Joe of Destruction: Week 6 and 7

Hi all, Rob again, Unfortunately I haven't been able to do a lot of work recently due to visiting friends up at my old university. Expect larger updates in the coming weeks when I'm back home.

Vehicles

For the vehicles, I decided that the main tank design could be reused and changed to quickly create several different variants of unit, a principle that I discovered from the Borderlands 2 art book. I took the base art from the enemy tank, and converted it into several designs. I also tested out a couple of pattern designs as a possible route to explore in the tanks camo.

Further updates to follow in the coming weeks.

Joe of Destruction: Week 5

Not to much to show in this week's update due to recently turning 22 and celebrating my birthday, as well as seeing off friends returning to uni for another uni. I've been working on my painting style for the most part with the enemy tank. Will hopefully post up more next week, continuing on the concept art front. - Rob

Vehicles

The tank is now painted and finished! This one took me a little longer to create than the last, as working out the back view's shapes was a little more tricky than the previous vehicle. There's a few adjustments I'll make to it in the future, as well as deciding on a name, but for now I'm pretty happy with it.

Tank concept

Joe of Destruction Week 4

Week 4's update doesn't have too much to offer in terms of new work, but rather a couple of concepts that I've been working on and refining. I've slowly been building up and working out the art style for this game, and will continue to do so in the coming weeks.

Vehicles

Work on the missile launcher concept is complete! I came up with a new border design for the bottom to make it more interesting than say a plane couple of blank panels. I also drew up and completed the back view lineart with block colours, allowing for a better look at all of the vehicles parts.

The other concept I'm currently refining is the goon tank. I decided to go for a darkish blue hue, which I had used before on previous vehicle work, and continue to do so. The back line art is slowly progressing, but there's not enough to show, so that'll hopefully be completed by next weeks entry.

The next update will continue to follow the refining of concept art.

Joe of Destruction: Week 3 2nd update

The 2nd update for week 3 contains updates on new character and vehicle concept art.

Characters

For the character side of things, I decided that to add to the overall gameplay and story, that their should be an allied America side that assists the player to defeat the enemy, to give the game an overall grander scale.

The first to be designed were regular ally troops.

Ally troops for the most will be no more than background pieces. Their may also be times when the player will run into soldiers that need saving or assistance, adding to their score total or gaining additional perks/weapons.

Ally Soldier rough concept

 From these first 3 designs I found that the 2nd design fits the bill the best. The first design took too much reference from WWII German soldiers. The 3rd design leads a more to Russian troops with the helmets design. This concept will need some finalising, but for the most part, I'm happy so far.

I also created a Sargent (Sarge for short) that will brief the player at the beginning of each level, and send his troops head first into the fray.

Sarge rough concept

For his look, I was inspired by the Sarge character from Quake Online. I also wanted to give him a more armoured look to show his higher rank. (And a constant supply of cigars) I felt that giving him less armour didn't make him look as intimidating, so I aim to stick with the first drawn up design.

Vehicles

Since there will be an aerial base, there needs to be supply vehicles that can deliver supplies between the floating platforms. To this end, I've drawn up 6 rough concepts for hovertrucks.

Hover Truck roughs

The main aim was to make it a small but bulky vehicle to go with the exaggerated feel. As of yet I'm still playing round with ideas, but am happy with the roughs thus far.

Now, one of the main important assets for this level will be flying aircraft carriers. There'll be light carriers that will be parked in the main base, and a couple that appear and block your way. I've never attempted to full draw an aircraft carrier, so decided the easiest way to go around it would be to draw it from a top schematic view, in order to work out were the main parts would be placed, such as the engines, runaway and potential turrets.

Light Aircraft Carrier roughs

I did four variations, and decided that 2 and 3 were the closet to what I wanted. I then went on to draw up a new version that combined and elements from the four designs.

Light Aircraft Carrier roughs combined

I aim to draw up a rough perspective sketch to fully realise the design, blockmodel it in 3DS Max, then move on to using it as a guide to get the final look nailed down.

This concludes the update for week 3 2nd Update. The next update will focus on getting the concepts closer to completion.

Joe of Destruction: Week 3 1st Update

Week 3 1st Update will be showing  the continuing progress on the current vehicles, as well as the new initial 3D environment blockouts.

Vehicles

For the vehicles, I continued to plan out the final concepts for the tank and light helicopter, and tightened up the line art. The tank is ready for the painting stage, but after looking it over with a couple of artists, realised that some parts of the light helicopter need to be changed perspective wise.

Tank final line art

Light Helicopter line art

Environment 

The main update comes with environment blockouts. I had a rough idea in my head of how I wanted the test level to play out, and started to create the pieces accordingly to my ideas. To make things a little easier to read through, I've colour coded and split up the environment into 5 different sections: Key Structures, Path Structures, Background Pieces, Enemy Structures, and Lootable/shootable objects. Note I used the 3D software 3DS Max to create these models.

Key Structures

The main key structure was the Helipad at the start of the level. You get dropped off here, and will continue on the path towards the enemy. I found a good circular helipad reference, and combined with the cloud city architecture, built it based around that. It differs greatly from the basic concept as I found the circular shape was more visually appealing to the eye.

Helipad top view

Helipad bottom view

Path Structures

The path structure was an important piece to work out, as I will be making use of it to create the main paths in the level. I started off by creating the floating platforms from the original concept.

Floating Platfroms: Trap platform, Corner platforms, and variations on the single platform.

However, I quickly found that putting them into large groups made them very high poly, at about 46,000. So instead, I created a piece that merges them together, which significantly lowered the poly count to around 19,000.

New Platform top view

New Platform bottom view

I also created a rotating piece which the player would traverse to reach different areas. Potentially thinking of using it as a quick save point, depending on the length of the level.

Rotating platform

Background Pieces

These pieces were created to fill up the environment, as well as provide other ways for the player and enemies to move around. I created a series of silo pieces, creating 3 different variants, that could be scattered around the level where needed.

Silo single top view

Silo single bottom view

Double silo connected

Large double silo connected 

An additional bonus has been being able to reuse assets to quickly build up new asset pieces, which helps to cut down on the production time immensely.

Enemy Structures

The enemy structures will help to protect the enemy, produce enemy units, aid the enemy in fighting, but most importantly, provide the player with more structures to destroy.

The first enemy structure I worked on was the watch tower. I've done a couple of variants, as I found when modelling the first variant, it didn't look entirely right. The watchtower will allow for enemy snipers, as well as regular troops to shoot and lob grenades from.

Watchtower front view

Watchtower back view

The second structure was the floating turret. This piece will rise up from under the screen and aid the enemy at random points during the level. Can also be used for friendly fire if standing in the right place and dodging at the last moment. I'm really happy with the exaggerated tall look, as it fits in well with the art style.

Floating Turret

The last enemy structure for now is the enemy helipad spawner. These will float in from a random location and spawn 2- 3 helicopter units. This can be halted by the player destroying them before they have a chance to deploy/during deployment.

Enemy Helipad Spawner top view

Enemy helipad spawner bottom view

Lootable/Shootable Objects

The final pieces I worked on were the lootable and shootable objects. Lootables will give the player weapons, and possible health buffs, depending on which mechanics are implemented. Shootable objects will cause chaos to the enemy if shot or pushed in the right direction.

The two I've modelled so far are the loot crate and a generic barrel, which could have several different uses slapped on it.

Barrel and Loot Crate front view

Barrel and Loot Crate back view

This concludes the work update for this post. The next update will be posted in the next few days, and will focus on a variety of updates.

Joe of Destruction: Week 2

Week 2 focused on continuing to develop the games art style in the pre production stage, and started to narrow some of the final designs for the vehicles. It also saw the addition of a few more characters, vehicles, and other game content.

Characters

For the character work, I decided to create a leader goon that would send the enemy troops after the player, as well as having their own attack style. The design was inspired by German generals, in particular the heavy coats and hats they wore. Note this design features the beginning of the logo design for the enemy with the crying skull. I also made use of the gas mask iteration work, and gave the leader a more frowned expression, to help further separate him from regular goons.

Enemy leader goon

Week 2 also saw further development of the female character, currently named Gemma,  and the male black character, for the current time being referred to as black bro. For Gemma, I wanted her digital representation to have a sci-fi look, with heavy armour plating, possibly pinning her down for a potential sniper role. (Note Joe of course would be the regular shooter class.) I looked at armour styles from history, and also mass effect, which helped me to figure how all the armour could fit together.

Gemma early work 

Gemma roughs

For the Black bro character, Mr T was a huge inspiration, well known for being a general tough guy fighting through explosions and ridiculous situations. With this in mind, he'll be made the explosive guy for the mercenary team. This is reflected in the blown up sleeves and the huge amount of explosives strapped to his back. Not much changed from his original sketch, as I was pretty happy with how he looked from the start.

Black Bro roughs

Vehicles

For the Missile Launcher vehicle, I combined elements from the 6 roughs and created a final design. For each final design I aim to do a fully coloured front view, and a block coloured back view.
I started out by drawing out the rough version, then redraw the line art, as you can see in the back version.

ML working out

Flat colouring was then introduced, followed by working out the lighting and tones. I then did tonal work, and worked out the colour scheme as I went along. I also tightened up the line work to reduce the rough sketchy look.

ML coloured and adjusted

Needless to say I'm very happy with how this has turned out so far. There's a few changes to make here and there, and the back version to redraw, but aside from that, I'm happy with how this has turned out.

I also drew up 6 roughs for a light enemy helicopter unit, which will be a fairly regular enemy unit that appears to harass the player

Light helicopter roughs

Items
I've also started looking into collectable designs the player could pick up. The first item is the enemy weapons chest, which would give the player a random weapon/buff/health pick up.

Loot Crate designs

Weapons
A brief look at weapons has also been done for the enemy goons arsenal. Below is a selection drawn up to get idea of what I could play with.

Goon Arsenal

Other
In terms of other art content, one important item was the merc and enemy emblems, that could be used for UI, placed on vehicles, etc. I created one for the mercs, which is based around a lion, and a  skull design for the cyber terrorist, based around the skull design I created for the Leader goon.

Mercenary emblem designs

Cyber Terrorist emblem designs

This concludes the work done for week 2. Week 3 will have a main focus on the initial modelling done for the environment and further vehicle work.

Joe of Destruction: Week 1

Week 1 focused on getting the ground work set up in the character, vehicle and environment departments. I'll give brief explanations as to the ideas of each concept, the inspirations, the difficulties, and changes that occurred as the work went on, separating all the concepts into their respective sections.

Characters

For the character work, I continued to work on Joe. The inspiration for Joe was Rambo, with the bandanna, the military vest, the combat clothing, and the big muscles. I tried out various poses and positions to nail down his look. 

Joe Rough concepts

I eventually followed a rule where getting nearer a final design, I would do a series of 3 rough looks, that could be changed with ease, altering sections as needed to try out different looks. Making the eyebrows bigger, thinning the legs out, and changing the eye size. I hadn't settled on the final look for Joe at this point, but was getting closer to it.

To speed up the overall process of character creation, I took the template for the basic pose and transferred it onto other designs. This included the enemy goons, the basic soldier who will plague the player in every level. To make them ready for any situation, I decided on a skin tight suit with a gas mask, a kind of combat haz-mat suit if you will. 

I also wanted to really play with the mask designs, so went on to creating another file where I just had fun messing around with the proportions and size. These could be used for more elite troops found in the later levels, or general different unit types.

Vehicles 

For the vehicles, I started work on a missile launcher tank. I wanted to keep the proportions small but big, as if to create a vehicle that could only work in the digital realm. Metal Slug and Battalion Wars were big inspirations for the proportions I was looking for. For the vehicles, I've put it down to 6 designs for the rough work, to allow for enough variety, but not to create too much work. 

ML rough concepts.

I really liked the base of the sixth design for the tank variant I wanted to create, so I took the it to a new file and created different turret designs to go on top. I wasn't totally satisfied with the designs, but the first one was the closest design too what I wanted. 

Tank rough concepts

Environment

Now that we're on the environment art, I can reveal a little more info on the test level. The first level the evil cyber-terrorists throw at Joe and co is a floating sky military base, much inspired by aircraft carriers from the avengers and the floating city from Star Wars. I've included a quick mood board to give you an idea of what I mean. Like I said, digital realm, lots of creative freedoms.

Sky Base Moodboard

In terms of concept art, Environment is not my strongest suit. I use it more for planning out environment pieces, or particular assets, and tend to fully flesh them out in 3D to their fullest potential. Below show a few examples of asset pieces I'm looking to include in the level.

Basic Platforms

Helipad platform ideas

Access platform and watchtower

I want to focus on including lots of pipes, engines and circular platforms to imitate the cloud city look, as will as give a feel that there's a lot of complex machinery need in keeping the pieces afloat. 

This concludes the first week of work for this project. Week 2's post will be coming up shortly.