Peter McDermott

It's "polish week" on Iron Brawlers! That means particle effects, sound FX, smooth loading-screen transitions... all the juicy stuff that a game needs to feel good. And I gotta say, I love this stage of game development. It's been one hell of a journey building this game, and it's not over yet. We've got some tuning to do to make our combat feel tighter; we're constantly playtesting and balancing our two playable characters. We are stoked to have our second character, Goblin, in the game - I think he acts as a strong antithesis to our hero character, Sol.  We're aiming to release Iron Brawlers on itch.io on Friday, April 9th. Our immediate goal is to have a playable, early access build that we can update over the coming weeks. We'd love to slowly add more characters, more levels, and new gameplay modes.  This is a quick update because I've got plenty of work to do - one week from now I hope to be able to provide an in-depth postmortem, analysin

The first week back from our summer holiday is Tech Week! We had a whole week to focus on upskilling relevant to our game project with a focus on learning something new. With our Beta deadline fast approaching, I knew it was high time we added some flavour to the UI in Iron Brawlers. So for Tech Week, I wanted to learn how to make some cool renders of our characters and to experiment with turning them into graphic UI elements using Photoshop.  This week was a big challenge for me as graphic design is not my forte. But I thought that starting with a render was a good way to work within my 3D skillset and use Photoshop to transform high-quality images into cool backgrounds.  First I captured a render in Maya using Arnold.   After some colour research, I settled on a colour palette that complimented our character and the vibe we are trying to set. I used Photoshops Poster Edges filter to add some texture and hard shadows to the image before desaturating and recolouring them to match our c

Much has happened since my latest update: summer break has come and gone, 2020 is in the past, and Flowerboi has some colour! This post is a quick update on the current state of Iron Brawlers, showing some improvements to the visual style of Flowerboi who will now be called Sol. We returned to classes this week feeling reinvigorated and ready to finish our game. Since my last post, I have made another pass on Sol’s animation set after seeing how the play out in Unity and in response to feedback. This was Sol’s old running animation... And here he is now! Christa has really captured the essence of Dante's concepts. She did awesome work giving Sol a magnificent lock of...petals and the armour set looks great. Dante has done an amazing job texturing Sol. Texture detail has been kept simple to play nicely with our toon/cell-shader. This scene was captured directly from Maya using a simple 3-point light setup, but he looks even better in Unity with our cell-shader applied. The changes I

The research is done, and this week it's time to start blocking out the first few animations for our hero character in Maya. Last week we filmed reference footage using move breakdowns of great fighters like Mohammed Ali, Israel Adesanya, and Tony Jaa. My focus animating this character is to keep the attacks quick with short wind-ups and longer follow-throughs.  It’s been super fun trying to bring this character to life. For this project, I decided to create all the animations in one scene in Maya, isolating each animation in its own animation layer. This allows me to switch between animations quickly without having to record timeline keys for the start and end of animations or having to switch to a different file for every animation. This also makes it easy to check the transitions between each move.  This week I thought I'd treat this post as an informal animation critique session. I'll show some playblasts that I presented to the class on Friday and paraphrase some feed

The days are growing longer, and it feels like we’re finally moving towards summer here in Wellington. Billboards line the streets in the lead up to the coming election; there is a general feeling of relief after returning to Covid-19 level one. It’s easy to forget that our circumstances are unique here in NZ. Meanwhile, my brain is deep in rigging-land building an IK / FK skeleton for Iron Brawlers.  We’re one week into Alpha (4 weeks total). Dante is setting up our environment asset pipeline, building our first stage, and Josh…well Josh is doing all the hard stuff really: refactoring code, moving from a collider system to raycasts and trying to build a custom hit-detection system. I’m stepping out of Unity for a while, building our base character rig in Maya while Christa brings Dante’s concepts into three dimensions. I spent the first couple of days reinforcing the foundations of my rigging knowledge: I’ve made rigs before, but I’ve often felt like I didn’t understand the core conce

It's week two of developing Iron Brawlers and we are midway through the prototype phase. Josh has made some awesome headway programming, getting the camera working, player collisions, and lives in the game. Christa has made great progress on a female base-mesh and Dante's main character is looking super unique and cool.  While my focus is going to be largely animating the characters for this game, I think it’s also important that I implement those animations in-engine, so this week, I’ve been working on getting a prototype version of the player character in the game using a rigged and animated model from  Mixamo.com . Mixamo is an awesome tool for prototyping, making it super fast to get animated characters in your games. It's awesome to get a sense of how the mechanics are playing out with a fully working character.  I started by hooking up a running animation. Once the transitions in and out of idle were feeling good in the animator, I added a jump and a punch. Once each