gameplay was pretty easy to nail down but deciding the theme of the game turned out to be a much harder thing to do. We initially had a dessert theme but then it would be a game of sorting cakes and pastry it felt so candy crushy, we ditched the dessert theme and came up with another one, junk sorting! But yeah junk sorting did not appeal to our tastes. So we tossed that one too and finally settled down with a sci-fi traffic controller where you are in space controlling the flow of traffic. The theme became a retro sci-fi theme where everything is curvy. 

The concept art and finished models by me

The goal of the game is that you have to let the green ships pass. The blue ships go down the toll gate and you have to fling the red ship away. If you let the red ships pass then you will lose a life. controls are simple, you can use any key to raise the gate and push R to restart the whole game

I learned some more Photoshop techniques from Joel while making this game. I got to concept and design my own ships this was my main task which took alot of my time. Making this game made me realize that there is still a lot of things for me to learn, I still need to train on painting side of 3D as I am not so good at it. I can't wait for the next game jam, I really learn a lot while jamming 

Here is Some screenshots of the game

Did I mention that we have physics in game?

Download the game here

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone! I've made a scene just you and for this occasion, I've been working on it for a month now and I am happy that I could finish it in time.

 Can you help the sleepy bunny find all 9 eggs in the scene?

Personal Experience

I have never built a 3D scene from scratch before, but i was prepared. I knew what I wanted to do, I started planing what I was going to make. I started to make sketches on what things i was model and how roughly everything would look like. When I have finished modeling everything and started making the scene I felt that I had no idea how I would do the scene, the sketch that i made was pretty rough and placing things in 3D is much more difficult than just drawing them in paper. Over all it was fun, and positioning different objects to see if they fit aesthetically was a nice experience for me. 

Technical Experience

The whole scene is made in Unity which is a 3D game engine, I'm planing on making the scene again on Maya because there is a rendering tool there; mental ray and it does wonders with the lighting!

I've started using normal mapping using Nvidia's Photoshop plug-in, apparently Unity has its inbuilt normal mapping system, you just need to have a grey scale texture for it to work. I have worked with normal mapping before but I mostly used it on single objects and i did that in Maya.