A recap of the project

We started the project 2011-03-28 and it went on to the end of GGC (2011-05-28)
Our game started out as a digital game but about two weeks into production we realized that the digital game we were producing didn’t meet our quality standards. So, we had to make a serious decision. Would we continue with the digital project, should we design something completely new or should we keep the design and make an analogue game instead?
We decided to make an analogue game.

High Concept

Set in the near future Carnage is a popular and deadly pastime. It is a race for life-and- death where you have to cross the finish line first or make sure that your opponents never get that far.

Vision

• Reward: Discipline and experience of working under a high pressure as well as more 3D experience for the artists. 
• Ability: Ability to work towards and to hold a tight and hard deadline. 
• Challenge: To get the most out of the concept Carnage and to get it as well balanced and polished as possible. 
• Strategy: Everyone takes responsibility for their own work, each one helps the other. 

Project outcomes and results

The Gotland Game Conference went better for our group that what we could have guessed. A lot more people than what we had thought played it and we got a load of positive feedback as well as some constructive criticism from both the jury and the public.
Some of the jurors did even say that they wanted a copy to take home with them and that they was prepared to pay several hundred kronor for it just as it looks now, if it ended up on a store shelf. I guess that you can’t get much better feedback than that.
So, the result of the long hours and hard work that we had put in to our project resulted in very successful conference for us and a potentially commercial product.

My role as Lead Art

My responsible areas

• Making sure that the group is keeping a consistency of the art 
• Making sure that the group is keeping deadlines. 
• Keeping the artists motivated during the course of the project. 
• 3D modeling, texturing and 
• Rendering all of the art in the game 
• 2D art 

I think that I did a good job as lead art. The art looks consistent and we did hold all of our deadlines both internal and external.
As always if we have had more time things would have looked even better and some of the design could have been more polished. I’m although proud of the artists; the three of us have made an excellent job.

Skill set improvements 

I entered this project with some basic knowledge of high res modeling, hard surface modeling, normal mapping and retopology. This project has been a great opportunity to develop that knowledge. I now am much more confident in my workflow and I work a lot faster.
I feel that I have a better understanding for how normal maps work as well as when you should include something in a normal map or when you should leave it as geometry.
I have also learned not only to hold deadlines, but to make sure that other people hold the projects deadlines.

Recommendations of best practices

I would say that my personal best practice is the modeling and texturing of the “front mounted spikes”, a weapon that you can pick up and use in Carnage. I did this model from scratch with baking normal maps and ambient occlusion and painting the diffuse map in about 7 hours. Here is a link to a summary of my work flow.
http://christofferakterin.blogspot.com/2011/05/3d-monkey.html

We worked in a small and tight group. We worked together every day and therefore we could quite easily keep our desired goals and quality. We now have a very well functioning communication in our group and we will work together again in coming projects.
With that being sad, we had a too small group to be able to produce a digital game. This is something that we want to change in the future. We would like to have at least two programmers as well as a dedicated 2d/texture artist.

GGC is over

Gotland Game Conference is over for this year and to make a long story short, it went much better than what we could expect. Our game was very well received by both the jury and the public. The last day it was actually played non-stop.
We got some constructive criticism (which is always nice), some suggestions on design choices and some ideas of changing and altering some of the mechanics. But other than that no one had anything bad to say about it.

We are still waiting for our written feedback from the jury and I’m waiting in anticipation for that.

Some of jurors have written and talked further about Carnage after conference. While these pages are in Swedish Google translate does a decent job (except from the podcast).

Oskar Skog (writer for Sydsvenskan, LEVEL and Loading.se. ) has written an article about his trip to the Gotland Game Conference.
http://loading.se/articles.php?article=15484

Linda Kiby (Paradox interactive) has blogged about some of the games
http://kiby.se/2011/05/30/gotland-game-conference/

Tove Bengtsson (Svenska Dagbladet ) talks about her three favorite games at the conference in this podcast (57 minutes in)
 http://www.radiogamer.se/tidigare-avsnitt/lyssna/6776


During this project I have evolved as a 3d artist. I have become more confident in my workflow. I think that this shows if you compare my earlier work in this project with my more recent. Things look better and I work a lot faster.

I have also become more familiar to the term “Kill you darlings”. I understand that you have to see to what is best for the project as a whole, this means to scrap design ideas, early iterations of models or additional content.

Seeing how we worked in a tight group we could always quality assure our graphical assets as well as our design iterations at a very early stage. The result from this is that we have a very polished game.

At last I would like to thank my partners is in design Juan Carlos, André and Joakim. Without you Carnage wouldn’t be.

2011-05-23 to 2011-05-26

Tomorrow the Gotland Game Conference opens its door and Carnage will be one of almost 60 projects at display. If you are in Visby be sure to come and check it out and of course play a lap or two.
This week has been spent on rendering our art for a show reel that will be shown on a TV screen at our booth. The trailer is also complete with sound and I will post a link in this post.
We got our copies back from the printing company today so the rest of the day will be spent on some arts and craft as well as sorting the thousand cards or so that our ten copies exists of.  The school closes at 01:00 pm so by that time we have to be finished and run home to get some sleep before showing up at 08:00 am tomorrow.

Here are the renders of the 3d models that I have made in this project.

2011-05-16 to 2011-05-20

Our game is at the printing company being printed and hopefully nothing will go wrong. I must confess that it is a bit creepy leaving our last eight weeks of work in someone else’s hands. Because that everything now is finished I thought that I would post all of our cards and such so that you can see what I and my colleagues have been up to the last 5 weeks or so. 

Since Wednesday afternoon André and I have been busy sending animations back and forth between us for our trailer. I made a quick mockup over it in 3ds max and André started fine tuning the animations making it look great. 

It’s hard to pinpoint in words exactly what animations I did for the final product since we have altered each other’s work. However I made the particle effects, that that great I know but they serve their purpose. 

The checklist is checked.

As I had planned almost all of the time this week was spent on rendering weapons for our game cards. I set up a scene with some nice lightning and tweaked the materials to get the quality that I was looking for. A huge pain was to figure out how to render the Molotov cocktail given that I actually am no renderer and is virtually self-taught I think that the result came out ok. Model and material (with some modification from me) is made by Juan Carlos.

I also spent some time on creating a trap tile that can be placed on the board.
At this stage everything that is used in the board game (graphical wise) is completed. The only this left to do before we send it to the printing presses is a little adapting with bleeds and crop marks.

I will post more pictures next week when everything is 100% complete.

As I thought a lot of the time left before we send our art to the printing company (and we do this at

The 13th of May) will be spent on rendering. I will probably spend the whole next week concentrating on rendering the weapons for the card to make sure that these will be as pretty as the possibly can.

This week though, I have rendered our cars for the paper cutouts that will be showcased at GGC. In my blog I will only post the renders of the cars that I have modeled. Please visit the other artists’ blogs to see how the renders of their cars turned out.

I have also modeled, textured and rendered the Dashboard, one of the most important components of our board game.

Except from this I have also made all of the back faces for the cards and they follow below.

This week has been spent mostly on rendering and modeling. I have finished the model and texture for the dual shotguns. These babys shoot 12 gauge lead slugs. Also spikes, coins, bolts, screws... Juan Carlos made the little orangle engine on the top as well as the drum clip.

I also put together and render the poster that will portray our project at GGC. Juan made the awesome logo.

Me and Joakim sat down and designed the cards that the players will use and here follows an example of those.

The 3d is almost near completion so expect that there will be a lot of render time for me in the near future.

Also, remember to check out our Development blog witch is more frequently updated.

3D monkey

Time is flying by as it usually does when you’re having fun. This week has been spent on modeling and texturing. I have finally completed the model and texture for the last of the four cars and I am quite glad with the result. A screen is posted at the end of this blog.

I have started to model the shotgun and the front mounted spikes. I finished the spikes and I am almost done with the high poly of the shotgun.

Except from that, I and Joakim have started to structure how our poster will look and I will most likely spend quite some time next week finishing it.

I also thought that I would post a short review of my workflow while modeling, baking and texturing the front mounted spikes.

First I create the basic low polygon model. Not much to see at this stage but with some texture maps things will be more interesting.

Sculpting the high polygon model in Mudbox from which I later will bake normal maps and ambient occlusion.

Halfway done with the retopology of the lowpoly. I do this because I want the low and high poly models to have the same silhouette.

Finished lowpoly with Diffuse, Normal and Specular.

Finished lowpoly with Diffuse, Normal, Specular and wireframe. 

How to kill your darling.

2011-04-11 to 2011-04-15

After a few days of risk assessment we came to the conclusion that we can’t continue the production of Carnage as it is with just one programmer. There is just no time for the amount of work that has to be done.

So I’m sad to pronounce the death of Carnage: The video game, but I’m very happy to introduce you to the birth of Carnage: The board game!

In other words, we had to decide whether to make a bad video game, or to pour our game design knowledge together and make an awesome board game.

This means that a lot of time this week has been spent on reorganizing and restructuring our planned work. Our new milestone is 26^th of April and by then all the graphics that has to be sent to the printing company should be finished.

Except from the board game we will also create a trailer. This trailer will serve as both a trailer for the game as well as a “show reel” showing of our artists 3d skills. I just want to point out that we are not taking the lazy man’s road. We will have work to do, believe me.

No rest for the wicked.

2011-04-03 to 2011-04-08

Another week has passed and a lot of work has been done.

The first car is kind of finished. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the result but for the time being, it will do. I have also spent some time at the tiles that I mentioned in the previous post and they are also done.

It actually became four different tiles (instead of two) to compensate for the higher wall on the curved tile.

Yesterday I started modeling the last of the four cars that will be featured in Carnage and I would say that I’m halfway there at this point.

By the 26’th of April we will have a presentation showing of our first playable version of the game and by the time that I am writing this we are about two days ahead of the schedule that I had planned. So, things are looking good from the art perspective.

As promised I will post a few screens of my week this work. Do remember that at this stage more or less everything is a work in progress.

The first car at about 1200 polys, 2k diffuse, normal and specular.

The first car at about 1200 polys, 2k diffuse, normal and specular.

A lone racetrack floating somewhere in the UDK space.

The other car, still in modeling stage.

The other car, still in modeling stage.

And with the wire frame.

The first post.

2011-03-28 to 2011-04-01

Hi there!

My name is Christoffer Akterin and I am currently studying my second year of Game design and graphics at Gotland University. This will be my personal blog during the development of the game Carnage.

This week we started the project for real. The design is now about 99% complete, so we can now concentrate at the actual creation the game. The game, for the ones of you who doesn’t now, is Carnage. Carnage is a turn based strategy game in a car racing setting. Take a look at our Dev-blog for more information (www.carnagethegame.com).

My role during this project will be Lead Artist, thus my main focus will be to plan the groups work, updating our product backlog, making sure that the art is consistent and of course contributing my fair share of art to the stack.

During this week I started modeling one of the cars which I finished in the middle of the week and have now started baking out normal maps and ambient occlusion. There has also been a lot of other stuff to take care of, for instance our booth at the Gotland Game Conference. After a brainstorm we came up with a quite nice mockup for the design.

I have also started designing two of the tiled pieces that the race track will be made from.

Check back next week for an update with art stuff!