To new beginnings!

So senior year is coming to a close, and all I can say is that these last few weeks have gone on without a hitch. I really couldn't be happier with how this project has gone. That being said, i'm so happy to announce that this project will continue. Post graduation, we have plans on continuing this project in order to push for a release. Whether this means pushing for being published, or fully going indie, that has yet to be decided. Either way, we will be releasing this game!

As far as these last few weeks actually at the college, we recently showed off our game at the senior show. At this event, we presented all of our senior games to recruiters, and gave them a chance to actually sit down with our game. All I can really say is that, the game has been received really well. We have gotten amazing feedback about how this game has come out, along with a lot of feedback telling us to push this game further.

TLDR, I am so happy with how this project has come along, and I cant wait to continue working with my team in order to make this game the best it can be. Until next time!

-Will

Office Mayhem display at the senior show.

Trophy system

    So with the end in sight, there's really not many features to add before graduation. That being said, the one thing that we wanted in the game was an accolade system. This system would add trophies to the end screen in order to reward the players for tasks they have done throughout the week. These accolades range from throwing out the most items, to competing the most tasks. As you are awarded these accolades, you actually receive these individual trophies to represent them.

    Other then the current talks at hand, the game overall is coming along very well. I couldn't be happier with how hard the team is working to bring this game to a close.

PAX East Marketing Materials

So with as big of an opportunity as PAX East is, we are indefinitely needed a marketing overhaul. Because we only have a section of the Champlain college booth, we needed to optimize the overall space we are using. That being said, we set out to create some tent cards to show off our games current poster, as well as some business cards to hand out to people and other developers.

Tent Card

Buisness card

In Attendance: PAX East 2017

   Throughout this entire blog, I have been covering my part in developing Office Mayhem. Development started back in early September, and ever since them I have been working with a very talented team to continue its development. All of that being said... I'm excited to announce, that our team has been selected to show off Office Mayhem at PAX East this year. Our game will be on display representing the college at this world wide expo. I couldn't be more proud of my team, and it is an honor to be attending PAX East with our game Office Mayhem.

To be honest, I have been at a complete loss for words, but that's no reason to stop working. For these coming weeks there is a lot for me to do in preparation, but I cannot overstate my excitement for both this games development, and this amazing opportunity. For any friends and family attending the show this year, be sure to stop by the Champlain College booth (Booth #10016) and play a few rounds! 

New assets!

As I said in my last blog post, its been a busy few weeks. As we keep expanding the game, we are able to add to the overall task list in the game. That being said, I got a good chunk of assets completed and imported this week for the new tasks. With a majority of the new assets built and ready to be implemented, I will actually be able to take a step back and work on another project the office mayhem team has going. I wont talk about it much here, but I will be sure to cover all of the new work in the coming blog post. All I can say its back in the marketing materials realm, and its a very exciting step for both my personal college career, and for the team as a whole.

So to jump into what I did for this week, there were a lot of asset reworks. The two major reworks were the outbox and the computer. For the outbox, it was a basic redesign in order to increase the readability in game. The computer on the other hand was a bit more of a hassle. Due to the distance of the camera from the actual play space, there was a lot of artifacting on the detailed parts of the model. Its because of that, that I made it my focus on reworking most of the computer model. I did my best to maintain the overall look while removing a lot of the unnecessary detailing. Overall, I would say many of the reworks came out fairly well and are looking pretty good in engine.

As for the new assets, I worked on a server tower, bathroom door, and the entire office mayhem alphabet. The server and the bathroom door faced some challenges due to harsh camera angle, but overall they came out well. The alphabet as a whole wasn't very difficult, it was just fairly time consuming to build and organize. All of that being said, it has been a very productive two weeks, and i'm happy to see my new assets already making their way into the build. Really looking forward to the next blog post, so untill then!

-Will

Keeping me busy!

So this week has been a fairly busy week. With a lot of the work in progress, there's not a lot to show for right now. That being said, as a team we have a lot of cool stuff in the works. The rate we have been adding features is very exciting! It definitely keeps me busy.

As far as the entire team dynamic goes, I think we are still holding strong. Unlike a lot of the groups, we have maintained our consistency when it comes to updating the builds and adding new features. Theres not to much else to say for this week. Just happy to be working with a such a strong team. 

Next update is going to be filled with art, I promise! So until next time...

-Will

Coffee Time

Continued working on many of the asset reworks this week. Unfortunately since last week I did get hit with the campus sickness. That sickness hit my productivity pretty hard, but I was able to work through it. As for the assets I have worked on. I finished updating the outbox and actually built out the coffee maker for one of the new assets this week.

As for the rest of the art team, Norman has been updating the first character model, and Andrew been working on animation. With the first character model being so close to finalized, Andrew has been able to start working on rigging and getting basic animations into the game. Overall, it has been a fairly productive week.

Not much else to add, so until next time!

-Will

Moving Right Along

Not a whole lot to report this week. Productivity across the entire team has been fairly solid. As a group I couldn't be happier with how fast we continue to grow and expand on the game. In regards to the group, everyone has been managing their roles very well. 

As far as the art team goes, we have made some major progress. The first character is coming along great, and we are finally able to see the base model in the game. Next up on the list is getting the rig and animations down. Andrew has done been doing a great job reaching out to the programming team in order to nail down a proper animation pipeline. Very happy with all of the progress the art team has made.

As for me? I have been working on general asset creation across the board. I have been updating and redesigning a couple old assets this week. On the downside of things, there is a cold going around campus and I may have been infected. With this upcoming week, I hope to keep moving right along, and continue pumping out assets. Until next week!

-Will

Back in the saddle

First of all let me just say it has been an amazing week back. We started with just a general meeting in order to get everyone up to speed and that went off without a hitch. Its because of this that we were able to jump right back into development. To sum it all up, I couldn't be happier with the new team, and i'm very proud to be a part of it.

As far as the art side of things, things are going fairly well. Having never really been a lead, so I have been doing my best to adapt the the art lead role. All of the artists seem to have transitioned into their tasks fairly quickly. Norm is already blasting away at getting the characters started, and already we are fairly close to having our first updated character. Andrew is doing just the same with the animations. Already, we are getting the animation framework set up and ready for the first character to get implemented. Already I can see that we have a very strong art team, and I cant wait to start kicking out assets.

As for me, I am focusing on making the office environment as modular as possible. In order to do that, I have constructed and set up a modular wall system. I was able to quickly import this into unity, and it seems to work just fine. 

Overall its been an amazing week back, and i cant wait for the weeks that follow.

-Will

A simple Reflection

Hello!
So, as far as Office Mayhem goes, its safe to say I have been fairly radio silent on this blog. That being said, its time for an update. As of now finals week is over and the production cycle for this semester has come to a close. So lets rewind a little bit to late November Office Mayhem had successfully met the requirements for presenting to our class and our professors. We were able to confidently show off not only everything we have done, but everything we want to achieve in the future development of Office Mayhem. We did this in order to plead our case for Office Mayhem to move into senior production next semester. I can happly announce that we did indeed make it to next semester, allowing us to truly expand on Office Mayhem, and make it the game we have wanted it to be since day one. One thing this does mean though, is that we are expanding the original team. As much as I would love fighting through next semester with the current team, we are going to need some help. So as far as choosing the new teammates our entire senior game class has gone through a draft in order to pick up the new people we need for the team. This process was fairly hectic, but overall I couldn't be happier with the team that we have ended up with. So that brings us to where we are now.

Where we are now?
With the final weeks of the semester coming to a close, development on Office Mayhem has definitely slowed. Since the code freeze, no significant progress has been made to the game itself. Instead we turned our focus into successfully integrating the new group members. This is a very important thing to the entire group. This is because, throughout this entire semester our group has really been successful due to our positive group dynamic. Our core group really had great communication across the board which really lead us to our successes with Office Mayhem. Obviously there were some hicups here in there, but these were really very minor in the grand scheme of things. As far as the new team goes, we want to carry this positive group dynamic forward. That is why these past two week have really been just having meetings with the new team not only to discuss how we have done things, but also to "break the ice" so to speak. So that's really where we are in this whole process. As far as Office Mayhem goes, I cant wait to move into next semester with this new team and cant wait to see where our developments will take us.

How did I get here?
I really couldn't be more proud of how far we have come as a group and how far we have taken Office Mayhem. As far as the art process has gone I am very happy with the overall direction we have taken. From the original concept of this game we have always had a good idea of how we wanted the game to look and feel. We landed on a very minimalist style to not only achieve a very comedic, entertaining look, but to also make the game as approachable and understandable to a diverse audience. In order to do this, I went through many iterations of the artwork and color pallet for the game. These not only helped me nail down what worked and what didn't, but also allowed me to get frequent feedback from my team and from some QA sessions. As a whole I can honestly say that I have achieved the look and feel that we originally set out to achieve. Moving forward, im sure the look of the game will develop, but im sure it will be for the better and will help better achieve any goals we set for the game.

What did I do?
Through this first semester I acted as the lead artist for Office Mayhem. Being the only artist on the team, I was scared of what this semester had in store. That said, going through and creating Office Mayhem has been the greatest experience for me here at Champlain College. Throughout the semester I was able to guide the art direction as a whole in order to best fit the overall style we wanted to achive with Office Mayhem. This meant crafting a color palette and modeling style that would properly represent Office Mayhem.

What does this mean?
Out of all of the production and game experiance I have had at champlain college, this game is one im the most proud of. I couldnt ask for a better team and a better game to call my capstone game. As a whole I believe this team worked very well together and did an amazing job at including all members in any decisions that we made. I know I speak for all of the team members when I say that I really hope to continue this trend as we move into next semester. I could not be happier working on this game, working with this team, and I cant wait to work with the new team members.

Marketing

Throughout this entire process, our goal for this game has been to make it receivable and approachable as possible. We want this game to have a very large demographic. Though the art style and the settings help in this, I decided to take it a step further and focus on some marketing material. In order to achieve this, I set out to create some basic chaos renders that capture chaotic snip-its of the game. Along with these, we are ordering shirts for our group members, and stickers to give out to our testers.

This idea of marketing material has been a very interesting concept to explore. Mostly because its not something we have really thought about before in past production classes. I'm very excited to be moving into the presentation process for this game, and I believe that this marketing material well help promote this game.

Characters

This is likely to be a quick post, but I feel its interesting none the less. Having never really focused on characters in many of my production games, it was interesting to focus on characters this time around. These characters still have a long way to go, but for the time being I believe they get the idea across.

With the comic nature of our game, and having never done character animations in the past. I decided to stay away from a realistic style character. One style of character that I have always enjoyed in games are the "Weeble Wobble" Rayman style characters. Having the character not have arms, but only hands not only helps with my lack of animation knowledge, but also brings the characters into this comedic, chaotic world. Along with this, once I do eventually get into animations, I will be able to push the limits of our characters movements. These exaggerated gestures and movements will help the character read more when on screen.

Moving forward with these characters, I will definitely like to push them further then just being simple flat colors in suits. One concept that we have are really attached to is the idea of being able to switch out the heads of each character. This will give the player an interesting level of customization, without having to drastically change the body itself or more importantly, its rig. I really look forward to exploring these ideas as this game goes on. Until next time.

-Will

Color Theory

After the exploration with color, the decision has become fairly clear. As a group, we ran through each of the color concepts and sorted out the pros and cons. As expected, there were a couple that were just way to exaggerated for our needs. That being said, they were definitely very useful. A lot of the color choice came down to taking the pro's of each concept, and trying to find a way to incorporate it in the final colors. A big example of this would be with the original superhot style render. Though this was very clearly not the direction we would like to go, the render still did a very good job at highlighting the intractable objects. Highlighting these objects with in the color palette seemed to be the biggest piece of feedback we got. The very vibrant render was also a popular one. The vibrancy of the render really played off of the comic nature of the game. That being said, I do believe that it was arguably to vibrant. With the colors, I want the game to get that comic/chaotic feel, while maintaining the believably, and approachable aspect of some of the other concepts. That being said, these two concepts became our biggest inputs when selecting the final concept.

In order to refrain from getting hung up on the colors, this color decision needed to be finalized and quick. For the final color selection, I did my best to grab from both the superhot, and vibrant color pallets (from the previous blog post) while making the game approachable and readable. In the final color selection, I focused on maintaining the readability of intractable objects, while bringing in some splashes of color from the vibrant render. This entire process has been a fairly educational one. Having learned color theory in some of my previous classes, it was very interesting to put that knowledge to good use.

-Will

Thinking in Color

With this low poly style, color choice is a fairly important piece of this game. Thus far, we have had many concepts for what we want the color to be, but no real visuals for these concepts. I personally have a visual mind, so getting these visuals nailed down was key to this color choice. With this in mind, I decided to back away from asset creating, and jump into the world of color theory. For each of these color choices, I set out a distinct goal. While some focus on highlighting the intractable objects, others focus on hitting key color points. While many of these are fairly exaggerated and will likely be discarded, these concepts will help visualize possibility's for color. With these concepts visualized in renders, I will also be able to get feedback from other artists and even QA testers.

-Will

A Modular World

One of the biggest risks so far for Office Mayhem would have to be the sheer of assets required to create a compelling and interactive office space. I covered this art wise in the previous post, but im here today to talk more about the technical side of how the environments are being handled. With the primary risk being amount of assets and the interactivity required within the game, we had to come up a proper and efficient way of building these level. In order to do this, me and Ty sat down and came to the conclusion that a grid layout would work best with the environment.

In order to work off of a grid, a modular pipeline would need to be created of any conversion or construction of assets. Having used a modular pipeline before in some of my other projects, I was confident about using this system within our game. With this grid based system, tiles and pieces can be placed essentially like lego pieces, in order to match the level designs created by the designers. This gives the designers complete flexibility when putting together levels, and overall I believe Office Mayhem will be better off for it.

- Will

Nailing down the direction

With the setting of Office Mayhem taking place within a corporate style office building, things could get very boring, very fast. In order to avoid this, I am focusing on creating the office in a very vibrant and fairly minimalist art style. The reason for this choice in vibrant colors, is that it will play to the level of goofiness we want in the gameplay. Rather then this being just another boring corporate office, we cater the art toward the office antics that take place in the game. Though the vibrant colors will help support the overall gameplay, I believe the most important aspect is the concept of minimalism within the artstyle.

I decided to go for a more minimalist/lowpoly artstyle not only because it plays more towards my strengths, but it also greatly increases the amount of assets we are able to put in the game. For Office Mayhem, we want most of the actual office space to be both usable and intractable. The minimalist art style is key to this because placing alot of assets around an environment can quickly overwhelm a viewers eye and could potentially give of a very unappealing look. With the minimalist style, not only can I focus on creating as many assets required, but also make sure that the environment is easy to read and understand. With more of a simple look and style, players will be able to quickly understand what is around them, and what they will be able to interact with.

This concept of minimalism holds true, especially within the color choices. These past few weeks, my goal has been to nail down a color palette that works and flows well within the game. For this, I have taken a look at many different offices, ranging from the average bland gray office, to a very vibrant and colorful office. My goal with this first pass at the colors, was to find an area in between. Something that wasn't to distracting, but wasn't bland boring.

With the first pass at colors complete, I can happily say im excited about where the style is taking the game. That being said, the colors still have away's to go, and will most likely require further exploration. Once again, until next time.

- Will

Taking the Dive

  Moving into my senior year as a game artist has been a crazy thing for me. I am constantly blown away about how far me and many of my peers have come. This year has me very excited, and I couldn't be happier to be starting my senior capstone project. For this project me and my group have set out with the hopes of creating an amazing game that shows off everything we have achieved at this college. In this group is me, Ty Wood as the programmer, as well as Jeremy Root and Richard King as the game designers. Having worked with Jeremy, and Ty before, I couldn't be more excited for this project to finish up our senior year here.

  For the past few weeks or so, we have been swimming in a world of concepts. That being said, we have narrowed our game selection down to a game we like to call Office Mayhem. With this concept getting fairly good feedback, both me and the group are happy to be going forward with it. Before we jumped head first into this concept though, we needed to make our pitch to our class. For this, we needed to outline our goals and vision for not only Office Mayhem, but also for many of the other game concepts we had previously envisioned. With this being early in the semester, the art direction for these concepts were fairly broad. In order to give the class a good idea of what I envisioned for the games art, I decided to make some quick 3d scenes in Maya, and render them out using Keyshot. I feel these really worked well at showing the concept and our ideas.

The early stages of our presentation weren't the strongest at the time, but I believe we did a good job getting our concepts across, and overall we received some very good feedback from both our peers and the professor. With this positive feedback we finally settled on Office Mayhem. Today, we are taking the dive, and focusing in on the core aspects of the game. As for me, my goal is to nail down the art style for this game and make it look the best it possibly can. Until next time.

-Will

Setting up the new website

As of now the site should be completely up an running. As the semester go on ill be sure to keep it updated.

-Will