Last stretch of prototyping

The prior patch was not so different to the first one, that was due to documentation. With the heavy part of documentation out of the way it was time to focus on bringing the full game together. From the new movement, to 3 new birds, and a glimpse at how the game would fully look.

Winged Warfare has a lot of opportunity to expand. Focussing on the core part of the game which is the balloons and birds was a must. These features make or break the game. That does not mean no other features were added along this process for example punching a fellow player. It does not pop a balloon but gives some defense to the defenseless. Every time you are hit, you get sent flying, that concept was harnassed in the punch. Get to close to a fellow player and you might be in for a nasty surprise. Further ideas that can come from this are out of scope for now but feel interesting to explore in the future. For example stealing the bird of someone you punched.

Art

This week the art bible needed some adjustments, and on top of that it had to be finished. Sections such as proportions, rfx, shaders, textures, lighting and composition were added, and certain pages were made less condensed by splitting certain sections into multiple pages.

First off, we finished designing the different kinds of birds, each has a distinct shape language based off a primary shape, making it easy to tell them apart, also by function. E.g. the hawk is sleek and long, signifying it’s speed and the owl is seemingly harmless, because it does not pop balloons, but steals them.

For the RFX, a 2D-esque cartoony style was chosen, since that would go well with the aesthetic of the game. As a prime inspiration for the effects we chose the game “Dofus”. Effects should be simple in nature and based on sprites and occasionally, meshes.

For the textures, Substance painter will be used, and since our pipeline will be considerably fast, there will be no time for sculpting, thus no baked normal maps will be used. Metalness values are also forbidden, since those would prove to be too distracting. Variations in material can be shown with roughness and albedo maps.

For Lighting, we want to keep it simple. Just one directional light and sky light, and local height fog will be used to exaggerate the height and bring focus to the player arena.

Controls

For easier visualization, control instructions were added for X-Box controller, Playstation controller, Switch controllers and Keyboard.

Models

This week prototype models of the game characters as well as environmental parts of the game were made. The main reference source was the art bible, which had previously mentioned elements already made in it.

The Icebergs were made by combining several boxes of different sizes in different positions, then combining the with a boolean operation. After that, in order to get rid of n-gons, first triangulation operation was used followed by quadrangulation. Next the reduce operation was used followed by Smoothing and again reducing. Additionally, in order to give the models this nice look Bevel Operation was used.

As of now the character models are made with a basic shapes which were first illustrated in the art bible. Its purpose was to show that the their basic shapes resemble similarity to bullets/simple robots. These models were made with different simple shapes, stuck to each other without merging them together.

Icebergs with a basic material, without any post-processing toon shaders.

Icebergs with a basic material, with post-processing toon shader but no outliner.

Ice Bergs with a basic material, together with post process toon shader and with outliner enabled and adjusted.