Hiya everyone! This week I'm gonna show off a little of my design process! I wanted to redesign one of the character sprites because I didn't feel like she had the right vibe about her, and after all first impressions are super important in this game. So let me introduce Sylvia. Sylvia hails from one of the richest cities in the world, and her father happens to be the leader of said city, as such she's had a very sheltered upbringing. This has lead her to have a bit of well, an entitlement problem, shall we say. That said, she's also grown up reading fairytales and stories of grand adventures and brave heroes. In fact she's set out on her own to become such a hero! And she's learning… Slowly… Despite her sharp edges, she has a good heart. Prototype Breeze art The characters of The Breeze have sort of, lived in my head for a long time… I'm still adjusting to talking about them out loud! ANYWAY, so Sylvia has a design already, it just needs a bit of tweaking. I started by reducing her back to her pure Vibes™, that is her shapes and inspirations. Her core appearance design is somewhere between Cheerleader, Ballerina and Fencer. Sylvia is a fighter and her style is very elegant and showy. She's fancy. I mix and match the elements I like into outfit designs! Originally I wanted to give her a high collar to emphasise her neck and push up her chin to add to her aloofness. But it just didn't look good! I also knew I wanted to give her a pleated skirt. It's a bit impractical, but I think it shows off her naive and idealistic side. Then I add together the parts that work and hope they go together! I also test a few colour combos. Last time I used the same red colour that I use for the Breeze uniform, and it made her look like an employee. Oops! OOOf that was a long one! Thank you for making it this far! If you have any questions about the characters or anything… I am always happy to talk about them hehe, just @ the breeze on our twitter and I can get back to ya!
Thanks a lot for your support! We'll be back soon. Stay safe, ~ Chey
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Hello everyone! This week we’re super excited to show you all some early sneaky peek in-game screenshots! Keep in mind that the game is still very much in development so there’s lots of polishing we have left to do! With that said, please enjoy this first look! Your first day at The Breeze will be your training session! Or call it a tutorial if you like! This will give you an introduction to some of the staff at The Breeze. They’ll pretend to check in to show you how it’s done, you’ll have Zip checking in on you throughout so don’t worry! There’s a few ways to learn about the characters of The Breeze Inn, you’ll learn a little just from checking them in! You’ll get the chance to talk to them later on too if you want! You can only pick 2 people to talk to though, so whether you choose your favourites or the ones you know least about, is up to you! You can check on who is in each room at any time by checking the hotel terminal. The terminal also lets you make notes right in the game! So you can remember any important details between rounds. There may also be some… odd, ways to get info on the guests. Including a mysterious social media sleuth. We're making very good progress on our gifts! We finally have the full list finalised and a large chunk of them have been made already! This week I'll be finalising the script for day 2 and working on those sprites. I'll be sharing part of the sprite making progress with you in our next blog! Please look forward to it.
Until next time, stay safe! -Chey Hello everyone! It's good to talk to you all again! Sorry for being quiet. The team has all been recovering from finishing university! Yup, we're all done! We were able to finish a little chunk of the game for our final submission. We're going to continue to work on The Breeze, our next goal is to get the content we have implemented and polished up in order to release a playable demo! We hope to have this ready for you by winter this year. It's looking good, we're making lots of progress. I'm currently working on the script for day 2, and then I can start on the sprite sheets for it! We've implemented a new bug testing pipeline, so Sam has been working through some of the stuff we found in the build for uni. Grace is kicking butt making up more gifts! Check out her latest below! We'll get another update out to you soon! But for now know we're very much still dedicated to getting The Breeze out to you all!
See you soon, stay safe. -Chey This week we've made huge leaps forward and can finally get on with a little bit of playtesting! We've started implementing content, and I've been able to crack on plugging in artwork. Speaking of artwork- Grace's finished off our first set of gifts and Macy's Gift shop is nearly open for business! Here's a sneaky peak~ I've asked Sam to give you all a little insight into the work he's been doing, *ahem* As we made progress on The Breeze Inn we felt comfortable exploring ways to improve the way the player views the characters through dialogue, since I focused on the programming side of things I was responsible for implementing a plugin which would give us additional tools to express character dialogue, such as, changing font size and text and animating text. Additionally I wanted to improve the process of adding dialogue to save time on implementation. During this time progress felt incredibly slow, I had struggled with implementing the plugin which needed to be changed to suit the existing code, this lead to delays and setbacks but it's now complete! With a functional dialouge system it is much easier and clearer to understand the code, we now have the first day of dialogue done but need to sort out some minor issues before we can start playtesting, but we're close! So there you go! That's it for this week. We'll see you soon with another update.
Stay safe, - Chey Hello everyone! It's good to see you again! To be honest with you all we've been having a few set-backs lately, game dev is weird and sometimes things don't go according to plan. We're still working really hard to get The Breeze up and running! And we'll have something out to you at the time we planned, though it may be just a taster. We're getting through this stormy weather together! We have plans and back-up plans underway to help us! We have a bunch of content ready to implement as soon as we can! To make up for a short update here's some concept art for our mysterious merchant! They'll be the one supplying you with gifts for your guests. No one knows much about them other than that they always have exactly what you need, when you need it. The only challenge is whether you can identify it for yourself. Character SpotlightClick through the image below to meet Lightning! Thanks for reading! Don't forget you can contact us any time on twitter @BreezeInnGame if you haven any questions for us devs, or even the guests!
We'll see you again soon, stay safe, - Chey Hey 😊 I've been making 3D art for about 3 years now. I tend to focus on low poly stylised assets, but I'll give any style a go. When Chey asked if I wanted to work on Breeze Inn, I was pretty excited. Chey had made some gorgeous art for the early version of the game, and I was excited to put my own twist on it. Last week I talked briefly about what I’ve been doing lately, this week I thought It may be cool to delve a little deeper and really explain the details of my workflow. With the main hotel area built and textured, I’m now working on the gifts. These will initially be 2D rendered icons of the 3D models. We hope to later implement a “closer inspect” mechanic where the player can zoom in and rotate the gifts too. So, first things first, I’m given a list of assets, some visual reference and a whole bunch of artistic freedom. When modelling the assets, I like to keep them as simple as possible. The more complex an asset is, the higher poly/tri count will be. And the higher the poly count, the more strain it puts on the game engine. Pair this with a target platform of mobile and you’ve got a pretty restricted budget. As a ballpark figure, I like to keep my assets below 1k tris each, with an exception for reeeeally special assets which can be pushed to 1.8k tris. Once modelled, they need to be UV unwrapped. Which is so. Much. Fun. -.- I make sure every asset shares the same Texel Density, that is: they all share comparable space and size on the UV sheet. This helps ensure the texture resolution matches and you don’t end up with some super crisp assets and some blurry. My Uv sheets tend to run at 1k in size. This gives me plenty of space to fit as many assets on the same sheet and allows me to hand paint the details clearly. I take a snapshot, take that in to photoshop and start painting. I don’t really have a method when I comes to painting, I usually grab a bunch of reference and start on whatever takes my fancy first. Because the assets will only have a diffuse map (or a ‘colour map’ to the less technologically inclined) I need to paint as much detail in as possible. I’ll paint in lighting and shadows which can be pushed further in engine. I really do love what I do and am always working on some personal projects in the background (or playing D&D) x Character Spotlight!Click through the image below to meet Medi! This week we ran a poll to decide the character spotlight and Medi tied with another character, so you'll meet them next week! Make sure you're following us on Twitter to partake in future polls or Q&As!
This week we're going to take you inside the Breeze! The Breeze as it is now has only existed for 2 years. It was purchased and massively renovated by its mysterious and wealthy owner M. The hotel is strange, and that perhaps reflects the whims of it's eccentric owner. The building is small, having only 3 rooms available for guests, and those rooms magically change every single day. Luckily the hotel has a beautiful café/restaurant attached, which draws in the tourists and locals all year round. Made almost entirely of glass, it's one of the hotel's most striking features. concept art that our magical artist Grace turns into something beautiful This week we have updates from the team, so I'll hand you over! SamI've been working on improving the dialogue system which will help us keep our code organised and will shorten the time required to implement all dialogue and decisions. Along with this we've been implementing and making changes to a plugin which allowed text to be animated to move and change colour, this will be really useful to show feelings and emotions of the characters dialogue and we hope will improve the players overall experience! It's a big task for me to do this as there are aspects of UE4 which are used I'm not very familiar with such as using macros and functions, but it is by understanding these I can streamline the process for dialogue implementation. Another issue I'm facing is integrating the plugin code to fit what we currently have, it's good to have this challenge though as it'll improve my knowledge immensely! GraceThis week has revolved around the iterative process of refining the existing assets. Everything I make begins life in the modelling software: Maya. We are working to quite tight budgets, so I need to make sure that every object conveys its purpose at a glance. It can be hard finding that balance, but I do enjoy a challenge. Once modelled and UV unwrapped, I paint the textures by hand in Photoshop. It’s a longer process than other workflows I've used but I thoroughly enjoy it and try to integrate hand painting into most of my projects Once the texture sheets are painted, I import the assets into a test version of the game in Unreal Engine and give them a once over*. Once happy I send them on their way to be placed into the proper version of the game. *Once over can be anything from 10 – 100 texture sheet changes. Depending on my mood. I hope you enjoyed this insight from the team! Next time we'll get you more updates, and a character spotlight!
See you soon, and stay safe. - Chey Heya everyone! This week we’ve been working on a bunch of new stuff! Grace has been adding to our décor and taking charge on some new social media! She’ll soon be posting on our Instagram and has set up a Facebook page you can follow here! https://www.facebook.com/breezeinngame/ We’ve found a great new tool to help us implement dialogue! Sam’s been figuring that out and hopefully you’ll be seeing some of that very soon! I’ve been working on our sprites! I’ve never worked with the paper 2D stuff in unreal before but it’s looking to be straightforward. I’m having a lot of fun revisiting my old work and giving the characters an HD touch up! I’m trying to stay true to their heights this time too hehe. I’m also working on replacing our whitebox UI, I’m excited to see it looking pretty! Last week I promised you a character introduction, so here it is! Our first and maybe most adorable character- Zip! You’ll have seen them all over our social media- that’s because Zip is the manager at The Breeze. They zoom around all day keeping everything running! Zip will be your guide and companion throughout your time at our little hotel. Character Spotlight!
You can check out a short comic strip featuring Zip here:
https://breezeinngame.tumblr.com/post/620100529113186304/ Next time alongside a longer update, we’re gonna take you on a tour of the lobby! Thanks for reading! Stay safe and we’ll see you soon! ~Chey The Breeze Inn started as a personal project for me. My main interest when it comes to games, and in general, is characters! Strong characters can endear me to anything. I wanted to make a game where the characters are the focus, a game that needs you to be a good judge of character. Like a puzzle game where the characters are the puzzle, and that's the core of The Breeze Inn. The game is simple! It just takes a little bit of intuition! My passion is in creating interesting characters, with diverse backgrounds and appearances. I hope to do a good job of creating characters representative of many backgrounds. As a queer person I made the decision that the majority of characters would be LGBTQ+. It’s important that these characters get the chance to exist and live treated like people, and in stories that don’t revolve around their genders and sexualities. Also just because I feel like it. Please be patient with us, as we learn, and contact me if you spot that we’ve made a mistake! Our team is creating The Breeze Inn as our Master’s Degree project! We’ve worked hard to get the basic mechanics working, and we’re passionate about finishing and releasing this game very soon! We’ve been busy rebuilding the game from the ground up in Unreal Engine4. This week is the start of our very last semester, and production on The Breeze now begins in earnest. Already we’ve set to work on implementing the first set of dialogues. Sam has been clearing up my messy code and researching streamlining procedures. Our talented 3D Artist Grace has been giving the existing models a polish, adding a touch of flair! And I’ve been planning and drawing up character sprites.
We’re so excited to start sharing the game with you! Please follow us on our social media to stay up to date, and we’ll let you know when the next blog arrives! We’ll also be showing behind the scenes content and sharing a little of the world of The Breeze Inn. Next time alongside the update, you’ll get to meet a very important character! See you soon! ~ Chey. |
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