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Research
Pitch style and formats
When creating a pitch I need to think about who is my target audience. In this sense it is for my tutors. With the idea of me selling my idea in order to get the go ahead for my game. The pitch will be submitted via an assignment therefore, I will need to make sure the idea is clear and understandable.
The pitch will be selling the idea to the tutors. I will need to the persuade them that idea is reliable can meet the desired deadlines. However, this is also going to be a sales pitch this is because I am focusing on a particular product. It will also be explaining how the product will unique.
A pitch should included an attention grabbing title which can get the audience attention. It should also included things such as the core game concept which contains unique mechanics which will make the game stand out more.
It needs to cover the idea such as story art and your audience. This can also involve how you plan on getting the reach to your audience such as marketing strategy.
With game development everything comes at a cost therefore, he need strong planning and to understand your competitors and what they do well and what could be improved.
Lastly is a way to visualize your game for example showcasing what has already been made. Weather this is in format of a trailer or presented as a demo. This is your main selling point.
I managed to find the official Bioshock pitch via internet achieve. Comparing it to the official game to the pitch you can tell that it was changed but still some core elements were kept. Seeing how a team has put a pitch together compeered to my idea has made me relies even if I do pitch the idea it is okay to change the idea but making sure that I keep the key elements such as cars and a road for them to explore.
Primary
Audience
So let’s talk audience. Who is this for? How will I get my reach? Why did I choose this market? These are some of the questions which I ask myself when creating a Audience profile. The goal of an audience is to find purpose for your objective.
My target audience will be for car enthusiasts which, are around the adults and teenage years. Who have an interest in cars. Another interest that my audience may have is the interest of the anime art style. The age group is very active online and spend a lot of time on social media such as YouTube and Twitter/X. My target audience overview is for those that like cars and can be portrayed in a anime style animation . Using a mixture of both worlds realism on cars but the visual appearance of anime.
Unit8-Form
Unit8-FormAns
In my forms I found out that my target audience..
I also deiced I wanted to create the game to be playable on different platforms these platforms such as:
- XBOX
- PlayStation
- PC/Handhelds
A large part of my market games feature on almost or on every console therefore, I deiced I will walk on the same path and make sure that it is playable on most consoles. This means adding controller support as well as Keyboard and Mouse.
Going to location
I decided to leave my house and go outside to get a better understanding on how cars function on road surfaces. However, with this location I decided it was too short for the idea I had. However, this is still a good base as I could scale the roads, how the car interacts with roads and to give it that realism feel.
Building Mustang GT 1968
I am going to be modeling a Mustang and to further greater my understanding on how to model I decided to buy AIRFIX version of the Mustang I want to take inspiration for. It did come with stickers however, I did not apply them as my main goal was to construct the body.
Secondary
Assetto Corsa
This is very well known for realistic physics and it’s modding community this allows a lot of flexibility because they can add cars which aren’t suppose to be in game and can use them. Assetp is more track based than it is open world like Forza Horizon.
Forza Horizon
Forza Horizon 6 features stunning visuals, massive and diverse map which Asseto doesn’t have. Therefore, it has many different terrains. One thing I noticed about the FH6 is that the roads are too wide. Therefore, I will try and make them as close together as I can. Enough for room of error but slim enough to still feel that realism like you are driving a car. FH6 hasn’t released yet but the visuals are much better than Assetos.
Visuals
This was a talk with Matt Collins from Turn 10 Studios, discussing the art direction around Forza Motorsport 7.
In the video they discussed that the red Dimond like shape was the players main area of focus meaning this is where the players eyes are mostly drawn to. The further from the red Dimond you are the less attention to detail there is. Whereas, the Red Dimond is important. However, it isn’t definitive this is because it depends on what is happening in the gameplay. Knowing where detail matters is important cause too much detail and you could lose the player interest as it would become overwhelming.
Another thing they bring up in the talk is the balance of PBR materials which I plan on using. They explained about industry color pallet is good to use this is because when you take real life phones often there is light within those photos so you can remove the light.
Lastly they also have Photogammertry which helps creates these PBR materials. This means they take thousands of photos of the same object so that it can merged together to bring a 3D model, with texture details like roughness.
For my visuals I have decided to go with a cel shader this this because I am very passionate about the anime look. This is because I am very formila with how it looks and the ways of achieving it based on previous works. I feel like the cel shader also express more emotion than regular lighting because of the tones used for the story telling.
A cel shader (also known as toon shading) is a way to give a hand drawn look. Instead of smooth gradients and realistic lighting. A cel shader usually contain different bands which often is good for lighting direction. There are many different types of cel shading from stylised from titles like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker or the anime games such as Dragon Ball FighterZ. Each has their own unquiet style not just within games but in movies to.
https://twitter.com/rare_pistachio/status/2025276166043488270?s=20
This is a cel shader made with blender 4.2. Although this isn’t unreal engine which is what the animation will be taking place in. This was inspired by Persona 3 Reload which was created in unreal engine 4. However, due to it being open sourced I can have a look at the project and try to translate it to Unreal engine again.
I took inspiration from the GDC talk about how guilty gear managed to achieve their cel shading this is because I believe this is a very polished anime look which I want to recreate. When I looked into the cel shading on YouTube around 90% was post processed material however, I think gilty gear gives better lines and more control. Whereas, post process happends when realistic lighting has been applied and you get a splogy gredient which would ruin the style.
Guilty gear has achieved the art style already by having different camera angles within battle. These types of camera angles will be good for the cinematic idea. Creating the anime style in 3D scenes can help create a innovative story telling this is because you can capture more emotion and expression.
Cel shading is quite hard to get right this is because there is no middle ground between and if it is too inconstant it can very easily be ruined which has happens numerous times before. It is also hard to show a replicated 2D style in 3D. An anime called RWBY is one of the most popular 3D anime however, I still believe that there is still ground to explore.
How to create a cel shader
The cel shader contain 3 main components.
- Threshold – This is the the point between the shadow value and the light value creating the highlights of the shadow.
- Light vector – This is the direction of which the light is coming from. This will work along the side of the threshold as if that threshold is met then shadow highlight will show.
- Normal vector – This is often the way that the faces are facing as seen in the example image above.
However, a cel shader is very dependent on lighting without good lighting your cel shader will suck. There is no global lighting effecting the characters meaning each character has their own point light in order to best convey the light vector. The light is also adjusted for each cut scene. However, I will not be adding singular light per character and will instead use a global light in a smart way as mentioned in my research about lighting later.
Vertex normal are very different to face normal. A lot of 3D modelling engines have tools to work the vertex normal out however, this is often for realism and not cel shading. Also Guilty Gear got the effect by setting them manually which is time consuming. Therefore, I will be using normal maps as they are more piratical however, there will be less control.
Color in anime is treated in away to express different emotions and moods giving a pathetic fallacy feel. The combination between the light and shadow vectors create a way of expressing the character or model. Anime also priorities the foreground and tend to make the background less detailed.
So how is color achieved? Color is often done by the unwrapped model and applying the colors needed in a flat shaded way. Before becoming cel shaded. They multiply 2 textures together allowing more control over the shadow.
Outline can be split into 2 categories. One is the outside outline which often uses a inverted hull method which is flipping your entire mesh inside out which is a poorly optimized way of doing it. However, it gives you more control than using post processing. Post processing is a less controlled way however, is more optimized. However, I will still use the inverted hull method this is because I will have more control as we have already changed a few parts of the method this is one part which I don’t want to change. The next outline method is that inner outline. This is again controlled via textures or can be done manually which is very hard to do. Adding a inner outline adds diversity
After doing a few attempts in with my cel shader I decided to go into further details about a cel shader as I wasn’t hitting the look that I wanted. It felt like I was missing something therefore, I decided to do further research. I felt that my first attempt was closer than my recent attempts people also noticed this difference.
In this tutorial he uses post processing which was mentioned during the GDC however, for the same reasons of Guilty gear avoiding it however, this does make a good contingency plan for if something was to go wrong. As this goes into a lot of detail on how to get the look.
Throughout my research I managed to stumble on a car anime by the official Toyota group which looks very cool. Looking at this art style on their cars it made me relise that Post process might be the way to go as it is more adaptive as well. Which is something I struggled to get right on this one. The Toyota anime GRIP looks a lot more stodgy than having a hard coded shader. I will now be using post processing which will give me less control on the overall shader. But this will be a plan B if the technique is too hard to use.
Let’s break down how the car looks. Based on how the lighting is made we can see how it is interacting with shadows and the overall look. You can see that the car is a mostly solid color but feels less metallic. There is no outline on the car we can see that the shadows are more splodge. We can see it still features a hand drawn element. Instead of hard two-tone shadows it has a smooth gradient between light and darker elements. It has very basic environment shading.
Lighting
Lighting
Another GDC which will impact my game is that of Forza Horizon 3. This is because of their technology in order to create the sky within the game. Although this focuses more on the realism I can still focus on the lighting how it can effect the environment.
When doing research on the car commercials I relised that they featured different times of days which I thought was a cool idea. My original thought was to use a video however, there are many disadvantages of this.
Going to the location to capture real time lighting and how it effects the world around it will add to the realism of how the world should look but with the twist of the cel shader. This would consume a lot of time and require data processing. I managed to find a resource which I could use which contained high detailed HDR. Therefore, I will be using that in my production. This method will be more limiting as I won’t be able to use many of their techniques but the idea is much the same. I still plan on using motion however, in a different method.
If I am to use a custom HDR I would like to present the shadows in a also very realistic way this is done by getting a scrolling texture which can show cloud reflections on model adding to that realistic look.
I didn’t get too much information from it unlike the cel shader this is because although lighting is relevant and this has given me ideas for my lighting and how to do it this will still require trial and error.
Forza Motorsport 4
MX5 gameplay
I was away when making this game play teaser for my primary research of going to the location. In my MX5 game play. I had a feel for the controls and looking at how the AI was competing against me. There are gameplay bugs but I made do.