FBAUL-IST GAMING 2018
PET RACING
Hello everybody, my name is Guilherme Filipe and I am a BA finalist at the faculty of Belas-Artes. In collaboration with three Master's students of the IST we are creating a 3D pet racing game, being my job to take care of the aesthetics of the project.
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Each one of us has a story behind our present person, just like you also do, and we would like to let you get to know us a little bit better before getting deep into our project.
Guilherme Filipe
Visual Artist, 3D Artist, Concept Art, Game Interface Design
"If you ask me I don't know if I always wanted to be a Game Designer, I just know that I've always loved everything about videogames but my younger-self didn't thought it was something tangible to do for a living, somehow in the middle of my personal growth I was in a stage where I just went with the flow, that's how I can say I started to create art for games. Guess what? I loved it! Never looked back since then. I'm happy to be performing an important role in something that I'm interested in because I'm one of those persons that If I see a videogame with amazing art I totally bow down to that masterpiece, althought I do aknowledge that the gameplay and the mechanics of a videogame are very important."
- Guilherme Filipe
Miguel Marques
Game Developer
"Hello! My name is Miguel Marques and I'm a student at IST. Games have been a major interest of mine for many years now, along with programming. Mix them both, and I couldn't be happier developing games!"
- Miguel Marques
Elio Freitas
Game Developer
"Hello Elio Freitas here, I am a telecomunications engineer studying for a master degree in informatics in IST, I changed ships because of my love for programing and videogames even though I miss the antennas my passion for games won the battle!"
- Elio Freitas
Tomás Marques
Game Developer
"I'm Tomás Marques a student at IST studying computer science and engeneering. I like playing, thinking about and making video games, so when i got the chance to study game design it was an easy choice. "
- Tomás Marques
About the game
The title of this project pretty much speaks for itself. You will need to:
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Raise and nurture your pets. Race with them and win.
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Meet "Pet Racing" (working title), a pet management game where you get to train your pets, care for them and, if you're both good, win plenty of races.
Here's how it works: to start you off, you're given a new pet in dire need of care and training. Through feeding and caressing them, they'll be ready for training in no time.
Training is done over mini-games. By successfully completing a mini-game, your pet's stats will increase, granting better results at future races.
Finally, the racing. Racing is far from automatic - you'll be responsible for managing your pet's fatigue and motivation by adjusting the speed he must go at and feeding him some treats at the right time. If you finish first, you'll both be rewarded and, sometimes, you'll even get a new pet!
This game will be brought to you by Elio Freitas (IST), Guilherme Filipe (FBAUL), Miguel Marques (IST) and Tomás Marques (IST). If you like the concept, follow our development blog at https://petracingdev.wordpress.com/ !
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What will you do?
The game sits on two main concepts: racing and managing pets.
In regards to racing:
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Pick your favourite pet to race with
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Directly move and control your pet
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Use your pet’s special abilities to outrace your opponents
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Obtain money and unique eggs by winning races
As for managing pets:
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Feed, train, care for and play with your pet to help it grow
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Hatch eggs and breed new pets
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Send your pets on errands to obtain money
Why would you do it?
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To outrace increasingly better opponents
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To watch your pets grow, becoming stronger and happier as you nurture them
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To obtain awesome pets by hatching rare eggs
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To create better pets through generations of breeding
How will it look like?
You will race in a 3D 3rd person view. The following titles are our inspiration:
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Mario Kart
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World of Warcraft
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Monster Hunter Stories
Managing pets will happen through a menu-based interface. A few examples that we love:
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Monster Rancher
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Sonic Adventures 2 (Chaos races)
Why is it interesting?
We feel like this idea has plenty to give. These are our main selling points:
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A unique blend of racing with pet management
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A distinct lack of pet management and arcade-y racing games on the PC
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The feeling that what you’re racing with is more than just a tool
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We hope we'll be able to show you a game as good as we believe it can be!
March 30th 2018
It was not a long time ago since I got you in touch with my project for the first time but we have a couple of progress from this past couple of weeks that we'd like to show you guys.
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Logo
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Before anything else, we would like to show you the logo for our game.
We believe that a logo is one of the best "visit cards" that a project could have, it is a way to welcoming a person to it in a way they can feel more comfortable to go on and get to know it more deeply.
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I created different versions for the logo:
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one more minimalist/monochromatic;
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another more complex with colors, gradients, textures and shades.
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The logos below were the ones chosen by us and that logically each one will have its use depending on the key issues of the background in which the same will be inserted.
The versions that you will see now are the various prototypes performed to see which resulted better:
The meaning behind it
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Since our game is about different kinds of fantasy animals racing against each other I knew I wanted to insert that aspect in the logo somehow and that's how the "e" that looks like a dragon came out.
You could ask why the specific use of the dragon and for that we would tell you that it was simply because that gigantic beast is one of the most famous mytical/fantasy creatures in the world, and that way we can show to the people that the fantasy genre is inserted in our game. It was also because dragons are much more flexible with regard to its shape and so they would be the best chance to make the silhouette of E.
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Wallpaper/Screen Background
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I drew some wallpapers which can be inserted as a possible background in some menus. However, so far I only have one finished but as soon as I get another one done I will continue to show you them in the next posts.
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This is an underwater scene that I drew:
That's it for now! This is the resume of this couple of weeks.
I hope that the next time I'm here typing again I'm showing you guys more three-dimensional things, for your interest and my own good as well! See ya!
April 15th 2018
Hi once again!
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Last time I was here typing I remember finishing my post by saying that I should have some 3D stuff done at this point for my own good, and I am so reliefed for being able to say that I have!
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These couple of weeks were focused on finishing the screens and wallpapers of the game.
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The following image is another wallpaper I created for this project:
The 3D part of the game that's been working on is the starting screen.
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The main idea for it is to have a camera that its focus is changed depending on the menu selected. That mechanic part is still being worked by my developer colleagues but the 3D scenario is already created.
This start screen will work based on three menus:
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Barn: to restore your pets health;
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Train: to increase the level and status of your pets;
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Race: to compete and aim to win against other players.
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We have created a tiny demo in order to see what was working nicely and what was not in our racing mode.
This demo was only done to find technical problems so everything you see are assets that will not be in the finished game.
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With this demo we came to the conclusion that the camera will not be on the back of the player and neither on the side, we will put it in an angle of 3/4, that way an automatic race will be nicely seen and not as awkward as it was with the camera on the back.
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That's all for now! Things are going well, so now it's the time to start doing the characters and I couldn't be more excited about it!
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See you next time!
April 30th 2018
Hello everyone!
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I have some exciting things to show you of what happened in the last couple of weeks!
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Menu
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First of all the menu I showed you last time has already a very dinamic camera that moves its focus depending on what option we select.
In the racing tracks we have inserted some obstacles to make the game more fun to play and added one of the mini-games that we wanted to put since the beggining. Those mini-games are part of the Training Field and its mechanism works just like in Tamagochis, which means that in order to increase your pet's status and level you have to play some mini-games and win points from that.
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Take a look of the prototype here:
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We have tested this prototype in a mobile phone even though that had never been our intention from the start and it worked pretty good, so that could be a possibility in the future.
Characters
However, my favorite part of what I did in this meantime was creating the characters. First I sketched them in paper and after that I recreated the 3D model of them. Right now, I am using ZBrush to create the 3D model.
The character I started doing the 3D model first was the wolf because it is more suitable for when people think of pets racing and if there's some bad luck coming at me and for some reason I can't finish the 3 characters in time for the presentation at MOJO at least I have a pretty good character to show off our game.
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Below I give you the process of creating the 3D model of the wolf even though it is not completely finished yet.
This is how it all starts.
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You can never completely understand how this is going to turn out just by loooking at this base mesh since when creating a 3D figure you have to start from the simpliest to the most complex, but you know what they say: never judge a book by its cover!
The most satisfying part for any artist: getting into details...
Here's a small timelapse video of the process:
Unfortunately, I was recording since I started sculpting but when I finished the head and started doing the claws ZBrush crashed and for that reason I lost the video up to that point so I am only able to show what happened after that, which was creating the paws, adjusting the legs and adding the claws.
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As I said, the wolf is not finished, just have to look at the drawing to realize that, so I still need to had some fur to it and its saber teeth. After that I need to paint the model, rig it and animate it. No worries for you because I am sure that next time I will have a video for each character and much more!
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There's still two weeks until MOJO but I'm confident that me and my group will pull it off and have the wonderful game we all worked so hard to get!
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Hope to have great news the next time I get here! See ya!
May 15th 2018
The day we were all fearing and waiting for had come! MOJO showcased a lot of great projects! Besides being able to expose my own project, another great part of the event is to share the experience each one had in the process with the other participants. It's great to get in touch with their projects and see what they made for the occasion, it's a mutual inspiration exchange most of the times.
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It was great to live this experience once more! This time I felt a lot more in my habitat than last year because I had an entire year to let this passion grow in me and get myself to learn more stuff about this world and its artistic part.
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Unfortunately my game wasn't fully ready for the day. Not that it wasn't working, which it was, and we had a lot of people testing it out, but we didn't add all the details in time for the occasion. Sadly, the 3D models were ready but somehow few of them gave my developers teammates some struggles when being placed in the game engine and those struggles were not surpassed in time, that's why my game wasn't finished at MOJO. Regardless of that, thankfully this blog exists and this is my opportunity to showcase all of my art created especially for this project.
From the logo to the 3D characters I enjoyed doing it all, it was never boring because I was never in my confort zone. I had never done 3D before, had never created so many concepts in such a small amount of time, had never created scenarios in game engines and had never rigged or animated 3D figures. Saying this might seem like I'm painting a wonderful picture of the situation but it was more nerve-wracking than anything else. I did not know how to do 3D work, nobody taught me, I learned it all by myself knowing I had a deadline. Some errors I made were obviously the result of that lack of experience. It took me one week and a half to sculpt and paint the characters, however that wasn't the hardest part! The hardest part was to rig them and animate them! I had no idea it would be that difficult! Each character took me 6 hours straight to rig and animate, and some of them would not be fully correct at the first attempt so I had to redo some of them multiple times, for example, I had to repeat the wolf 6 times, rig and animate... too many hours without sleeping I must say!
The good part that I can extract from this is that I definetly learned from my mistakes and I built amazing content for my own portfolio! That was one of my main goals with this whole experience!
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I will gladly share some of my work with you now and a couple of snapshots taken in MOJO:
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-Some close ups:
-A small video to resume my hard work:
-And to end this chapter here's a couple of pictures of me testing out other projects and a photo with my group:
That's it! It's over. I don't know if this was my last MOJO or not but I can only aim to do greater projects from now on, each one better than the one before! That's all I wish!
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Goodbye lovely espectator! It was great having you there!
See ya!
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-Guilherme Filipe
May 30th 2018
