Bachelors Degree incoming. Now to find work.

As of this past month I've finished all of classes for my Bachelors degree. At this point it's just a lot of applications to various places. Since my two main focuses are as a Game Designer and a Level Designer I figured I'd take a bit of time to try and build a game from scratch that makes use of both.

So let's begin. This is the first post for this game. My plan is to post for the next few weeks and build the game here from the ground up. I'm not sure how much art I'll be making for it, but I will get the structure to each type of card designed. I came up with the base idea for the game last night and hashed a bit more of it out with my brother to make sure it was solid as a starting point.
This game is designed as for play as a board game as opposed to a computer game.

The game concept is based around a group of players making their way through a dungeon. Players will gain levels, loot, and abilities as they progress. The dungeon itself will be created as the players move through different rooms and, after a set number of rooms has been passed through, a boss room will appear as the next room to be entered. After players defeat the boss they can immediately set out for another dungeon, but they will not encounter the same boss again. The game officially ends when all 6 bosses have been defeated. If a player dies at anytime during the crawl their character card is wiped clean and they re-enter the dungeon with nothing.

Box Contents (If this were to be made)
Player Cards (6)
-These are the basic layout for the player characters. Each of them is identical. The player will place their abilities and items on these cards to keep track of them. They will also receive a coin each time they kill a mob. They can trade in a number of coins equal to their current level to increase their level by 1 and gain a stat point to improve their character.

Ability Cards (25)
-Depending on how the players want to play the game they will be able to choose or be randomly receive a total of 3 of these cards throughout the game. Each player will get one at the beginning of the game and again at when they reach levels 6 and 10. Some abilities have a second stage which can only be activated by forgoing the ability that they would gain at another time. Players that strengthen one of their abilities will end the game with less abilities that those who don't, but their abilities will be much stronger.

Loot Cards (25)
-These are the rewards that players will gain from defeating mobs, opening chests, and defeating bosses. Each player can have a total of 4 Loot Cards at any time. They can trade loot between each other as long as they are in the same room and there are no enemies in the room with them.

Mob Cards (30)
-The enemies that spawn in the rooms. Most rooms have some number of red stars on the floor. These indicate the number of enemies that spawn in that room. Each enemy has unique stats, but all follow the same set of behavior rules. An enemy will move to the closest player and attack only that player until it or the player dies. If a player moves away from the mob and another player is now closer the mob will target that player instead. Some of these mobs also drop loot.

The Mobs will look something like this. I'm just throwing things together from random images on the internet.

Boss Cards (6)
-Each boss comes paired with its own special room. Boss rooms are 10x10 and also contain mobs. Each boss has their own set of behaviors.

Room Set (25)
-There are a total of 25 rooms that the players might travel through. These are broken into 5 different stacks that the players will end up pulling from to build the dungeon. The room sizes are 5x5 or 5x10 depending on roll numbers. When a player reaches a door way from one room to another they will roll a d6. The number that they roll will determine which stack they pick up the next room from. The stacks are face-down so the room that they pick will be random. Once revealed the rolling player can orient the room any way that they wish. Each stack has some unique effect related to them. All stacks contain monsters.
Stack 1: Primarily Loot Rooms. These rooms are most likely to have a loot chest in them containing one, two or three loot items for the players.
Stack 2: This stack is made up of corridors and branching hallways.
Stack 3: These rooms always contain mobs.
Stack 4: Stack 4 consists of rooms that are a mix of the previous 3 stacks.
Stack 5: These are the 5x10 rooms. They may contain loot, but are more often found overrun with mobs.

Next post I'll see about Loot cards, the start of the player mat, and a room or two.

With the Ouya console on its way Battle Gnomes has been doing a lot of work recently. A few days ago Emil Harmsen, CEO or both Forever Interactive and Everfire (previously FI-Fire) gave a speech at a Vet Transfer gathering. While there we had two kiosks set up to show the current state of the Battle Gnomes. And it went very well. We had one complete level and four playable characters each unique in nearly every way. Below are a new set of 36 maps that I've made for the game. I've made another set of 12 since I scanned these in but was told to wait to make another set until we got more feedback on those which I've already submitted. Things are going very well for Battle Gnomes.

UWM Animation Backgrounds

This is the background for the first scene of my major project for this semester. A forest view, the time of day leaning towards sunset. A small critter runs down the tree immediately in front of the camera and slowly makes its way towards one of the other trees and ascends.

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I'm not really to inclined to say how the animation continues, but above are the backgrounds for the inside of a cave entrance on the cliff face and a room located there within. The man on the floor has been turned to stone.

I feel strange about continuing this blog, mainly because it feels less like a blog and more like an infrequent update on my current work. Not that this is a bad thing, but it indicates that I should either get an official online portfolio or update here much more frequently. That being said.

Forever Interactive has never been more busy. Both Battle Gnomes and Visions of Zosimos are quickly approaching launch dates. Battle Gnomes has gone from being a relatively basic survival game to a full scale arena battle. Not only that but we have secured a position on the upcoming Ouya console. We will be launching with 8 full characters, 4 Heros and 4 Villains, on a total of 6 maps, each with its own form of gameplay. Including the basic free-for-all and team battle game modes we are including a King of the Hill and Capture the Flag map. The maps look amazing and they have been a blast to design.

You can check out some of the gameplay here.

And on the other end of the spectrum Visions of Zosimos is also looking amazing. We have some new artist that are doing a spectacular job and have given some of the older cards a face-lift. They models for the in game battles have also been getting upgraded. VoZ is aiming to launch next year and it will be amazing.

As for myself I have one more year at UW Milwaukee. Next spring I will be graduating with my Bachelors Degree in Animation. I'll post some of the work I've been doing for my major project tomorrow, a 2D animation using pencil, ink, Photoshop and ToonBoom.

I've also continued work on two of my own video game projects and have the structure for both almost completely fleshed out. I need more programmers.

I'm hoping to start sending out my resume and applications come next April or May. Here's hoping for some amazing work to do.

Right then. A lot has happened since I last posted. Seven months is a long time. The work with Forever Interactive is going great. We were at GDC this year to promote both Battle Gnomes as well as Visions of Zosimos. The future is looking really good for both. I've been extremely busy dividing my time between my two major film projects at UWM and FI, and I think I may have overloaded just a bit too much this year. I've more or less completed a game design that I'm hoping I can get funding for come summer and have an ally or two to aid me in programming. Sadly I haven't worked much in 3d lately and this makes me sad since it's what defines me as an animator. Be as it may I continue to work.

That took far too long.

The 'That' to which I refer is fixing my access to both my YouTube channel and my access to my blog. At the start of this past semester MATC killed the access that I had to these sites and I was no longer able to log in and update who-ha. I finally figured out how to fix it. Hooray. This means that in the following week I'll be updating this blog with some new 3d work that I've been doing, a dragon being the most impressive. Granted it is only the dragon's head, but still good.

A small Side Project

While I've been teaching at Discovery World this summer I've had some spare time during the night to work on projects of my choosing. I spent a few nights making the below model.

This steam punk weapon is incredibly high poly due to multiple turbo smooths, but I can't argue with the results, now can I? It took my a total of around 5 hours to reach this point, and I haven't had time to work on it in a week or so. The next step will be Unwrapping and then texturing the model.