Category Archives: education

Train2Game student Diaries of Ben Stoneman May to June

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18/05/12
This week the game had changed quite a bit in regards to movement and controls, at the moment we are not near getting a build done and there are still many design issues to consider. I have been finding that a lot of design issues are hard to understand by other team members. They find it hard to see how some of my requests make the game better for the player in terms of gameplay and control. We also needed to begin work on the enemy, however the artist had no idea where to start and frankly came across as not being very excited about learning. I worried this would take too long, so i decided to begin learning how to model, rig and animate in 3ds Max.

25/05/12
This week I have been working on the developer diary for the Asset bundles project. I have been happy to hear feedback from others in regards to the diary, It has given me insight into how they understand the document and has allowed me to make changes that ensure that all can understand and enjoy reading it. One thing that I have found hard whilst doing the developer diary is understanding the problems the coder has faced when working on the game mechanics, also why they decided to program a mechanic a certain way and a lot of other things concerning the programming side of the development.

01/06/12
This week we have tried to get as much of the important art assets for the game finished before our artist goes on holiday for two weeks. The artist had been on cases all day most days, however on the Friday i pushed him to get the essential art assets completed. The art assets had been modelled and UV unwrapped, however the textures still needed to be made and the models need to be imported into the project. the rest of the week has been basically getting the support cases done and giving a personal touch to each of the 9 rooms in the game, including lighting and scenery.

08/06/12
This week was quite short, however I did volunteer to work the Monday and Tuesday, which were bank holidays. I came into an empty office on Monday and got straight onto the cases there were a lot of cases and they were all for me to complete. I did not find it daunting at all, in fact i knew exactly how I was going to go about getting it done. so I began to plough through all of the simple activation cases. On the Tuesday I decided to work from home, I was now past the activation cases and onto the asset store related content. Usually I do not get many asset store cases when working with Rob and James so i did find it quite difficult to answer certain issues. I was advised to say to the customers with issues i needed help solving, that we have limited staff due to the diamond jubilee weekend and the issue will be dealt with asap. the rest of the week was recovering from the hardcore case work over the two bank holidays, however i found i had learnt alot about the asset store cases and how to solve them.

15/06/12
We had our latest build done today, after we tested the build and saw it was working like a basic beta version, we began setting up a presentation. Unfortunately we were unable to link the iPad to the projector, so therefore we decided to go around the office allowing others to test the game and give us their feed back. All my life i have valued feedback, ever since my primary school teacher said “ask your friends what they think”. The feedback we got for those who tested it brought up good points and most gave us a solution. The rest of the week has been mostly cases and polishing the game
ready for the Friday build.

www.train2game.com

Train2Game student Diaries James Bouckley week 15 and 16

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Week 15

This week we discussed targets for the game.  When should it be finished by and when would we have a demo ready.  We tried to have a demo ready by Friday but unfortunately we failed.  Despite the game being interesting and very fun to develop, the support cases have to come first and a surprising abundance of them this week and Rob still being on holiday meant we just didn’t have enough time to work on it.  It came as a bit of surprise to me this week when I discovered we needed desktop controls because the game was going to be multi-platform and the dual-joystick imitation controls for keyboard I had made (purely for testing purposes), weren’t going to cut it.  After a bit of stressful week, I have to admit that being told this didn’t find me well.  Ben spent some time going around the office with the iOS version of the game, which was finished, getting as many opinions as possible so we could polish the demo.  Meanwhile I struggled to finish the PC controls and failed.  Not a great week in all, but still a fair margin better than any week I’ve ever had in any other job… ever.

Week 16

Unity 4.0 has been announced!  It was announced this Monday and boy does that make for a lot of support cases!  Rob is now back with us and good job too because I think without him Ben and I would have struggled.  This again meant another week with not as much work done on the game as I would have liked.  The desktop controls are finished now, but buggy and I’m not happy with them.  Also, one of the major things that people noted about the game when Ben showed them last Friday was that they didn’t like the linear mapping between finger-joystick position and player speed.  What that means is that there is linear dependence between the distance of your finger and the centre of the joystick and the speed the player moves at.  People would have preferred a relationship that meant when you’re near the centre you move slower but then you accelerate faster as you move further away.  When I heard this my reaction was “Okay, that’s doable but it’s going to be expensive.  We’ll have to do a square-root operation every frame.”  God bless Unity though because they have already thought about it.  Mark showed me how to sample a curve and apply it to a script and the iOS controls are now far more user-friendly.  Another thing that came up is what happens when the player moves behind something.  Currently we have a shader that highlights the player so you can still see him.  This however sometimes makes it look like the player is on top of the object instead of behind it.  So instead I have started to implement a script that will make the objects see-through instead of the player being highlighted.  I was having some difficulty with this and with some help from Cat, we nearly got their.  I’m confident I can finish this myself early next week.

www.train2game.com

Train2Game Student Diary Ezekiel Morris Weeks 6 and 7

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Week 6

Well this week has been awesome so far facial expression are working in unity now so I’m glad about that , three weeks  struggling to get this face expression working but as a student I haven’t had experience on flat facial animation before so  it was Difficult  to solve this  issue.  I needed some guidance so Ben, a student at train2game took a look at this flat facial animation problem and got it working in unity 3d.

Next stage working on another character, creating textures but keeping the same model but still I’m not satisfied how my first character textures are looking, when I’m doing concept art I make sure you have a good understanding of the concept, for example how big it is, what is it wearing a reference image of my character once I’m clear on the design of the character I can prepare texturing the character.

I feel that this is just a work in progress on development but still we got a working function game it just needs some cleaning up so things are pitting up and also  I like the workflow I’m doing now,  you just feel that you know what you doing without thinking about it.

Oh yes we have a new environment artist joining the DR studios.

Ezekiel Morris week 7

This week DR studios had a launch party to celebrate their new release – my sea park, I’m happy to say my sea park is doing well  and  I’m happy to say I did collaborate on the project as well .

On my sea park I did the penguin and the seal sketch and then Matty helped clean up  the sketches. When I started at DR Studios I was working on another project and I was told  to help on my sea park  for  bit. After finishing  the sketches for my sea park  I when back to my original project .It was a nice day and a nice lunch out with my associates, the place we went was called red hot world buffet the food was excellent but I couldn’t eat anymore I was full.

We all went back to DR studios, I was food drunk, now I’m on another project and my task  is to model this character in three days but it’s going to be a  video render with a pink or white  background, then I’m gonna put a camera in the scene so that it  goes around the character when it’s  being rendered.

So I started off doing a model sheet of the character head but I wasn’t sure if I should sculpt the character or model it in 3d max but gonna model it straight in 3d max.

 www.train2game.com

Train2game Student Diary Craig Moore – What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

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Craig Moore – What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

Student Diary , Week 30

Unleashed on to the world like a penguin in a paddling pool! My Sea Park hit the unsuspecting world head on yesterday and it’s been an incredible experience, and this was only day one!

We had already seen the beginnings of the social media pushes, by our publishers, earlier in the day but it wasn’t until we got word of My Sea Park creeping in to the charts that things really got exciting. There was the hope it was doing well but the visibility wasn’t really available.

That was until around 5pm, while we were in the meeting with the publisher we heard word it had crept in to the top 50! Of course everyone became very excited, but by the end of the meeting it had already, again, crept in to around 37!

Of course this continued throughout the day, admittedly it wasn’t the most productive of days but it was a really lovely reward for all the hard work.  Of course, being a free title, there is now the hope it will actually monetise well.

That was pretty much the key moment of the week, the rest of my week has been spent illustrating and working on the concept document for the next title, which is going incredibly well. I am waiting on feedback from a few of the other guys here, but fingers crossed it will get some approval; It’s a really exciting project!

-Craig

www.train2game.com

Craig Moore

Student Diary – Week 31

What an incredibly exciting week it has been!

Suffice to say, with My Sea Park being released, the entire office were glued to iTunes watching our brand new game slowly work its way around the charts.

It was great watching it go up and down, and really muscling with the big boys, I got in to the habit of checking it with a stupid regularity, but seeing it in the same space as games like Angry Birds, Infinity Blade and Temple Run was such an amazing feat I can’t help but feel proud.

I think everyone in the office is pleased with how it has done, but the fun isn’t even over yet! With version 1.2 of My Sea Park put into submission last week we are hoping for the first update to drop either today or Monday. With that we should hopefully see a load more faces in the door, as well as hopefully some of the older ones who perhaps didn’t get chance to play as much as they would like or simply didn’t give it a good enough try.

I think it does highlight how competitive the market is at the moment, particularly for My Sea Park’s genre. We have to simply keep working on it, while also working on the next project, to ensure it stays fresh for customers both new and old.

This week I have been getting deep with Unity, finding my way around it and putting time into learning the way the UI systems work, it’s been a great learning experience and so far and I’m finding Unity incredibly pleasing to work with.

-Craig

www.train2game.com

Look Who doctored a visit from a Dalek at the Train2Game stand at GSL?

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Train2Game at Gadget Show Live gets a surprise visit from a Dr Who Dalek

Train2Game interview: Gaming Charity Special Effect – Part 1

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Train2Game was at the Eurogamer Expo, and while there we sat down for a chat with gaming charity Special Effect. Special Effect is dedicated to helping young people with disabilities enjoy computer games when it may not otherwise be possible.  They use their expertise and adapted technology including eye control in order to make this happen.

In first part of a two part interview, R&D at Special Effect Bill Donegan tells the Train2Game blog about what Special Effect do, how eye control technology works and how they adapt games to use it.

Read it below, on the Train2Game Scribd, or listen to it via Train2Game Radio. 

Can you tell us a bit about the story of Special Effect please?

Special Effect was set up about four years ago. The main aim was to find ways to help people who’ve got some sort of disability, people who can’t use a computer in a normal way or can’t play video games in a normal way using a mouse, controller or keyboard, and find ways for them to play computer games and do other leisure activities if they can’t use the ordinary ways of controlling a computer.

So today we’re showing ‘eye control’ because we’re doing a world record attempt – to get the biggest eye control tournament ever – which I’m guessing is a new record! So hopefully we’ll make a record at least. And we’re also doing a fastest lap competition of the game we’ve got today, which is Trackmania Nations.

The way we’ve got it to work with the eye controller is we created a little bit of software with a volunteer called Tim Brogden, and that turns the mouse movements from the eye control into keyboard presses for the game.

How do you even begin the process of getting eye control into standard games?

It’s often quite tricky because basically what you’re doing with eye control is moving a cursor around the screen by looking around itin the way we’re using it. Obviously there are certain games you can do that with, by doing a left click for instance by blinking or just dwelling on an area.

Obviously point and click games, a lot of those can be played with this; but then if people want to play other types of games such as racing games, there’s only one to my knowledge that you can play using a mouse pointer. So, we came up with the idea of this software to open up lots of games to more people who use things like eye control or head control and can’t use the keyboard to play the game.

So how does Trackmania Nations work with eye control?

The first thing I’d do is…I’ve just sat down in front of the computer which is going to do a quick calibration. Basically this is just telling the computer it’s a different person to the one that’s just had a go on it.

So, I’m going to look at this target on the screen and then the mouse is flickering everywhere because we’ve changed the sensitivity settings to make it work better with this game.  If you’re using it for a normal computer, you need to put some smoothing on to make it a bit more accurate but for this game it works perfectly well.

It looks like it’s working so I’ll just close the calibration down. That’s the alt controller running so what I do is press – we’re doing it in the physical form but you can put on screen buttons up to start the alt controller – so I’m starting that now. Now as I look around the screen the car will follow where I’m looking.

If I want to turn right I’ll look slightly to the right, if I want to turn left at this corner I’ll look to the left. And then if you look at the track you’ll basically accelerate, so if I look down I’ll come to a stop and then roll back down this hill. But it’s set up so you don’t have to look up at the sky to accelerate, you just look at the track ahead of you.

How difficult was it to bring the eye control tech into Trackmania?

It worked quite nicely. The main reason we chose it was because of the short levels, because for people who aren’t used to it it’s quite good just to do a short burst track and do it a few times. But the actual making the profile with the alt controller was one of the easier parts. Obviously it took some tweaking and we made some changes for the Eurogamer event because people aren’t used to using eye control, but it was fairly OK.

Stay tuned for part two of the Train2Game interview with Special Effect and leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

For more information about Special Effect, www.SpecialEffect.org.uk

For more information about Train2Game, go to www.train2game.com

Train2Game Codebox #1 competition winners

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Train2Game are pleased to announce the winners of Codebox #1, a competition for those on the Train2Game Game Development course.

The winners are:

1st Place: Dale Haste (Train2Game forum user Hastey)

2nd Place: Alex Gibson (Train2Game forum user crucifieddreams)

3rd Place: Mike Connell (Train2Game forum user Smoothshiny)

Dale wins the awesome Asus nVIDIA 3D GeForce GTX 560 TI DirectCu II TOP Graphics Card (1GB) worth nearly £200 with Alex and Mike win tickets to the Eurogamer Expo courtesy of Train2Game.

All entrants can now talk about the competition, now known as Code Marmelade, on the Train2Game forum.

Thanks to everyone for taking part, and be sure to look out for more competitions in future.

Train2Game at gamescom Neven Dravinski Producer UFC Undisputed 3 talks to Danny Palmer

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Train2Game at gamescom Neven Dravinski Producer UFC Undisputed 3 talks to Danny Palmer and shares the shortage of QA testers in the industry!

Train2Game at gamescom John Block Producer of Metro Last Light talks to Danny Palmer

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Train2Game at gamescom John Block Producer of Metro Last Light talks to Danny Palmer and explains how he got into the industry and what you should do to get started.

Train2Game at gamescom 3 of the team from Ghost Recon Future Solider talk to Danny Palmer

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Train2Game at gamescom 3 of the team from Ghost Recon Future Solider talk to Danny Palmer, plus games advise and how to start in the industry