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In this blog series we will explore the development aspect of making stuff here at Guru Games. We will examine and talk about the thought processes that goes on behind the story, the environments, the characters, the animations, the music, the sound and the code that is the meat and bones of our game. With this blog series we want to give you a personal look at the development process of our games and we want to share, with you, both our success and failures. For each devblog, different team members will contribute and write about their experiences and struggles with the project. If you are the slightest interested in game making, this is the blog series for you!
Well, after that introduction has been taken care of, allow me to introduce myself! I’m Johan Zdybal and I’m currently a 3D (and 2D!) artist at Guru Games. I’m also the Art Director for Magnetic and our second project: Medusa. In this episode of the devblog, I’m going to talk a bit about working with the Magnet Gun for Magnetic. As you can see in our current trailers and screenshots, there is a Magnet Gun in place. This is something that we are re-designing at the moment, we are going through the entire game and iterating on aspects that we are not content with. I’m going to guide you through the thought process of re-designing the Magnet Gun. The current version is a good, but we believe we can make it better. We really want to emphasize that the Magnet Gun is an experimental prototype, few of its kind are made. It’s delicately crafted by experienced technicians and scientists, but it is also quite rough and unstable in nature. Its current state is not something you would want to package and sell, it’s a prototype made for testing.
So what I did was that I sketched out a ton of new thumbnails for the Magnet Gun and together we eliminated ones that we didn’t like, and iterated on the ones we did like. We wanted to keep some of the core concepts present in the current Magnet Gun, such as the four prongs that protrude from the gun, and the rotating magnet. What we wanted to change was to add more detail, more cables and meters, to make it feel more prototype-y.
These concept pictures does not convey a sense of detail or depth of the weapon. One can assume how thick the handle would be or how wide the gun is, but it’s difficult to tell. The challenge with made-up weaponry is to make it look real, as if it could exist (and work) in reality. Also, since we are making a game from the first person perspective, it has to look good in-game from the first person view. It has to convey the feel of being really magnetic and almost alive to provide the right feedback for the player. When you use it, it should feel correct. It should behave as you, the player, would expect, and what you would expect is not necessarily what is the most realistic or appropriate option. An example of this can be seen when studying other guns in games. One could assume that if you create a realistic automatic rifle, modeled from a real world rifle, it should sound and behave like the real thing. But the real world sounds and behaviour of weapons rarely match what a player would expect from the rifle. This has to do with everything from a players personal preference to knowledge of the real world gun, to influences from other games, movies and so on. This is a challenge that we face with the Magnet Gun. It has to appear to be realistic and behave realistically, but in a way that gives the player good feedback. It really is a delicate balancing act of sorts.
As I mentioned earlier, and that you may see from this refined concept, it is quite hard to estimate the thickness of the object. Which is why we in tandem blocked out the Magnet Gun in primitive 3D shapes as I continued to work on the concept. We needed to see how it would feel in 3D and if the shapes and forms of the object looked good from a first person perspective. This is why this concept does not necessarily represent the end result. Alot of things get shuffled around and tweaked in order to look good in-game. Since we don’t have a real world reference to adhere to, we can change the design as much as we want, until it looks exactly as we want it to. This is one of the fun things when it comes to working with fantastical items and elements. It really gives you the freedom to create cool stuff and change and modify them if they don’t work as we had planned!
Each week we will continue to uppdate you with more devblogs that will focus on different aspects of developing games. This one has been about concept art and prototyping, but who knows what we will talk about next? Maybe we’ll dive into animation or programming? Maybe we’ll talk about the office, or the Story arch for Magnetic. It might be the importance of playtesting or maybe just how awesome and fun it is to make games! If you have any suggestions, feel free to let us know in the comments section below, or on facebook, twitter or whatever that google thing is called.
