Series 4: Chestershire

With regards to Procedural design and the concepts I've done for those previously (which I'd still like to come back to) Working on the Chestershire rifle has taken it's natural course in my head and given me an insight into how the idea works in three dimensions. I've been working on the variations for the base of the Chestershire and had come up with quite a few before I realised how easy it would be to combine parts of both. Here's my opening introduction to using the Chestershire for my Procedural Design work.

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~ZH

The Chestershire

Been working on some 3D models for a rifle and variant versions of it. Variation being the key feature to my design process as has been shown a lot in the past, working towards potentially building a 3-dimensional series for the Procedural Design work. Anyway this is the Chestershire Lever Action Rifle and the two variations of it I've created so far. Really getting the hang of the 3D modelling but I'm really not comfortable doing texturing, I'm hoping that someone will be really good and want to take part in helping with my designs else I'm just gonna have to get good at that too heh..

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EDIT: 2 more models

EDIT AGAIN: Thinking based around the procedural design ideas I brought up a while back I've been able to apply certain things to these weapons as well, I've got 2 hybrids that use different parts of each of the ones I've made.. this idea is indispensable..

~ZH

Coloured Quartique

Blah blah something about colouring that sword I made blah :P here it is. Need to model the handgun that goes with it next.

~ZH

A hint of dread.

Went to Mantic HQ today to playtest the second season of Dreadball, have to say it's been a really awesome day. Got to play numerous games against different opponents with different teams all over the place. I really enjoyed getting used to the characters and play styles of some of the new teams for season 2 and how they work against each other and against the season 1 teams. Had time to polish up on my general rules for the game so I'm pretty sure I'm on top of that exactly now, also tightened up a couple of ideas regarding tactics for my first couple of main teams. I'll be playing as Humans for season one as practice for my Human Female team for season 2, I have a game plan going but I won't reveal any of that, I will however reveal my colour scheme, crest and team name that I've been working on tonight. I sincerely look forward to getting my first teams and painting them up ready for play, so excited! It's been awesome to be part of the process of trying out the new people and being able to offer my opinion and ideas to the top dog himself! (Wow!) I really hope we get to do more things like that in the future, it's been a ridiculously good experience for me and I just can't wait to get going now!

~ZH

Quartique

Some work on a fantasy sword I drew up a lil' sketch of during 'lecture' today. Detail is much better than the other sword I was working on despite it's simplistic design, gonna have to practice texturing it at some point, it's part of a two part set involving this sword and a handgun, the set is called Quartique, I'll come up with individual names for the pieces later

~ZH

Arachnaut!

And then Arachnaut was complete! Sorta, kinda... Not so much textured but hey, behold his majesty, I'll write up his stats in a proper document at some point, as soon as I learn stats..

 Posed for a shot

~ZH

Arachnaut's new legs.

So after writing up my presentation for EA today I figured I'd play around more with that Dreadball stuff, I'm currently working on trying to make Arachnaut in Maya. So far I've just been working on the legs, here's where I'm at so far.. he's comin' along real nice :3 Hoping to impress the Mantic people <3

[Edit] He's got BODY :3

~ZH

Knock 'em for an 8!

Here's my second MVP design for one of my Dreadball teams (Same as Zonei), he's called the Arachnaut, in case the name and design aren't clear enough he's a big robot spider type thing and packs a massive punch with ridiculous speed.

Also I drew up a design for one of the other guys in my group, this is Connor's character brought to life as best I could do from his descriptions

Looking forward to Dreadball nights next week ;] let's go!

~ZH

Ahhh Zonei!

So today we attempted to learn some rules for Dreadball (Mantic Games), I thoroughly enjoyed having a go at trying to understand and really liked looking through the rule book and checking out the characters. I had some ideas for characters of my own already and I think I've come up with a whole team idea, I'm gonna do some more research and reading the rule book etc to try and base my characters more around the game's style but until then I've sketched up my first MVP, it's a sort of Golem/Construct called Zonei with a massive underarm cannon for launching the ball long distances, rules permitting of course, might need tweaking but I'm happy with how he's come out ^-^ much more to come on the whole Dreadball side of things, just wait till they're 3D ;]

~ZH

Hypo

We've been working on pickups and power ups in 3D sessions for the past couple of weeks, my ammo container can be seen on an earlier post with all the big shiny badly textured stuff, this week I've made my health pickup in the form of a pointy shiny needle ^-^ didn't take very long to make after I came up with it and I'm pretty happy with it so far, probably more work to come on it. Nevertheless, that's another asset for the pile.

~ZH

Die Schatz (The Treasure)

So I thought I was kinda finished with DonnerSturm but we'd been doing stuff about ammo containment in 3D modelling lessons so I thought I might aswell make an ammunition container for it.. so after all of 10 minutes making that I asked if there was anything else it needed. Mike suggested a carrying case of some kind and that gave me an idea, so I've been doing a bit of work on a container for the weapon and here's what I've ended up with so far.. it seems the project isn't quite closed yet.

Back left is the containnment chest opened with the 4 decks containing all the pieces to assemble the weapon, back right is what it looks like closed. Far right you can see a little ammunition container next to the standard version of DonnerSturm, on the bottom middle is the compact version stripped down to it's bare minimum, notice the lack of scope, sight, bayonet and extra magazine, probably easier to use 2 of them aswell.. anyway I've no idea if this'll be developed further anymore.. but hey it's come a long way again so we'll see ^-^

~ZH

D-d-d-DonnerSturm!

Coming back after half term I've been dying to do some more work/finish off my test work on the DonnerSturm SMG, so over the course of the week I've been adding bits and tweaking the design and finally trying to add some colour to the weapon. I've tried to point out some of the details that are relevant to the design, mainly the way in which the magazine interacts with the weapon. The flat magazine is based on the FN-P90's flat loading magazine which is mounted in the top, the DonnerSturm features 2 of these that run one after the other to provide a massive magazine size that is very compact and doesn't take a long time to change either, there'd be a switch to change between which magazine was being used. Below is an image of the way in which the magazine is attached to the side of the weapon -

Through the arm on the top of the weapon both of these magazines would pull out sideways from the weapon and rotate upwards where they can be removed and replaced with fresh ones.

Below is the breakdown of the pieces of the weapon in colour and then a final image of the thing as a whole, this concludes my first Maya test of a design.

 

I can't really improve on this with my current level of skill with Maya, in fairness this is actually pretty basic stuff, just a lot of it and in areas it has been really difficult to actually think in 3 dimensions to organise the creation of this first test. More to come sometime huh, but for now; Testing Complete.

 

DonnerSturm ~ "The ThunderStorm is Calling"

 

~ZH

Some sort of... INDUSTRY position.

So overall what I expect to get out of this course and where I want to be going with it afterwards is towards the whole 'artist' side of stuff. I'm not sure specifically whether I'd just want to do concept art or the 3D modelling aswell or just one of the two or how that works exactly, all I know for sure is I'm going to have to do a lot of drawing and practice at that sort of thing. It really interests me doing that sort of work though, I can think up designs constantly and keep having interesting ideas that I want to turn into some sort of image product whether it's just a sketch or something a little more perspective, it's really important for someone to be able to have an idea and be able to have the right skills to showcase it in a way that means it can be developed by a team and incorporated into a final product after however many tweaks are necessary. So lots more drawing practice, a little guidance in the actual concept art area (I'm useless at colouring things), and some more practice with things like Maya will be good. Finding a place in the industry in the right team and working on a project that really interests me would be massively ideal, and I'm sure it's not going to be quite that easy or convenient but hey it's going to be some tough work to get to that sort of thing, nevertheless I'm just going to have to put everything I can towards doing exactly what I want and in the mean time I can hone my skills more and more.

~ZH

Minor Update

Just a quick update on series 3, I've finished up all the crest pieces and the total is up at 10,000 combinations, next stage is to add the shading filters to each layer and then redraw them all from the side with the 5th piece of the combinations so that I get to my total of 1,000,000 from front and side, lots more work to do on this >< here's how they're looking now though and the gridsheet.

~ZH

Series 3 Update

I've done some more work on Series 3 of my Procedural Design project, as you saw before I had some kinda half sketchy crappy representations of a couple variations of helmets, well after quite a lot of work tonight I am proud to say the first 1000 combinations are done and tested and I'm so happy with how they're coming out already. I'll have to a lot more work on naming the pieces so that I can generate names with the images but so far here's a few little images I pulled up (Using a random number generator) to test the progress so far.

I've yet to work on the crests and side plates, also I'll be reproducing all these from a side perspective too to add some depth and then working with one or both of these sets to develop some shaded colour schemes too using layer styles so that the shading already exists and just needs colour beneath it to get the same effect. Think it's time for a break now though, perhaps a walk and probably a red bull.. it's been a long long night.

EDIT: Worked up my current tile set for what I've got to work with so far on the first 1000 combinations

~ZH

Requiem I

~ZH

DonnerSturm Alpha

A while back I put up a concept picture of an SMG called DonnerSturm and today while I had some free time I've started to try and impliment it in 3D with Maya, I set about making a number of different sections individually and have compiled them into a series of images showing the breakdown of parts and the way they fit together, from the sketch I did beforehand I'm pleased with how it's coming out even if this is about 4 hours of work and she's no where near finished. Hoping that it looks real nice when I get round to texturing it, anyway here's a few screenies..

 

Will try and do some extra work on this if I can get it sent home for half-term, vzzzzz! <3

 

~ZH

Series 3 Update

Work on Series 3 has stuttered forward a little, I've just about doubled the amount of sketches I had completed last session. Trying to work so that I don't attempt to come up with too many ideas at once else they'll start to be difficult to define properly. I'll wait a few more days for inspiration to accumulate then finish off the basic sketches from the front, once these are done it should push through with drawing up the side profile images of each part and then I can get working on redrawing them all in much better quality, after this is done I can start looking into the colouring system for these. More updates to follow as they come out, below is an example of the current stage of Series 3

A lot of work needs to be done when updating these into their neat counterparts but I suppose I should at least attempt sleep tonight V_V.. Auf wiedersehen

~ZH

A minor taste of things to come..

So I mentioned a few posts back about Series 3 of the Procedural Design project, which is largely just a test of the mechanics and design methods to create a certain idea. After having spent a few minutes here and there thinking on the idea of this new series which will be head-wear, specifically helmets, I've decided on a few more constraints to expand how much detail and effect I can get out of this next module.

Series 1 was just a very meager test of whether or not I had any idea of what I was doing with this concept, very basic with no real care put into it past just having a brief understanding of what I was doing. Series 2 was a little more in depth, I spent the time putting some effort into the actual design and visuals that I could achieve with the set of weapons I was working with, and where this didn't extend much in terms of defining a type of weapon it made a good overview to what I could achieve by thinking in advance. The planning and layout of this made it easier to work on remaking each design in a better quality once the first set had been tested, I was also really happy to have been able to experiment with colouring.

Series 3 will take the concept to an even greater stage, and where it'll definitely take a lot longer than my previous builds I'm hoping it'll be a much more expansive example of just what can be achieved using this idea. Like I said before, Series 3 will be a set of helmets (focusing on defense for now, none of these fancy hoods and coifs and tiaras just yet!), I'm closing it down more so I can get a proper idea of how this works within a particular class of generation. For starters I'm using a different planning style, before I was just drawing things down in any random order and it meant that some designs didn't fit together, this time I'm trying to put in some work to make all the designs just as varied but also they will fit together nicely too!

There will be 5 interchangeable parts to Series 3 (and then colour on top), each with the 10 variations like before, this will make a total of 100,000 different styles and with colour will produce a MILLION different helmets overall! So that's exciting... But there's more. Sure there was quite a few different variations in Series 2 but they were a lil' small at first and even big it was a bit hard to tell how it'd look properly.. with this in mind I plan to draw up Series 3 in two parts, from the front, and then again from the side, and each will be much larger when I rework them all in detail. This means we'll have a front and side view of all the combinations and hopefully they'll all fit together and look just like the same helmet from different angles (with any luck!)

On top of this I plan to do a bit more advanced work on colour once I get the main part of this done (I know I can do basic colour already so I'm going to go more full out with this bit). Once each part is done I'm going to apply some shade and tone to the parts individually, this means that when the colour is drawn up underneath it'll be shaded based on the part aswell and hopefully look a lot nicer.

Anyway that's a fair amount to be getting on with for now anyway, I'll be giving updates on this as and when I reach certain milestones of this Series.. also I've been thinking about what the next few Series might be aswell, I plan to do more items of clothing of course but at some point I'm going to do some work on interchanging buildings and also revisit weapons for a set of designs made entirely in 3D, it's a lot of work for a concept but damn if I'm not gonna prove that this is something people are missing out on! Catch you next time there's an update, appreciate the reading a lot.. it's nice to get all these thoughts written down somewhere, here's a lil' sample of Series 3 in it's most basic form (maybe somewhere before basic.. like pre-alpha)

EDIT

So that was all about 3 hours ago, steady progress has yielded a nicer looking teaser,

~ZH

Unit 7 - Assignment 1 (Part Three) - Regulation

Regulation

 

Within the games industry there are certain rules regarding the regulation and even censorship of certain content given the country or premise it is released into. Certain games get banned altogether in certain areas of the world as a result of legal or ethical issues but ultimately this falls under a regulatory point of view. In Australia they have a number of issues with regard to regulations from the import of goods and the immigration of people, but this stretches into the video games market there also. The regulation standards board of Australia has certain things that it looks for with new games that want to release publically there that have to be looked at carefully and either censored horribly (like with Left4Dead 2) or just completely banned in the country because it’s content promotes the wrong kind of behaviour or is just considered inappropriate. Of course this doesn’t always do what it’s supposed to do, a lot of the time when a particular game goes through that sort of controversy it receives even higher levels of publicity due to people being curious about just how bad this content might be. This leads to a high level of patching and or piracy with regards to the game, which wouldn’t have made money anyway in that country I suppose but it raises a moral debate slightly.

A lot of the time the old paradigm that anyone over the age of 18 is free to see and hear whatever they want, however this is often contended by regulatory bodies as it becomes difficult to keep this kind of content away from people under the ‘legal’ age of the classification of the material their products contain. It’s not enough to put a stamp on a game cover and have stores only sell to people of the appropriate age as there’s no way to restrict where they go after that, who’s to stop a friend/parent/sibling buying a game for a child that is deemed ‘inappropriate’ for someone of that age group. At the same time who’s to say that the day difference between being nearly 18 and actually being 18 makes any difference at all to a person’s mental ability to distinguish what’s real and what isn’t from any age. Some people develop a better sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ at an earlier age, is it right to regulate what someone sees if they feel like the content is suitable for them. This is the problem with blanket regulatory rules, a lot of the time the only way to get something out of consumption is to ban the product entirely, but the counter effect this has that the product gets even more hype because of content that is deemed suitable to get rid of entirely. This leads to more and more people going out of their way to try and find copies of versions of the banned game and replicate it themselves to spread it anyway, in terms of monetisation this doesn’t really make a difference to the producing companies in terms of profit for the title as they aren’t allowed to sell it anyway, the difference is that people still get hold of it and get to experience something that may be perfectly acceptable for the games industry but has been subjected to a ban on the grounds of unsuitability of perhaps even just one scene in the game.

From these issues we see where the difficulties in the regulation of certain content to certain groups is difficult because it comes from a moral perspective on the people who actually govern the representation and release of the industry under their jurisdiction. This means that in some areas people are massively underwhelmed with the amount of content they can actually legally get access to (like in China where internet censorship is a regulatory firewall), to places in which people might see the lax attitude towards regulation as a moral issue regarding whether or not it's right for certain forms of content to be so easily accessible. The internet is a huge place and it's nearly impossible to regulate certain things from it whilst still trying to allow people the right to be witness to whatever they see fit, this is slightly aided by the use of parental controls and certain ISP controls as well as built in restriction on what search engines provide, but at the end of all this it's very easy for someone to find whatever they want whether it's suitable or not because it's just that easy to get hold of, and that isn't always the responsibility of the regulatory bodies that do what they can to control and yet balance what content is allowed but alot of it falls upon us, the people who actually find these things. If someone is deemed to have done something that was purely influenced by content they had gone looking for then it's not morally right of us to question the regulation of their material, it is the responsibility of the people who take action as to whether or not they do what they're influenced by and the media takes it a long way out of proportion but at the end of the day the people who do ridiculous things based on 'influences' were highly likely to do it anyway.

 

~ZH

A brief overview of Dimensional Development.

The design process is the method through which end products are defined through the means of their creative development, simply put this means how a final idea comes together from the first few sparks of imagination. Coming across an original idea is probably best done through a brainstorm where the objectives of the specific design are portrayed and approached by the individual or team assigned to the project. Once an idea is chosen to be put through the design process it is approached from a number of critical pointers to determine whether or not it is suitable as it is for a final product and if not how it can be modified to fulfil project parameters. Following this the idea is then put through a number of tests to reflect the changes made by any critical and aesthetic changes important to the final product. If at any point along the design process an idea is not feasible to work with then it can be scrapped and the design process resumed from the brain storming from before or right from the beginning to re-assess whether or not the approach being used for the project is the correct.

A concept for the design process that I have thought through and tried to make understandable is 'Dimensional Development' an idea the came to me while considering how to complete the process of designing around a project that required 3D development. It starts with the brainstorming session in which a 'One-Dimensional' idea is considered for development, one-dimensional being just a single point with no assessable detail. From here it can be expanded to a 'Two-Dimensional' idea through which the single point is expanded and approached from the front and has a basic overview of something but no real detail on any of the functionality or inner workings of the idea. Once the '2D' model has been assessed of its merit and prospect towards the projects final design it can then be engineered into a 'Three-Dimensional' end idea in which every angle of the idea can be approached and the inner workings can be perceived and modified if necessary to make this final concept of an idea completely accessible to any critique or requested modifications for it's final implication.

 

The merit of this within a creative environment is almost self-explanatory as it creates the advent of being able to show the process through which a product is developed from it's initial ideas to a full-blown implication of the projects inner workings through a palpable and recognisable end result.

 

~ZH

The 'Unique Digits' System.

Within the procedural design mechanics and stages, each of the things created by the system I've been working on is based on a number within a catagory (for example the '15524' in Series 2). After having done a little more research into the kind of things I'll have to apply to each specific part in terms of actual data I've been working on how to fit in the item rarity ideas that any game that involves extensive 'looting' has. For this I'm going to do a study on how different parts give different (balanced) data results, by applying certain 'Rarity' values to parts within a class of the procedural design mechanics it should be possible to create examples of things that are supposed to be clearly better, this can then be denoted with text colour as in countless other games.

The 'Unique Digits' system is planned to be based around certain combinations that come up within each class of the procedural design series', these will be what's known as 'Unique' items, some of these may be completely arbirtrary though if possible I'd like to include things that may be references to certain other things based either on the look or style of a created item within it's own class (this is not subject to just weapons, or even just equipment). I plan for colour scheme to also be a factor at this point for example if 15524 is the Lagoon brand State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship and is considered 'Unique', then I would prefer that a 15520 which would be Mana brand instead is not considered the same rank (or even close).

Unique status will not be an increase on the highest rank possible, it is completely seperate from other ranks from normal to very rare. Unique is not limited to only strong components but more specific components, let's say for example that a '11123' is classed as a really weak axe but '25126' is a very rare axe, the change of perhaps just one digit of the '11123' could make it a Unique axe and have stats which far surpass the '25126'. Anything Unique will have completely different names aswell based on the thing itself, so the '15524' may be renamed entirely to 'The ShipWreck' for example.

Anyway just a quick thought but this was important to write down. Also I'm working on pre-production for Series 3 of the procedural design project (Hint; It's helmets!) Though I'm coming across a slight issue regarding the naming mechanic. If everything is different then it needs it's own name and the more parts it has the more the name needs to contain, so far weapons had 4 interchangeable parts to create their variations but with helmets I already have 5 interchangeable parts (not including colours).. from a test example it makes the names pretty long, which doesn't bother me in a game but I get the idea it will get ridiculous. This may need tweaking.

~ZH

Unit 7 - Assignment 1 (Part Two) - Legal

Legal

Within the games industry there are a number of issues that arise purely from a legal standpoint and where some examples may get dragged into a legal debate on the grounds of other problems there are enough that come purely from a legislative area. These may vary from things as simple as the name of a particular game or trademark (as with industries outside gaming too of course), but also there are many legislative issues that come from the approach to buying and using certain hardware and software based on what is deemed legal from the publishers whose right is to protect their own products.

My first example comes from a lawsuit between the companies Zenimax (parent company to Bethesda) and Mojang (an indie developer that has had massive success). In this example Mojang had been developing another indie title which revolved around a fantasy card game that they planned to call 'Scrolls', this immediately sparked claims of copyright infringement from Bethesda as it 'clearly' conflicted with their franchise called 'The Elder Scrolls'. Bethesda, (and therefore Zenimax), claimed that using the name Scrolls for a different game could fracture their already strong consumer base and lose recognition for some very highly acclaimed titles. This might seem to be a ridiculous claim that a new game that in no way opposes Bethesda in terms of competition and is so completely different from their series that to claim copyright over one word in their titles' name however from the point of view of Zenimax they have to be seen as willing to defend a brand that is very important to them else it could be seen as careless action regarding copyright ownership and could be revoked or have it's conditions changed legally by an outside judging body. From this it becomes more obvious as to why seemingly frivolous lawsuits arrive 'just for the sake of it', whereas in reality it is merely a large company being protective over it's property and rightly so. Zenimax and Mojang settled this outside of the courtroom on the grounds that Zenimax owned the copyright and would license Mojang to use it so long as it was on a one use basis and didn't turn into it's own 'Scrolls' franchise, this led to an agreement in which both companies came out with what they wanted essentially, Mojang had never planned to create a sequel in the first place and Bethesda & Zenimax were able to protect their own property. Robert Altman (CEO of Zenimax) said that "We are pleased to have settled this matter with Mojang amicably."

In a completely separate example we see developers come across legal issues that are defined from the point of view of consumers vs. producers, in short Piracy/Theft/Infringement. All of these are commonly known by most people with a handle in the games industry and there are several issues legally and also morally that come around these things. Developers see it as a massive problem (and rightly so), because for every copy of a game that is attained illegally (without payment), they don't make the money that they should have done, and where in most cases this is a digital download (and no material possession is lost), this is still seen as a case of theft on the part of developers and indeed the legal system. A lot of the time people who do this will claim to have a reason or excuse for essentially stealing games, most of this will boil down to not having enough money which of course if applied to anything else is just outright theft. Though there are some questionable examples of whether or not there are cases of it being understandable as to why people do 'acquire' games for nothing, if the country they live in hasn't published it for example or perhaps it's just so old it's out of print and no other copies will be made. From a moral and indeed developers standpoint these should be acceptable cases of downloading software for nothing. The problem is that from a legal standpoint action will be taken as a whole against the entire idea of illegal distribution and piracy of video-games, without much regard given to these minor (potential) exceptions, and in the instance of MegaUpload, anyone who had things stored there that had nothing to do with video game piracy lost everything without warning or much respect at all because so much was deemed to be illegal that it was permanently shut down regardless of content.

It's difficult to approach legal issues with a specific view on what should be done about particular issues, whether it be keeping certain content away from age groups who shouldn't be allowed to be exposed to it or from people who claim to have good reason to download for free but there are many questions that are left unresolved and ignored from a legal perspective because it's just too difficult to contain and split into such fine examples. For example should the age requirement be different for gender because girls mature faster? It seems ridiculous but if an emotionally disturbed 18 year old gets hold of questionable content legally is that any better than a perfectly sane 15 year old having the same product?

Unit 7 - Assignment 1 (Part One) - Ethics

Ethical

Within the games industry there are many instances of ethical issues that affect the developers, consumers and anyone who becomes involved along the way (be it reviewers or other people in the media). An ethical issue is anything that can be taken as 'offensive' or potentially 'dangerous' towards a certain group of people or activity, this often comes under two general themes.

The first of these would be a specific part of a game being deemed ethically wrong due to the way it makes people think towards a certain people, in this example the problem drawn is regarding racism. The first Resident Evil 5 trailer had massive repercussions on the developers as it depicted a main character from the Resident Evil series coming into violent contact with a group of infected (Zombies), now on the surface as a description this is perfectly acceptable and almost cliche of games that came out around that time but when you actually see it from an outside point of view it looks like a rather well-built white American man killing a lot of defenseless African people. This was met almost instantly with media uproar that this game is racist, out of context this it's clear to see why this conclusion is drawn and from the inside of the industry we see that companies like Capcom that develop their games are a little too close to even make this comparison and therefore assumption that what they've created is racist because to them they know it's a protagonist trying to survive against creatures that are no longer human, but from an outside perspective this seems blatantly thoughtless and offensive.

The second point to make on a different tangent towards ethical problems in games is the assumption that people develop around how they think games will affect people's behaviour. We as gamers understand that playing Mario doesn't make us want to jump on turtles for example but even from early instances of graphically redundant video games there is uproar about them being far too violent (Death Race for example), this isn't helped by the advance in visual technologies that now mean we can depict things that seem so lifelike that these issues are actually brought up with some clout. Many examples are drawn of people coming to the conclusion that children who play video games will take their life lessons from ways in which they interact with a fantasy world within a video game that may seem so realistic that they will apply these to their own life, for example killing a prostitute to get your money back or killing someone with a claw hammer because Manhunt was released recently. These issues take place under other contexts of gameplay aswell other than just violence, there are examples of ethical problems that come from anything from people who see certain things as horribly explicit sexually, or even moral choices regarding 'religious' content about an in-game belief system so to speak.

Developers have to be constantly mindful over these issues when creating a game so that they don't offend people as they can alienate an entire portion of their potential market simply by offending them within a game in a way that was not intended to be seen as that at all. As mentioned above a lot of times in which these problems seem to get past developers is when they are too close to the thing they are creating and literally just don't see a problem, which draws another good point. Does noticing something is racist make the people who have developed it racist, or is it the person who comes to that conclusion? The trouble with ethics is that it is entirely dependent on the position of the person viewing it, which is why some issues seem ridiculous to some of us (especially within the industry or at least close conjunction with it's mechanics), and equally perfectly understandable and valid to people either on the outside who take personal offense or parents, for example, who want to protect their children from certain things that may be within a video game.

The Procedural Design Tests (Series One and Two)

A little while before I started the Games Design course I was working on a series of tests regarding the design of procedural weapons (taking inspiration from the generation of weapons on Borderlands of course). After playing around with WillowTree (A 3rd party modification tool for making weapons from scratch on Borderlands from all the possible combinations available) I got the idea to try and set up a similar system that I could use to create things from a randomly generated number to provide a wide range of results.

Series One ~

This started off as a very basic attempt to have a few weapon designs based around firearms, I set about drawing a gun in 6 different parts, each part having 4 variations.

Following this I put them in order and began to ask people for a 6 digit number using only the numbers between 1 - 4. Obviously this was all I could really do for this preliminary test as I'd not drawn enough variations to accommodate more but this was just a test. I made up a few designs using the combinations of digits I was given (given that the other people didn't know what the numbers meant) and this was the result, the weapons made with the numbers provided (and shown)

From this early test of the concept I was trying to work with I was actually impressed with the results I'd gotten from quite varied parts that I'd just drawn up without giving any of them much thought (my favourite by far is the last one). It was still clear that a lot of this would need tweaks regarding using parts that would integrate together more smoothly (the lever action handle on this first test doesn't seem to fit any too well), however this was a good initial concept.

This is the general overview of series one as a closed project, the weapon parts shown in their different types and in order of their use given the six-digit code as well as a few of the earlier examples.

Series 2 ~

After my first venture into this concept of design I was trying to develop I moved onto a more in depth study of the idea using something a little different this time (to move away from the very Borderlands style that I'd gone with before as a test). This time I was planning to work with melee weapons in a kind of RPG style, I was keen to try and create ten variations of however many parts I was working with so that however many parts given every weapon could be produced with a number of the amount of digits of parts created. I was also keen to incorporate colour into this test aswell as I'd always had some problems with getting colour into my designs properly as I've mentioned in other entries here. I also planned to create a naming system so that all weapons generated under this scheme would be coloured and also have a name specific to their design.

The first step in creating all these was to decide on the number of parts, given that I wasn't aiming for a specific type of weapon (an idea I plan to come back to later), I decided to do melee weapons that could cover a few variations so I used four parts at first that would each have ten variations which would give me a starting number of what seemed like a massive 10000 combinations of weapons exactly (9999 being all possible numbers but including 0000). I thought this was ridiculous after working drawing up my original sheet of designs as that seemed wrong but it turned out that just drawing those 40 weapon parts that was indeed the amount I'd created.

Below is the first series of weapon parts, each part has been given a name and the order in which a weapon is named is noted at the top of the image. Ignore the little blue numbers for now.

From these parts any number between 0000 and 9999 will generate a unique weapon with it's own name, below are some examples of numbers I was given and generated the following weapons with their given names generated by the code '431 of 2', this being the order that a weapon is named, basically it is the Base - Handle - WeapEnd of Hilt (e.g Plain Royal Edge of Honour - 1111)

I'd noticed that in some other examples some of my earlier designs made some generations seem badly made as the actual 'Weap-end' of the weapon seemed dwarfed by combinations of hilt, handle and base (the names given to the other parts).

Quite visible in the first example on the left, even when I tried to stretch the image of the blade it still looks tiny on the rest of the hilt of the weapon making it look slightly wrong. Originally I tried to overlook it though I would come back to this issue later in this test.

Going back to the last of the good examples I'd like to draw attention to the fact that once again all the parts I'd drawn had no planned pairings with any other part that I'd drawn, so naturally every so often one weapon generated randomly seemed to come out horribly well. My favourite by far (of the ones I actually generated) is the 1552 'State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship'. This was made from a number given to me by someone else who couldn't see the parts and I absolutely love that this thing came out of the random assortment of parts that I'd created and would become the example for further studies throughout this test.

After putting the weapon size issue to one side for the moment I went back to look at colouring of these weapons and for this I had to come up with a series of colour schemes and a pallet to represent all these. Taking another piece of inspiration from Borderlands (that I'd later expand on) I also gave these colour schemes a little logo that could be put next to a name so that it could instantly be recognisable which theme they used.

As we can see this section of the test was rushed a little but I knew that I'd planned to do a more detailed and clean version later on. Here we have a series of five different colour schemes (each column being numbered for it's theme reference) with their logos at the top, each logo is coloured by it's respective theme. Now we can go back to look at the little blue numbers on my original weapon part list.

These blue numbers refer to how it will be coloured based on the theme, not shown clearly on the colour pallet but the numbered colour at the top is colour 1 of that theme, then 2, 3 and 4 respectively going downwards. I decided to test these out first by applying them to the 1552, the State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship (Come on how good did that name come out?). Below is each individual colour sceme applied to the 1552.

It was my intention to try and give each colour scheme a particular point of contrast (being colour 4 in all examples), note that in the weapon part sheet the number 4 comes up very rarely compared to the more standard 1, 2 and 3 colours. This was done on purpose to try and add a sense of rarity to certain weapon parts to make them seem more special, which could then be developed as an idea into an actual game. After this I looked into a few different examples to see if the decent standard went across other random creations. (I'm aware that the first 2 are the same theme but these came from other people and it just happened to go this way.)

After contemplating these results I realised I now had 5 sets of 10000 combinations so essentially now had 50000 different weapons, however I wasn't satisfied with some of my colour themes and the quality of some of the weapons that were coming out seemed to need work. I debating ending series 2 here because I'd worked out quite a lot more on the basis of this method of design but I wasn't happy leaving it like this, I was determined to develop the idea even further to have an even better sense of this concept.

Given that each of the weapon parts looks fairly sketchy and some of the designs and names just don't seem to work I set about recreating them all as a more high definition image with some better names and designs for some of them, after a little work on this I had a much larger resolution sheet of better parts to now create with.

By comparison some of the designs have been changed completely and all of them had been developed into something that looks a lot neater. Once again all the blue numbers refer to how each part will be developed. Knowing that all of these would work as examples fine already I went ahead with creating a new set of colour schemes to accommodate the higher detail of this new set.

Taking some of the earlier themes into account and remaking them a little nice I then went on to develop enough to have a total of 10 different colour themes. While creating these I was talking a little with my brother, (who had been helping by giving me random numbers for some of the earlier designs), as I'd not always been amazing at coming up with ways of colouring things I asked his assistance and he created two of the following themes (5 and 6). Also notice that themes 1, 2 and 3 are almost the same as my first 3 colour schemes from before.

After designing the new colour pallet I wanted to expand upon the 'logo' idea that I'd used previously, taking yet another idea from the Borderlands weapon system I decided to not only give each theme a logo but a name aswell (as in the companies on Borderlands), taking some time to try and give each theme it's own character as when designing the themes I often had things in mind. Theme 1 was supposed to be kind of air and wind based, theme 2 is like underground with rock (the brown) and then metal ores (the grey) and even lava at the bottom. Theme 8 was a natural wood type look, theme 0 was supposed to be kind of magical. I tried to make each logo and theme reflect each other so as to create a sense of what type of weapon it might function as perhaps elementally (Theme 2 being Fire perhaps, theme 8 being something organic).

Here is the pallet of the colours shown individually (as it's sort of hard to see them properly being thrown together in a grid like they are above), and their respective named logos.

Now that I had another 'part' as such it now meant I could generate weapons based on a five-digit number instead extending my variations up to 100,000. (Eeep!) I then went ahead to ask people for some random 5 digit numbers to give me some final examples of this part of the test around Series 2 and I was very happy to have put extra time into making it much neater and appealing. Here are some of my final examples with their colours and names as well as their generation number,

I'm really interested in working on some more different series of this type of design concept using more than just weaponry, ideally I'd like to make it so that I'd have a concept of all manner of things that could be applied in a game (most likely RPG) because I'd been thinking that there was no reason that the same idea couldn't be applied to clothing, armour, people, creatures (and therefore enemies), even buildings and landscapes perhaps. All of these things together would create a ridiculous amount of variation to a game environment that I think is being missed out at the moment and I'd be really interested in putting an idea like this into something that I helped to create. The next series I'd like to do on this would be armour. I also plan to go back and create many more series of weapons in which the style of weapon is specified in the generation code aswell (for example the first digit referring to whether the weapon was a dagger, sword, axe, hammer etc.). I have a list of different classes that I'd like to experiment with in future.

Just to finish off here's the 15524, the State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship by Lagoon.

More to come on this concept, much love for reading this far heh I know I've gone on and on but I appreciate it a lot, any feedback or input is welcome <3

~ZH