Wednesday 18 December 2013

Plinky Plonk XMas!

I'm so so excited and happy to be able to FINALLY make this blog entry! :D We've been waiting a few weeks for Apple to approve the app and now that it's out we finally have the go ahead!

By we I mean Bev Bush (Games Design Course leader at UCLAN), Hannah Spikings (A fellow, extremely talented, student) and Jane Cull from FoCul who made the whole thing possible. They're amazing people so I'd suggest clicking their names and checking them out. In a non-creepy way. :D 

Plinky Plonk is an iPad App that helps teach children how to play the piano and allows you to earn coins to spend in the game's shop. We revamped the game from its previous version and added the Pond Scene, which you can build up by unlocking characters with the points that you earn.

I'd tell you more but I don't want to give everything away, so please do download it if you can - it's FREE! :D Here's a link to the game in the app store to make it even easier for you to get to it.

Here's a few screenshots of the game to show you a bit of what it's like:





And then to add to it a little more, here's some larger versions of a couple of the characters I made for this version:





There'll also be a non-Christmassy version of the app released at some point soon, so look out for a blog post about that when it happens! :D

If anyone wants to help spread the word that would be amazing, and thank you so much for reading and playing if you did! 

(~^-^)~


Wednesday 11 December 2013

Very Late Blog

Before I start I just want to say that I'm sorry for how late this blog post is. I've had some personal stuff going on the last couple of weeks that has made me extremely tired and not do close to as much work as I should have done.

I'm hoping to get back on track soon but for now here's what I have to share.

The treehouse scene I've been making in Maya is mostly done, I just need to finish the texturing and put it into UDK (which I'm going to get done tomorrow). 

The texture maps are all over the place at the moment so I'm just going to show some pieces that are somewhat finished rather than the whole thing:




The top piece is for the top of the trees while the lower two parts are various bits of tree bark.

Then here's the full map for the tree trunk (with a few gaps):



I'm not sure how big it'll be in size but if you click it you may be able to see some of the details.

Here's some shots of the scene itself without a texture so you can see what it looks like on its own:



The whole thing is made up of 13 different pieces with 5 of them being reused.

Here's what it looks like with the unfinished textures:


I really really don't like the tree tops. I think that they're too round and the texture looks awful on them, so I'm hoping to fix that over Christmas Break. 

I also had to model my level in Google SketchUP, so here's a look at that (warning, it's terrible):



I have more to it that matches up with the sketch some more but this is the general idea.

Then to finish off on here's some pancake cat:

 


That's all for this week. Thanks for reading if you did and hopefully things will be back on track soon. 

(~^-^)~