This is a short video showing a few clips of the LUVBOT weapon working in the game. Once released, the LUVBOT’s programming takes over - seeking a player to love. Once he comes in contact with someone, he latches onto them in a Super Love Hug Hold™. Unfortunately due to a design flaw in LUVBOT’s circuitry, LUVBOT’s love capacitors begin to overload in a few seconds, leading to a large discharge of love energy.
Here are some promised new screenshots of what I have been working on for Zero Gear over the last week or so. Hopefully it will blossom into a new game mode centered around stunts, and recognizing barrel rolls, flips, airtime, etc. Kind of like Tony Hawk meets karts. Soon I also hope to experiment with allowing players to align the rotation of their kart in mid-air, similar to games like Motocross Madness or Rush 2049. This might allow players to land all sorts of tricky jumps as well as pull off new tricks.
As I mentioned last week, I have been recording my work process while working on a new kart asset for Zero Gear. Here is the video that resulted. It was a pain in the ass to make but hopefully it will be interesting to some people. The video covers modeling and texturing the kart, although I did edit out some of the really boring parts like UV-mapping. Watch me build this from scratch: 
The software used in the video are Maya 8.5 and Photoshop CS3. It was captured over about 15 hours of work.
One very important aspect of Zero Gear we rarely talk about is weapons. Weapons in Zero Gear are picked up from special prize boxes on the map and used in a variety of ways. Before going deeper, here are some typical weapons in the kart game genre:
Press a button to fire the missile ahead and it will track the person in front of you down and blow them up
This is some kind of weapon that is usually placed down on the map somewhere, when a player runs into it, they are slowed down for a period of time
Press a button to slow down all other players
Place it on the map, after a period of time, it blows up, anyone in the blast radius is blown up and slowed down
Press a button to cause other players vision to be blocked so they can’t see
Press a button, you are invincible and touching other players causes them to get blown up and slow down
These types of weapons are annoying. Here are a few reasons why:
The weapon dynamics in Zero Gear are quite different because, well, they are DYNAMIC!
Here are the Zero Gear weapons (so far!):
A punching glove is attached to the front of the players kart. Press the use button to cause it to punch forward. *Anything in front of the kart will be launched forward.
* Note, anything is an important word. Objects in ZG react realistically, punch a Sea Mine, watch it fly the same as if punching another kart or a soccer ball.
Throw or drop this onto the map. It will bounce off walls and slide on the ground realistically. Any player that hits it will become encased inside. They will continue to slide with their momentum which could end horribly (off the edge!) or perhaps will put them at an advantage.
The mine can be thrown ahead or dropped behind. Much like a real sea mine (real sea mine = what I have seen in movies), once hit, there is a TING! sound and then BOOOM! Anything within the blast radius is sent flying outward to an unknown fate.
The player can place a twister in front or behind them (hint: probably want to put it behind you!). Anything that gets too close will be sucked in.
These types of weapons are FUN.
Weapons shouldn’t force something on a player, they should do something which may affect the player. Using this simple rule causes the player to experience more emergent and reactive gameplay than most games offer.
We have more weapons planned, such as the previously mentioned L.U.V. Bot. Watch the blog for more updates on them!
Of course, explaining this in text isn’t ideal. For the full experience, you will just have to play it!
We get a lot of good feedback about the art style of Zero Gear, so I thought it would be a good point to try and write up a little retrospective about the art direction of the game since that is one element of Zero Gear that seems to have firmly established itself. This was my first time playing art director for an entire game. I have had plenty of opportunities to design the look of many stand alone elements: environments, GUI’s, textures, models, graphic design, to name just a few of the disparate things I have worked on over the last 8 years or so. This was the first opportunity I have had to put all those things together into one package, and it was very exciting to dream up.
We started off with a pretty clear picture of what we wanted the game to be technically and design-wise though it has evolved some since the start. We knew the game was going to be very physical, and we knew based on the knowledge of ourselves and the way we work together that it was not going to be a serious type of game. We needed an art style to compliment that.
Here are the goals we had to achieve with the art style of Zero Gear
Eye catching and awesome without being overly serious.
Quick to create, and cheap to render.
As is common amongst most designers, the first thing to do when trying to get ideas for a certain look or feel is to gather lots of reference. Reference is anything already existing that has some element in it that is inspirational to what you are trying to accomplish. I have a big folder of reference from Zero Gear, from other games that are visually attention-getting and do not feature any kind of realism.
Out of all the reference I gathered - I decided to focus on these common elements:
The complexity of most modern AAA game assets is staggering. You have high poly versions, low poly versions, normal maps, AO maps, specular maps, and all kinds of other materials to create just for one finished asset. Many games will have a team of 4 or more people just to create the background miscellaneous assets for a game - I have to make ALL the assets myself, so I needed to save a lot of work here. Here is what I have limited my art pipeline to, which enables me to work quick and put assets together with a minimum amount of extra work.
Having a medium amount of polygons per mesh allows me to create assets at a reasonable pace - without having to be obsessed with optimizations - but low enough so that I don’t need to create different levels of detail in order to render them on screen. One asset, one mesh.
There was no way I was going to be able to create quality normal / specular / etc maps for every texture in all the assets in the game. So as a general rule - I limited myself to just a diffuse map, what you see is what you get. There are some exceptions to this rule, the customizeable assets in the game have a specular and a color mask to tell the engine what parts of the texture is shiny or can change colors.
There are many effects in the game that I use all over, like environment maps to make things shiny or appear rim-lit. These effects are really easy to add to any asset in the game by copy/pasting some material script text, so they are easy to add and don’t require me to do any special work per asset to implement.
I have gotten a lot more proficient since the start of the project - but at the outset, I had extremely limited experience animating game assets. I made sure to design the style of the game away from needing to create many objects with complicated animation sequences. One of the benefits of Zero Gear being so physical is that most of the motion in the game is an emergent property of the physics engine, and is a lot of weight off my shoulders. If I had to animate what every tumble, flip and spin of an object in the game looked like - for one it wouldn’t look as good, and two - it would take a lot of work. We do have animations in the game, on the characters and karts and weapons, but nothing with 8 directions of animated cycles blended together, or characters that talk with lip synced phonemes, etc.
That is it for this installment of Zero Gear art talk, I am hoping to take a time lapse video of the next asset I create to make into another post, if I can remember and record it correctly!
Here are some screen shots from a new map that I have been working on for the last few weeks. It feels good to finally have some new ZG media to show off!
