Exploring the Game Design Pipeline
As part of an initiative to explore aspects of game design with students in our Foundation Art and Design program, I decided to embark on a journey led by the very talented Mark Shufflebottom—a colleague from the Adobe Education Leaders (AEL) group and a lecturer in Motion Graphics and Interaction Design at the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Ontario.
The 5 week course was run under the aegis of Adobe Gen Pro—part of the Adobe Education Exchange. Mark, along with other AEL colleagues offered the course in every corner of the globe. The course explored the conceptual dimensions of game and player engagement as well as an in-depth worflow that spanned Adobe Photoshop for texture creation, Adobe Fuse CC (preview) for character design, Mixamo for character rigging and animation, Unity 3D for world creation, 3D game object design, game mechanics and coding.
The course provided pre-recorded lectures and links to reference materials and videos and also engaged the students live in online sessions via Adobe Connect. The Adobe Connect session allowed students to interact with one another and the professors and to ask questions and gain clarification on an array of topics and issues. Quizzes and opinion polls were also a part of the weekly mix. The connect sessions also enabled Mark to bring top notch game developers right to our doorstep—allowing us to share in their unique perspectives and methods and to pepper them with questions.
Students were also required to post weekly assignments and to comment on and rate the work of at least three peers.
In all it was a fantastic and quite challenging learning experience that I would highly recommend for any educator looking to engage their students in novel ways using the paradigm of game.
I intend to use some of what I have learned to support a unit on descriptive narrative and visualization as part of a new Digital Storytelling course that I am offering in January 2016.
Production Process
World Building
The figure above shows a character that I designed in Adobe Fuse and rigged in Adobe Mixamo. Textures were created and branding was applied to the character's clothing in Adobe Photoshop and then it was imported into a world that I constructed in the Unity game engine.
The video below gives a broad summary of the production pipeline for my game:
Gameplay
The video below captures some of the in-game action:
Photoshop—Texture Generation & Mapping
Virtual worlds and objects in those worlds require textures to be captured or created then mapped to the 3-dimensional objects. I began by creating a CUSTOM IMAGE SIZE of 512X512 PIXELS. I then generated foreground and background colours in the Photoshop colour swatch. These colours are used to generate cloud or fiber textures from the FILTER RENDER {FIBRES or CLOUDS} menu. Textures and images were created for rock, grass, wood, wooden packing crates and gold coins. The series of images below details the key steps in producing textures
Textures made in Photoshop CC
Adobe Illustrator—Branding
I wanted to create some signage and some branding for my 3D world so I used Illustrator to generate some graphics that could be used later on.
Mixamo Fuse—Character Design & Modelling
I used Adobe Fuse to design my character then used Mixamo to rig and animate its movements.
Unity 3D—World Building & Interaction Design
Production of the game world proceeded inside Unity 3D using the Terrain Builder tools (hilighted Square) to build the topography, water and vegetation. A folder Grass, rock and other textures were added to the ASSETS folder applied to the terrain
Mono Develop—Coding
Mono Develop is the coding environment for Unity 3D. It's Javascript and C Sharp frameworks allow one to code specific object and environmental behaviours in either language and to convert between the two.
Publishing
The final stage of development was publishing the game for consumption on a variety of consoles, browsers and operating systems. The BUILD function is accessed via the file menu where you can choose your target platform.
Reference Links
A number of discussions supported by online reference materials supported our foray into game design. I will share, in kind, the URL links that were shared with me.
LIVE LECTURE LINKS