Who's the boss?

A few weeks back we playtested one of our games currently in development, although the game already is pretty awesome we felt it didn't end good. It was ok but not the awesome ending you expect from an awesome epic game :). That's why we sat around the table with a few beers and discussed how it should end. After the vodka bottles, we ended up with lots of crazy ideas and, finally picked one....the craziest one of course! I don't want to spoil it for you and give away too much details about the boss, but I can tell you it's a huge vehicle which the player has to enter and work it's way to the top.

We needed to test this idea as soon as possible before creating the final art and realizing it wasn't such a good idea after all. I quickly blocked out a prototype of the boss in 3ds Max, imported it into an existing level. Once in the game, it's much easier for instance to determine the objects scale and internal tunnel and room sizes.



Mockup of the boss

Once that was done, it was time to think about how split the whole thing up into boss 'building blocks'. In the image above, you can see two building blocks: a tunnel-segment and a door. When I was satisfied with that, I created an initial version of the texture. First collected some style reference though! It's imperative that you unwrap all segments first before copying them. That's what I'm doing now. When that's done, I can weld them all together and do some final modeling and texturing of stuff I can't do with the building blocks. Then we test it some more, and then we can do the lighting for the whole thing!

Building blocks

Lucky for me, I have 2 other guys working on some other neat stuff going on in the boss fight (can't tell too much about it right now ;)). Awesome!!!

Matt