Coder Corner

I’ve been working a little bit on my Konoko Payne level. I’m usually on the software engineering side of things, so progress is slow and results certainly do not look next-gen or anything. But I’m quite happy with how it turned out. With some more years of practice I might be able to create decent-looking levels

Anyway I was thinking about sharing a few pictures:

• this is the whole level so far. I do not count the “prototype” level I did before, which is really not worth anything. Old ONI fans will probably recognize the last level of ONI, i.e. the Syndicate Mountain Compound. I started from that level indeed, for the top structures. I added some shadows, detail textures and a lot of new things but the basic layout is exactly the same as in ONI. As you can see though, the original entrance doesn’t go anywhere: instead there is a vertical shaft going underground. I always wanted to do a game with one of those classic underground secret bases, as in old James Bond movies or old games like Zillion. So, there. It’s also more than slightly inspired by Ghost In The Shell - Standalone Complex on PS2, as I will show just afterwards.
• the same picture, without textures. The lighting is precomputed by Flexporter. The level is made of different regions connected by portals. Each region is an independent MAX file, to avoid stressing MAX too much with a giant monster level in one single file. Also, using different MAX files would mean different people could work on the same level at the same time easily. If only I had different people to work on this
• here is a closer shot, to see more details. That’s it for now, that’s the whole level. Not much, but I haven’t worked on this for long. I mean I have the coding to do as well…

Now, as I was saying, there’s a very strong GITS influence here. So much that you could call it a complete rip-off. But hey, I’m not selling this thing, I’m only practicing my MAX skills. So no harm done. I created some cool comparison pics to show the scene in KP and the original scene in GITS. The GITS pics have been taken with a crappy digital camera so they’re kind of bad. On the other hand using a digital camera blurs everything out and curiously makes it look better than the real thing.

Konoko Payne on the left, Ghost In The Shell on the right:

Here are bigger, individual versions:

• http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_GITS_CMP00.jpg
• http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_GITS_CMP01.jpg
• http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_GITS_CMP02.jpg
• http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_GITS_CMP03.jpg
• http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_GITS_CMP04.jpg

In any case this project is a lot of fun!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 8:55 am and is filed under Oni / Konoko Payne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.