The map i've been working on has come along very well, and is about finished, although it needs some serious play testing so we can tweak the platforms and ropes.

In the process of working on the map i also designed some new meshes that we needed and got pospi to model them for me. They are all very straightforward fairly simple meshes being pieced together to create more complex interesting objects. You can see the best example of this in the new 'marshmallow tree' objects which are not only scenery and add to the marshmallow environment but can also be used as platforms. Today i also spent some time texturing these tree objects with a good amount of detail. Several other meshes still need to be textured and i'll be working on those over the next couple of days.

screenshot

You can see here the latest screenshot of the map, the marshmallow tree is made up of basically just spheres and hexagonal prisms.

I havent updated the journal for a while, so here is some indication of what i have been working on lately.

Recently we had a big working session where i finished off the main character texture and designed textures for the 2 alternate helmets of the classic characters from the original Marshmallow Duel. Or at least our interpretation of them. These can be seen in some of the more recent screen shots that have gone up lately. All these textures were then masked out properly to allow colour changing, and so now you can see all different colours of the 3 classic characters in the game, it looks much more interesting.

Lately i have been getting back to working on maps, which i still have a lot more work to do on by the release date.

Here are some sneak previews of the 2d map i am currently working on.

one

This one shows the new waterfall i've designed which looks much smoother and nicer than the chunkier one i had in one of the old maps. You can see here the design of this 2d map is set inside a big cavern.

two

Here is a small side room showing a better view of the shiny marshmallow now with specular. I think it looks a lot deadlier now that it resembles boiling hot sugar.

I have spent most of today and all of tonight working in the unreal ed map editor. I think the only way to really learn the program well is experience, messing around in it and doing everything the wrong way a few times before getting a feel for it. Either this or doing a lot of reading before hand... and that doesnt sound as fun or frustrating.

I started out trying to make a 3d version of the marshmallow waterfall pit map design that i put up here ages ago. Finally i got the terrain working very easily, and i had a good control over what i was doing with that. I worked on creating some textures for the terrain, some of which i was kindof happy with but mostly it was a bit difficult trying to make pleasingly tiled textures. I also started making a marshmallow texture as i really wanted my own pink marshmallow at the bottom of the pit, as opposed to a premade texture from the engine. I didnt get far with this as i had a lot of trouble trying to create a physics volume to kill the character when he fell down the bottom. I also had a lot of trouble trying to make a working liquid (wobbling) texture. Eventually i caused a whole bunch of errors in the map, and at the time i thought it was ruined ( i think i can fix it now though) so i decided to start a very simple and straight forward map, a classic style 2d marshmallow duel map which we've always wanted.

It was a lot simpler but i still went through a bit of messing around. Eventually i figured out all the things i wanted with the marshmallow and made a nice texture with 2 layers of rotating marshmallow over a liquid area which bounces around just like real wobbly thick marshmallow. I also set the physics volume paramaters to kill the player when he falls in and also to float him around as if it was really marshmallow. So most of the time you fall into the marshmallow you float back on top, its pretty cool. There is a nice picture of mowbray falling in the drink in the ingame section of the images.

There were a few things that came up while trying to make the 2d/3d map which are kindof important. It is kindof tricky placing the platforms near enough to the rope that you can step onto it, but far enough that it doesnt get in the way when you are trying to climb past a platform. Hopefullythis will befixed when we have an actual climbing animation, or maybe we can rotate the player around onto the frontofthe rope, although that sounds dodgy and i dont really know anything about it. I think there were more things but i forget. The map needs some fixing up and polishing off but basically its a playable mduel classic map.

Oh yeah i really love the magnet, best weapon EVER. So cool. Can't wait to play with it in multiplayer.

Ok so we got together to work all weekend. Again i was just working largely on textures, i started work on the main character texture which can be seen in pospi's previous post. This isnt finished yet but its well on it's way. It's looking very detailed so far, and its actually taking up a fair bit of time. But we want the main character texture to look good, and detailed, becuase its going to be seen quite a bit. There will be also multiple helmet models and textures to chose from. (on yeah in pospi's post the parts that are textured are kindof washed out by the lighting so you cant see it too well. And there are no specular masks or anything yet either)

Other pickups are also on the way to being textured, more of which i'm going to work on today.

I'm also starting to focus on map editing, which i need to do a fair bit of by next week. I've started playing with terrain again for my crater map, which i've been wanting to do for ages.

Well still working away at textures

my main accomplishment of today is the shield texture, which is all but completed (have some work to do on the back face.

The areas where the metal is exposed from the paint peeling back (or being hit by swords or someting, as the texture kindof suggests, not that there are any sword weapons in mduel ) are going to be shiny, while the paint surface is matte.

This texture is more detailed that a lot of the others becuase it is going to be used ingame as an actual sheild, andn ot just displayed as a pickup in a floating purple thing.

Anyway it is kindof a homage to the original marshmallow duel as it uses the typical purple neutral colour, and it also has a golden emblem of the highest prommotion level helmet. (which is also going to be shiny).

This texture i think says a lot about the atmosphere and universe of the game we are creating.

Well everything is starting to come together well on the mod, although there are a lot of things i hope we still have time to get done by the prototype due date. Well that i hope to get done at least. I have been spending a lot of time working on textures, and i am really happy with the overall style that has been coming out, as it is much like what i had intended in my head originally.

I havent been posting very much because i've been quite busy, but i've gotten the following textures completed (or nearly completed) recently.



Here is the skull, which looks suitably creepy. It is going to have self illumination glow on the eyes so that it looks scary in the dark too.



Parachute, not quite finished, is going to have the nice finishing touch of a little translucency so that it looks kindof threadbare in the mid sectiosn where all the air pressure would be. This sortof extra little thing i hope adds a lot to giving the overall impression of the marshmallow duel universe (most of which is implied and not explained much at all) which is a kindof desolate and worn out environment. When we talked to duncan gill, the original creator, he said what he first had in mind when creating the game was that post apocolyptic feeling. And then all the zany things kindof piled on top of that original thought, from the look of it.



Here is the grenade, which you can see with its specular reflection mask on (its not actually reflecting cos this image isnt ingame.) The white sectiosn where it looks like paint has chipped off will be shiny, to show that.. paint has chipped off. And the scratches on the metal will be shiny too, on top of the rust. Again all that worn out kindof tone to it.



This is quite straight forward lightning, but will have a bright self illumination and possibly specular reflection depending how it looks in game. I also have a panning animation which i'd like to test out to see how it looks on this.



Here is the magnet, hopefully a good example of the black outlined style i'm trying to do. Again there is more rust and scratches, which are also becoming a bit of a motif on these power ups. And the paint chips too like on the grenade. Now that i think of it, paint chips on a grenade are a bad sign that someone isnt treating a bomb too carefully hey. Anywa y thats irrelevant.



Here is the mine.. which i'm still kindof revising. There is a specular mask which i didnt show here because i'm not quite happy with it yet, i have to play around with it and see it in game.



And here is a good modern interpretation of the classic popup spawner. I like the geometry which pospi came up with, nice solid and simple, and very much like the original popup spawner shape in the old game. I'm really happy with the effect of the metal here and cant wait to see it functioning in game.



And here is another texture that i'm very ahppy with, one for the default explodable platforms which pospi designed.

and so that is all the latest textures, lots more work to do and a lot more textures coming soon.

The puck texture has been imported now also. If you look at the old renders it still looks much the same as before, but with added subtleties on the specularity mask that make it look a lot less wooden. The self illumination mask is also very important as it will make the lit-up orange patches glow when the puck is in the darkness.

The boot texture has now been imported into Unreal and is looking pretty good. The specular mask makes the base of it look very metallic with lots of scratches, and there is also a self illumination mask which lights up the red glowy things at the base of the boot. This can all be seen in the images gallery.

I have also tweaked the specular mask on the gun because i thought the scratches on the gun barrel werent prominent enough. I think now though they may be a bit too strong, so they may get tweaked again.

The gun pickup texture has been created and i imported it into UT2004 as a standard static mesh to get a look at roughly what it will look like ingame. Of course it wont be quite as big as it seems here (taller than a human man).


(more images available in the images section)

I created a simple diffuse texture in the style we are aiming for, and overlayed it with some scratches and shiny areas intending to use these as a specular mask. I had no problems getting the 3d object imported and showing up, or getting a simple diffuse texture imported in unreal edit and working.

I did have trouble trying to get opacity imported properly. The best thing so i have read and been told is to use the diffuse and an alpha channel in the same image file to use the one image both as the diffuse and specular mask. So i was trying to do this with a tga, but i couldnt ever get it to work. I did a search around and ended up downloading a photoshop plugin from nvidia which allows you to save and edit the DXT or DDS files that UT uses for texture images. This plugin made everything so much simpler, so i set up the texture in UnrealEdit and it worked just beautifully and applied to the gun without any trouble.

I used a default existing cube map or texEnvMap for the specular reflections on the texture, as i havent quite decided how i want to do the cubemap for environment reflections for Marshmallow Duel. I also havent learned an awful lot about cubemaps yet so i'm waiting on learning a bit more before i play with it, it's not very crucial at the moment i dont think.

Well i havent added anything to the journal for some time. I've been concentrating on other assignments i've had to work on which are now finished.

A couple of weeks ago i started playing with the level editor and testing rudimentary levels and experimenting with terrain editing. I got a basic handle on it and have been intending to get back in and work more in it ever since, to develop the original map that i designed a concept of ages ago. The concept images can be seen under the images section of this site.

Also i just finished a first front and side view sketch of the main Mduel character with his pieces pulled apart, for modelling his sections. As we had intended ages ago, he is now looking more geometric and simpler than he did earlier, although still with the same faceted bell shaped head. Some more character sketches are to follow soon, as we need to start modelling the core character designs to run in the game. This first sketch can be viewed in the concept section as well.

I'll also be getting more into the level editor and hopefully get some very classic marshmallow duel levels designed so that we can see what we have done so far in the classic style arenas.

Another texture design, this time for the nuke puck weapon, is available to view in the images section.

Here is another early texture design. This one ended up moving a bit too far away from where we have been going with a geometric style, and i might end up changing it fair bit. However it is still a visual prototype for us to see.

I have started texturing ideas for the pickups. I decided to jump right in with the boot, and see what i came up with. Now that its done we can think about how we feel this style will fit in with the game, and come up with something different if we dont think it is marshmallow duel enough.



The style i have gone for here is utilizing the high quality of the modern graphics we are using, but i think still a fairly simple style, with detailed areas between dark black outlined solid sections, emphasising the solid geometry of the object (which is something we want to do to interpret the blocky pixel aspect of the style of the original marshmallow duel.)

Updated the about page with more information about what we are doing and to make it generally more up to date. I think we need to add some more pictures to make it more enticing but we can do that once the texturing and rendering is done on some preliminary game objects.

Also some more sketches on the rest of the powerups is underway.

For the character designs, we have decided to experiment with a more blocky and geometric visual approach, as opposed to the often more fluid and complex drawings that i've done.

What i have started with is a variety of helmet designs. The idea is to try and match the feel of the original Marshmallow Duel game, not by having the same chunky pixel effect, but interpreting this in a geometric way.

A series of helmet designs can be viewed on the concept art page. We may use a variety of these in the game, with the users having the option to choose from an array of helmets. Or we may settle on one helmet design, or scrap these entirely if we come up with something different.

Bear in mind also that these designs are only based off the lowest ranked character from the original mduel game, the higher ranks are yet to come. (Although it is unlikely that we will be able to implement a ranking system in the actual game, the rank-helmet varieties will still be available in some way)

Some new sketches are up in the concept art section of the classic powerups, and some new ones that we are planning.

Some preliminary sketches are up for pickups in the concept art section of the images page.

I have uploaded 2 sketches of a concept design for a Marshmallow Duel map in 3d. The idea is interpreting the marshmallow sea at the bottom of the screen of the original game as a pit of marshmallow filled up by a marshmallow river which is flowing into a large crater on the moon (where the movie finished off). The platforms are then in the middle of the pit, and the river can be seen in the background. You can see these sketches in the concept art section of the images page.

A few new concept sketches of the main Marshmallow Duel character have been uploaded to the concept art section of the image gallery.

The main design of the character is starting to take shape, although there has been some exploration in how the hands and boots and helmet of the character should look, as well as some thought about the proportion of the body of the character.

I drew up an outline of what the character looked like in 2d in the original game and did a quick sketch trying to keep the character to the same proportions as in the original game.




My thoughts are that that the oringal proportions will not fit too well into a more well defined design, and so i think that the body shape will ultimately end up somewhere between the extra-stocky proportions of the original marshmallow duel game, and the proportions of a real life person or original UT character.

Also you might notice in the sketches i have been playing with a faceted design for the helmet, which i think could look quite interesting.