CAGD 377

 Mobile Game Design

Dread Pirate App

This semester we where tasked with making a mobile game. We were split into groups of three and four, with my group being the only group of four. We each pitched our game and then decided to go with one of the pitches. We decided to go with my producer's pitch of a pirate game called Dread Pirate. A game where you play as a pirate and fight, loot and sink enemy ships to become the most infamous pirate that lived. As well as defeat the most infamous pirate, Davey Jones. I am the modeler and level designer of the group along with Jacob Picard (Programmer), Mark Hudson (Modeler, Producer) and Chance Villavicencio (Modeler, Level Designer). After deciding the game, we began to write up documents and split up the work.

Sprint 1

I was tasked at first with making the first draft of the paper prototype map and the islands the player can place on them.

from there I was tasked with finding concept art for the various cannon balls in the game. I was only able to get one done before the sprint finished so I had to move the rest to sprint two.

Sprint 2

For sprint two, I began by finishing finding the concept art for the rest of the cannon balls.

Then I gathered reference art for the enemy warships the player would battle in game.

Once I finished gathering all of my references, I was tasked with finding a reference picture for two continents, Africa and Europe. Once I found those I began to model and UV them and I was able to finish both continents right before sprint two finished.

There was a task that I was not able to finish that I was assigned towards the end which was to begin to model the enemy ship. So that was moved over to sprint three

Sprint 3

So at the beginning of sprint three, the team and I began to work on the first iteration of the app. So I was tasked with putting all of the continents we had modeled as a team into the game scene so the player would have a world to play in. So gathered all of the continents and put them in. However, when I put them into the game scene, they weren't all the same size. So I had to scale them up to be the same size. Turns out when we were modeling them, we were not all modeling using the same measurement principles. So I fixed that and arrange the continents as they are in the real world.

From that point, I began to gather all of my partners work and put that into the scene as well, This included all of the temporary enemy ships and player ship.

After that I was given some pop up tasks of creating temporary enemy shooting ports and a sea monster.

We did have a problem while testing the app. We found that the player ship was able to go through the continents but we were able to fix it by going into the player movement script and changing a variable in there.

However, I still have the task of creating the enemy ship model which I have not yet started on and it may have to be pushed yet again over to sprint four.

Sprint 4

Sprint 3 ended well and we kicked off sprint 4 with our boots on the ground and stomping, we got so much done this sprint. Our production process was speeding up and we were heading in the right direction. Making this game so far has had its challenges, mostly on the programming side. We find ourselves having to go back and fix the core mechanics in the game that were not working properly in the playtest. i hope we can continue this pace even with out set back and continue to produce the same amount of work with less problems.

For sprint 4, I retextured the continents for the game, giving them a more realistic texture based off of  real terrain you can find in that part of the world. 

After texturing the world map, I began to model the enemy ship in Maya. The sails where a bit challenging to to make but with the soft select, it worked out smoothly.

After modeling, I split the ship into 3 sections for UVing. I made the ship base into one map, the ship wheel into another and the ship sails into the third.

 I Textured the enemy ship itself, I textured the wheel, the ship base and the sails all separately. The ship base and the ship sails are 2k maps while the ship wheel is a 1K map.

We decided to go with baked lighting on our models to make it easier for the game engine. After fully finishing the ship, I began to Model the enemy port for the game. I had problems at first with there being multiple faces under each other. So, it was hard to UV. Also, when I took it into Painter to texture, there were faces missing because of the UVs, so I had to go back and fix it.

Finally, for this sprint, I textured the enemy port.

Sprint 5

For sprint 5, I created particle effects for two of the cannonballs we have for our game. I created a particle effect for the lighting and ice cannonball

Sprint 6

For sprint 6, I tweaked the cannonball effects a little more to make them stand out more. I then proceeded to make the effects of each cannonball when they hit enemy objects in the game. I made effects for the enemy ship, enemy port, kraken, and merchant ship.