Wreckless Conduct: It's the Pits

One of the features of Wreckless is the machine pits, where players can get their vehicle repaired and reload their weapons. The money you earn racing can be used here especially if you or a competitor has totalled your car.

Development sketches and notes:

The old pits from the prototypes:

The current pits(still work in progress):

These pits are going to be inserted into buildings so you can get drive-thru service, oh the wonders of modern convenience. The name's not important but keep an eye out for the hazard stripes, they work like beacons.

Pit props/window dressing*:

* None of which actually operates, it's mise en scène/set design.

Shots of WIP versions of the hydraulic lift:

Stats of the current hydraulic lift:

This prop has a few problems like scale but these are going to get fixed soon. Sorry techno-nuts, it doesn't lift your car up. It's just window dressing.

Wreckless Conduct: Week 4

Last week the Wreckless team discussed the plan for the current 3 week sprint. The plan was to subtract the racing element and go for demolition derby.

Our old work breakdown looks like this:
Inicus - Competitor AI
Anderson - Car Customisation
Brie - Pedestrian modeling and animation *(This has changed to something particular tasty, more info can be had from Brie)
Me - Environment: modeling, texturing and level design

Old concept sketches dealing with roads, highways and rooftop racing. That's right, the city is a hive and it may turn out like Mega-City One from Judge Dredd. (Well hopefully something more navigable.)

Screenshot of me figuring out how the bridge and ramp road system is going to work out. It will get better.

You may not realise this but Inicus has written up a script that tiles the UVs for items like roads, pavements and windows when the game is run. Check out some before and after shots.

Wreckless Conduct: Props

I've been working my way down the prop checklist and I have about 6 models to go and about X amount of variations to on everything. The design brief/art direction for Wreckless can be summed up as: "You'll be fine as long as you make it as I see it in my head".

Here's some screenshots of what may be appearing in Wednesday's prototype:

Yes, the street lamp looks very long. I will look into it.

These be things that will be stuck on buildings, the two little ones in the middle are generic fuse boxes.

Wreckless is meant to have a lot of advertising it its world. This is the stuff for now and it's not even the tip of the iceberg.

Link Dump

#AltDevBlogADay has a new website which is much easier to use.

GDC Vault - Free videos from GDC.

DICE Presentations from this year's GDC. - They are an offshoot of EA so they will be discussing things about AAA title production.

Please Finish Your Game by Chris Hecker - (I will watch it sometime but I've been told it is important viewing)

Postmortem, Gamasutra style - Lessons learnt from production and release of games.

Space-Shooter Postmortem - Lessons learnt from a student producing a spaceship game and it comes with source code.

Kongregate Unity Game Winners - Unity and Kongregate had a competition and these are the results.

Jasmine showed me Space Invaders Infinity Gene, a very cool reboot of a classic which reminded me of Upgrade Complete

Demystifying trademarks and games - Stuff about copyright, logos and trademarks that you might want to think about.

12 business tips for indie game developers by Paul Taylor of Mode7

Extra Consideration: Console Gaming - Opinions piece from MovieBob, Yahtzee, and James Portnow.

Gaming can make a better world by Jane McGonigal - An interesting take on serious gaming and games as work.

Shadow Shoppe - A game prototype that is also a survey on how people associated character traits with body shape.

Da Font and Blambot are places that I use to look for fonts.

Wreckless Conduct: Buildings

Subtitled "Why you should pay attention to every little thing your producer tells you".

Here's a run down of how the buildings in the Wreckless prototype developed. Most of this happened over the holiday and is a staggering exercise in my own stupidity. Somehow diagrams and written instructions are the better methods of instructing me.

Buildings started out as design sheets:

Used to be buildings that were made of a base and a bunch of planes. Somehow I missed the instructions where the entire building was built from planes. When your producer is this guy, you know when you've failed.

Old tile set which had a scale issue.

Tiny doors are bad. You can see the scale is all wrong.

A Wreckless human is about 1.8m tall and when you compare him to an improved door, he's going to be bumping heads with an imaginary door frame. This screen shot was taken by my boss.

Current Tile Set:

All these textures are scaleable based on a 3x3 meter scale. For example our roads are 6m wide and xm long.

Weekend Goal:
Model, unwrap and texture approx. 20 props to populate the prototype's level.

Wreckless Conduct: Prototype Week 1

Hot Potato hasn't gone to the prototyping stage but its brother Terra has. However I have been working on another project during the holiday and that glorious and violent experience known as Wreckless Conduct is on the production short list.

This means that based on how the prototype ends up in 2 weeks, Wreckless Conduct will become a viable project for this semester or something to shelve for another time.

Wreckless Conduct is "a demolition derby with super awesome weapons" set in a cyberpunk future from the 90's. The project's headed by Inicus and features Anderson as programmer, Brie as character artist and myself on environments.

We've been working on the design and a prototype since late November/early December so our current goals for the next 2 weeks look like this:

Main Goal
Have a prototype that is a small game level
It will contain: moving pedestrians, competitors (AI controlled cars), environment props, buildings and a rudimentary HUD.

Work Breakdown
Plan for the next 2 weeks:

Brie: Model, unwrap, rig and animate (basic walk cycle) for generic pedestrian.

Yena: Environment textures and modeling environment props

Anderson: Credits system, Run time, HUD

Dominicus: Competitor AI, Pedestrian AI (coding for animations), build and implement level

Day 2 Thoughts
Yes, the current prototype has buildings with textures but they are broken. So I'll be spending the weekend fixing up those textures and then modeling environment props.

Here's some old building designs from the very start of the project, these were my starting points for building textures. More on this later.

Prop List
In rough order of priority these are some of things that would make the level look like a city. Consider it my checklist for the 2 weeks.

- Street Lamp / traffic light / electricity or phone pole
- Billboard (probably TV screen, but simple picture boards are also ok)
- Bin
- Street Sign
- Bench
- Dumpster
- Transformer / fuse box / something like that from which we extend wires between things
- Double-sided flat plane object on which to put wire/s texture (multiple different kinds of wire textures would be nice)
- Air-conditioning unit
- Vending machine
- Phone booth
- Metal barrel
- Neon sign
- Chainlink fence
- Plant box
- Construction scaffolding
- Cardboard box
- Wooden crate
- Gas Canister
- Handrails (for the edges of platforms, etc)

Here are some old design sheets for props.

Hot Potato 2.2

Uploading Hot Potato version 2.2, some minor tweaks made but perhaps some more work to do. Both documents are .pdf format.

Edit: Small tweaks now added to make these the final versions.

Design Document 2.2

Hot Potato Pitch

Tater Dev: Old Images

Old images that might appear in the pitch.

Tater Dev: Logo 1.4