Hello and welcome to Moon Dog.
This video will start at the main menu and we'll make our way through all the floors in the house as I provide some commentary on the game and what's going on with the small team behind it as well as myself.

Accompanying video here:


I'll take a second to talk about the awkward controls. It uses the classic tank controls, but with the camera of a first person system, the camera actually pivots around like your face would, this is to help make a more immersive experience and what I think will be a nice twist on the classic Resident Evil style without just making it an "FPS". As I walk into the house, I want to clarify that this is a stripped down look at the house, you won't see any furniture or items besides the candles, which you'll notice aren't very good at lighting up the dark house. You can see that the floor, ceiling, and walls have a texture, but nothing else will, and what is there is just a placeholder, once the programming gets farther along I'll be going back to . Now then, this small demo of Moondog takes place in a medieval time somewhere in Europe, this demo will put you in the shoes of a Moondog here to explore the house, find a treasured stone, and return to your employer. The stone is an ancient relic, but you'll learn more about that at a later time. In this world, a Moondog is a member of an underground society that steal from people of fame or interest. This house belongs to a lord who has shut himself up in the woods away from town, but rumors say he's actually guarding something and the moondogs quickly took action to find out what it was. One of your members already set out to find it, but without hearing back from him, the society sent you in to investigate his dissapearance as well as finish what he started.


More on controls: This game is using a tank control scheme for your body, but you can look around and almost behind you thanks to the camera pivoting like your head would. It might look a bit clunky right now with the slow turning and slow walking pace but we're working on revamping the controls, movement, and getting the main character in, who I'll be able to reveal in a future update. This game will focus on exploring the house and
getting immersed in the atmosphere, but of course there will be puzzles, item hunting, and a little bit of combat to break it up. The main demo will use this layout for the house and the main goal will be getting into all the locked doors, once you do that, you'll have to wait for the full game to see what the last door was hiding. As we go up I'll start talking about the timeline of the game.


This game is my attempt at creating a new way of thinking about an FPS game inspired by the VR headsets I worked with. This project is piggy backing off a previous project that was an attempt at coding a game in a month from scratch. Obviously that didn't work out too well but it's come a long way and kept inspiration from it. This demo is planning to be released around October of this year as a prequel to another project and as such is much grander in scope and will have more time put in as compared to the previous which was going to be something more of an arcade style zombie shooter. I want to emphasize the idea of this being a crash course in the control scheme, with weapons being more melee oriented and animation based rather than working with something that requires precise aim when players might not be comfortable with the controls yet. Things are fairly slow in this, and won't pick up to anything too intense until part 2 is started, where it can afford to be more action packed. We're reaching the end of our tour so I'd like to take some time to say that this first part is going to be free when it's released, and probably won't take long to complete. Part 2 is going to dabble in some different themes, have more enemy types, more puzzles, and will expand upon the story that encompasses the world these games take place in; that game will be for sale to help support the people helping me as well as myself so we can keep working on things like this, there's no price planned yet.


I'm not a fan of making any solid dates as things happen, problems come up, and a small team can easily hit a wall in terms of development, but I will be pushing for October from a small team as a lead and try to make some more videos showing major milestones like this. This will be my first game in what I hope can broaden out to a small series of related games, so I want to thank you first for making it this far, and for showing interest. Look forward to the release of moon dog, and more videos later on, see ya.

pugui Rock Sword

Been sitting on this for too long so I decided to clean it up and get it out there. Because I decided to "do my own thing" and create an all new texture I focused on just the rock part of it and I think it's not bad for my own thing but I can't help to think that I ruined it in a way.

Time to move along though and focus on something else. Here's a sketchfab if you want to get a look at the model itself.

pugui Rock Sword
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Hand Painted Sword WIP 1

At this point I'm moving along with shadows and working on giving everything a rock texture, taking a break as I block in where my major highlights are. A little too blue right now and not enough shadow but it's a start!

Nene and Clarion

Friend wanted a model for Tabletop Simulator and gave me this image:

And this is what I came up with:

Nene and Clarion
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Don't look up her skirt.

Month 3 Final

(Almost done, post here: Beauty in Decay)

(This might be a little strange, but here's what Month 3 looked like back in Month 0)

No, before you ask you are seeing right, this is not a white N64 controller, this is nothing at all like a N64 controller. Somewhere along the way I got it in my head to do an environment instead of a prop again, so I chose this at the last possible second and began work. HO LEE HECK was this a crazy challenge to do in a month for me. In terms of models there are very few, a door, a chair, a weird thing propped against the wall, but the level layout in Unreal gave me no end of problems. Foliage alone would have taken me a month to figure out let alone figure out while getting this thing modeled and put together in time. Had I done this with a blockout like the rest I think it would have looked a lot closer to the reference, but I don't think I did too bad. Enough rambling though, here it is.

You know the drill.

So what are you looking at here, well it's pretty simple actually, just a hallway of a random mental hospital somewhere in the UK. Fun fact I was going to recycle this hallway into the ArtStation challenge that was going on at the time but school + Challenge really don't mix well, especially for someone who doesn't know the ropes that well yet. Lets talk environment workflow.

Build pieces and get idea of placement in Maya
--> Export/Import pieces into UE4
--> Figure out placing, camera, early lighting
--> Tweak the post processing
--> Add lights, particles, etc. for the final look

Lots of ups and downs with an environment in my opinion. I enjoy the process of making and placing everything where it needs to be, learned a lot about UV's for this stuff here, the hard part comes from getting it all to work out together. That being said, it isn't what I spent most of my time on, all of time went to figuring out Foliage and Lighting. (foliage was abandoned as you can see in the photo) The light in the reference is "impossible" to achieve with natural lighting, so I changed it to be natural and added some light rays and particle effects to spice it up. Looking back it might seem like a cheap way to make it look "good" but for a hallway done in a month I didn't really have time for something fancier. If only it got a blockout month, I guess. Walls could use a new material, maybe wood or something?

Month 2 Final

(Again, you can see the pictures and such here: Mateba MTR-8)

(If you forgot what this looked like back in Month 0, look here!)

I like guns, I like guns that are really weird, I like guns that are a pain to model, and would you look at that this one checks off all the boxes. Mateba MTR-8, a sport gun that was made for shooting at stationary targets on a field quickly. You could also use it to shoot at people but you'd probably have a harder time with that, especially if you miss. With 8 shots you have a little bit of leeway though so maybe it's not too bad, has this been used in a game/war though? I doubt it, hell I haven't seen much of this gun at all in the 3D world, just a few projects for early artists like me. Enough rambling though here's some Sketchfab links

Mateba MTR-8 Clean
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Now don't tell anyone this, but this was actually the concept for how guns would look in a game I've been mulling over in my head for a while now, and I decided to go for it, but I don't think it worked out too well.

Mateba MTR-8
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

Anyway, there's a lot to be learned from this project the next time I do a gun, maybe in the material work, maybe in the presentation, maybe in the modeling. Nevertheless this is a cool revolver that I loved to look at, and that I want to come back to later for some rigging and animation work. Here's some pictures from the art station.

Click or RMB+View Image or whatever to see them in their full size.

Here's my workflow for hard surface objects at this time

Maya for base mesh and placement
--> Edge Loops for shape and then smoothing for high poly
--> Substance Painter for baking and texturing

Wow so simple, how was this not done in 2 days? Because I am an idiot and wanted to go an extra mile or two with my modeling, leading to the third shot you see there with everything torn apart. This means that you can pull my model apart piece by piece and render it all out from any angle, something that I decided sort of last minute and then spent a lot of time figuring out. That being said there are a few things missing since it was made for that last shot, not being pulled apart accurately since this is just a prop and would never be pulled apart like that for any reason, it's just pretty to look at.

Zbrush has a new modeling application with r7 I want to say, my friends tell me it would make my hard surface modeling much better but I frankly have very little experience with Zbrush at the moment. I may have to entertain the idea of using Zbrush exclusively for a new gun at some point. Oh, to dream about future projects.

That's about it for this one, there are comment sections and chat programs for any questions there are about this. Let's move on to the last month.

Month 1 Final

(You can find the pictures and such here as well: Leather Camera Bag)

(If you forgot what this looked like back in Month 0, look over here!)

My teachers always told me that simple is better, and really this proved it to me. My most popular final by a landslide, here is a small camera bag that I found online:

Sketchfab:

Leather Camera Bag
by Nicolas Riley
on Sketchfab

In terms of the amount of work put in, I guess this might seem like I did the most here with the insides and zippers there, but honestly I think the Mateba was a lot more actual hours. That's why you do simple things, a little work goes a long way with them whereas a more complicated piece will take 5x the hours to look just as good! I'm a believer but I don't listen well, I need to experience it myself. Enough rambling though, here are some pictures.

Make sure to click on these or RMB+View Image or whatever to see them in their full size.

This was simple, and I liked it, and people liked it and yadda yadda yadda. Maybe I should do some more small props like this, could be funner than working hard. I don't really have any thoughts to share on this one, the process was fairly simple so I'll go over it really quick.

This is my general workflow for organics at the moment:
Maya Base Mesh and placement
--> Zbrush the main parts that need it, pushing and pulling it as it needs to be pushed and pulled
--> Back into Maya for remeshing, which is thankfully very easy since I can export the base mesh I made in Maya that has all the Zbrush work done on it
--> Staying in Maya where I remesh anything that needs to be done manually
--> Substance Painter/Designer for the materials

Originally the sewing pattern was done in Zbrush because lolhighpoly but I was advised to do it in Substance Painter instead which worked out a lot better once I got it configured correctly. The sculpting work on this was actually really simple, just a little stressing and masking + pushing and pulling. The majority of the work on this was done in Maya, the base mesh having pretty much everything except a lot of polys. Although the workflow is pretty straight forward, I actually jump back and forth a lot between each step, tweaking and adding things as they come up. Through out all 3 months I always told myself I need to make sure I'm seeing potential problems immediately but sometimes it's impossible when you have a deadline sitting on your back and tunnel vision guiding you along. That's all for this, lets move on to Month 2.

What's been happening and final thoughts on Full Sail U.

(I suppose for once I should make a proper blog post and talk about what's going on with me. This post is most likely pure text, I'll make separate posts for each of my finals from school and what's going on right now.)

Wow, finally taking what I can refer to as a proper break from doing work. I have graduated Full Sail as of July 1st, 2016. It feels okay, not much like a proper graduation though, I still feel like there is so much for me to learn and so much practice I need to do, I'm overwhelmed somewhat and definitely not feeling like I'm ready for a job with where I am. Whether or not that's true is for someone else to decide though, if they think they can use me then I'm ready to go. When Full Sail says that it's a fast-paced course, they are not joking, I got a little whiplash from the end of it and I'm sitting here blinking my eyes trying to figure out what happened and where I'm supposed to go from here. I've never done this kind of thing before but I'm left in an awkward state of wanting to take a proper break, and thinking of what I can do for a project. Speaking of projects lets talk about what projects I'm working on right now.

Canifis Project
I've started and finished up the outside of the bank of the village of Canifis from the game Runescape 2. Right now I'm thinking of sculpting the rocks and such for practicing that workflow. Whether or not I will be doing the entire town, even with how small it is, is yet to be seen.

Izze's Characters
This project really ended up being a nightmare of a project to work on. Handpainting characters is something I was never "taught" to do, so I'm kind of making this up as I go. New problems present themselves every 5 seconds or so and working on a small laptop alone means my reference was only up about half the time it should have been since I preferred to actually see what I was doing at times. That being said I do like her characters and am enjoying it. THAT being said, I am so sorry it's taking me so long.

Project "Train Game"
What the heck happened to this, I made a video about it and everything. Well it turns out I lost my only other partner on the project so the team went down to 1, me. I have since been through school and such so my interest in doing this slowly dwindled since it was half mine and the other half belonged to nobody. Since I felt that way I decided to make a safe call and not make something up, using a proper source to draw from so that I would have a direction to go in. The project was simply to make a game, a focus on gameplay rather than art and story, so I'm going to be utilizing the famous short "The Rats in the Walls" by H.P. Lovecraft. A favorite of mine and a cool setting to boot. More information about that at a later time though.

Sculpting
For someone who graduated in Props and Environments you sure are thinking of characters a lot, I tell myself on a daily basis. Yes, me, I do think about my own characters a lot, more so than an environment or prop at the moment, because I like characters. That being said, I want to learn Zbrush better so I plan on making some stuff that utilizes it a lot more. Starting with that Canifis project I mentioned above, and moving on into whatever looks cool.

So yeah, that's pretty much what's going through my mind in terms of personal ideas right now. I'm a little scatter-brained at the moment but maybe someday I will actually get on the right track.

I'm also looking for jobs at the moment, though it's been hard with how much I've been moving around. Anyway, on to the actual work.

Game Jam: The Game

FULL SAIL HALL OF FAME 48-HOUR GAME JAM
A GAME BY:
NICOLAS RILEY
KHOA PHAN
RUSTY SWAIN
TJAY CARGLE
JOHN HUGHES
VISHWAJEET KALE
LEXIE ROOD


We made a game which I dubbed "YaSuMi", it means Holiday or Vacation in Japanese. I also came up with a small backstory: You play as Ya and Mi, two tiny aliens who come to Earth on vacation. Here they solve puzzles to help out their buddy Su, the snowman you see on Level 5. It plays similarly to Cookies and Cream, an old PS2 game by From Software, so I made some weird characters to go with it, my favorite being Ya the Green Dinosaur. Here's a youtube video showing how to beat the game:





Click the link at the top to try the game for yourself as well as see the games by the other teams, though it still seems my team is listed as being both Guardians of the Realm and Underrated Vow, which is not true, I was only a part of Guardians and Team Underrated Vow was simply replaced by my team somehow? Very odd.


I created the ships you actually stand on, all of Level 3 (the sand castle level), the characters, and did the textures for all the background assets and characters. Me and Khoa made up the design of the ships, the design of the levels, and oversaw the sound direction. Rusty was a cool programmer, and let me and Khoa do whatever we wanted, good or bad so that was fun.


I will be dumping the art assets as well as showing what I also worked on over the month in the next couple of updates!

Month 3 Blockout

Month 3 Project. Base Materials. Base Mesh.
Tomorrow I go back to work on the Camera Bag, color me excited.

Month 2 Blockout

Mateba MTR-8
Base Materials, Base Mesh

Final Blockout for Month 1

Base Mesh, Base Materials. Made in Maya, painted in Substance Painter, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.

Splatoon Octopus Pot - WIP

Started as a daruma, ended up as an octopus pot with a Splatoon dressing. Base colors only and a block out of the rope.

MTR-8 for Month 3

And finally, the project for Month 3, Mateba MTR-8.

And the blockout, the pink/blue/yellow sections are also split up into smaller parts but the blue sections are both separate from the base and trigger guard piece so I treated them as pieces hanging off the gun.

N64 Controller for Month 2

Here is the planned prop for Month 2 of Finals.

And the planned breakout, not including the L and R buttons as a group, and the Z button down below.

Finals Month 1 Project

End of the Line, time for finals.
Here is the first prop I will be making, it is a small camera bag.

And here is the plan on how I will be breaking down each individual parts.

Stay tuned for Month 2 and 3 projects.

LVL - Learning to make an environment in Unreal!

This is a little late, but lets look at a level I built in Unreal start to finish. As a warning, long posts are long, and require a lot of reading, so feel free to just look through the pictures, and imagine me at my desk slaving over Maya and Substance Designer in between each one.

Starting off, here are the first pieces of concept art I made to flesh out how the level was going to be.

These pictures are huge so open them up in a new tab to scroll around and soak them all in. We're going to mainly focus on just one of the rooms, and then I'll show the finished rooms at the end. So as you could see, these were my blockouts for the layout of the rooms, this was mainly so I could get a sense of how big my enviro pieces would be and to make sure I could walk between them with plenty of room.

As I was limited to 20 individual pieces, I didn't make too many blocks inside the room, and planned around using as little as possible. Shortly after making the blockout, I started making some props, and getting them placed in the room. On the top there, you can see the transition from blockout to actual props modeled in Maya, in that second area to the right I could work with my lighting, which we did a lot of in class on test rooms and the like.

Roughly a week later, and some sick days for luck, we have a room with actual props. At this point it's still a little empty though, and we needed to make these rooms seem full of stuff, these weren't new and shiny areas after all, especially not for my concept art. A lot of these props at this point were a little rough, and needed some more refining, but I was placing props, and that's what counts.

More props placed, nothing too exciting yet.

Huge jump! Lighting was figured out, with spaces carved into the arches to hold them, and I started getting some textures down. All textures were done in Substance Designer because of how easy it is to make tiling textures in it and simple materials such as wood, stone, etc. I would like to thank all the people on youtube making tutorials for designer and painter alike, they helped me get through most of this project, and I walked away with a better understanding of what I can do in designer. The overall direction when it came to textures was looking at what the concept art drew and then adapting that as I saw fit, that and reusing as much as possible! A simple stone pattern was used almost 4 or 5 times alone. Whether or not that's a good thing to do is unknown to me, so I'll just say "whatever works" is the best policy.

More textures, more prop work. I'll take this time to say that the amount of work it takes to make a level is more than you think, but not as much as you fear. Once you start figuring out where you can reuse pieces and textures, and start filling up a level, the whole thing kind of clicks and eventually you just start moving forward knowing exactly what you need from your props/pieces and what your textures need to be doing. I went back and revised my more complex walls 5 or so times as I went through just to constantly update them along with the rest of the level. I don't think it is too much of a drawback to do it this way, but it's probably a safer bet to plan out what your pieces need to look like beforehand.

Added some color, this is also the last picture before the assignment was "finished". Textures at this point were starting to get moved around as more were completed. If you compare this one to the previous photo, you can play a little "Spot the difference" game. Props at this point were pretty much final, and the lighting was also done for the most part. Fun fact, the makeshift bbq pit in front of the tent is the only prop textured in Substance Painter rather than Designer and it it's pretty sad to look at now, for one it's much too dark and in an attempt to really dirty it up I covered the actual material. In comparison, the rest of the area is strangely clean though. This is one of those learning moments, and since I didn't actually fix it for the final showing, I guess I learned that I should learn substance better?

And here we have the completed level with lighting and post process applied in Unreal! This whole process seems pretty easy when you lay it out like this, but each gap between pictures is usually several or more days of working on small sections, as well as modeling and creating textures. The vert painting (those dark blobs you see placed on walls here and there. The way it works is that you lay a texture over the existing texture at each vert point, lack of verts seems to give this blobby effect that I'm not a fan of.) really didn't turn out well now that I look back, so that's also something I should focus on learning a little better, but overall I thought the rooms looked nice. I didn't have much to say because I was so sick of looking at them by the time it was due, but here I can pour out all my feelings on them. The hallway splits up two different post process effects, the bar being much darker than the campground, and there's also some dust particles floating around the bar, probably due to the poor air condition in there. The campground and bar have an extra door leading god knows where, but I forgot to put a doorknob, either because I couldn't be bothered, or I was simply lazy. No one was going to look anyway, but still, always go the extra mile for your game. This was a long month, and it gave me a shock when I found out I had forgotten some basics of modelling somewhere along the way, probably due to not needing to model anything big for a couple of months before.

Level Design

Building a level this month, basing the three rooms off some concept art and areas from Metro 2033. The three rooms were made with BSPs in UE4 and need to be completely replaced. I'm making meshes for the floors/walls right now to further block out and define the levels, and have run into a problem of having a lot of different sized walls. Please pray I find a way around all this.

Particles

Lesson 2 Final for VEF1
Particles include Snow, Fire, and Smoke
Everything in the scene was made by me
My favorite part is the snow that's falling, I like the way it bounces.
Music is Intermission (Tea Time) by Anamanaguchi

pugui_新浪博客

I may have gotten in a little over my head with this sword, but I liked it so I wanted to do it. Side by side you can really tell what I could and couldn't achieve, but I'm happy with the end results. I have been told that mine is too soft compared to the concept art, so I will have to look into that and figure out exactly what can be done for it. As of right now I'm running off fumes, but I want to do some more painted textures from various pictures I have been collecting. Hopefully I can get them out sooner rather than later and start improving!