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starboltprojects · 3 years

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This is a new non-profit game guide for the Wii U game - Xenoblade Chronicles X. It concluded work a week or so ago, and most of the information inside is new to the internet. And I’m the author.

So, to anybody who knows me from university or elsewhere, my last five months after my Masters finished (more like mid-August to September, then late September to Mid-December, then mid-January to Present), have been spent in the darkest depths of a JRPG datamine, checking through hundreds of columns in tables like these.

Definitely not the natural environment of a perceived 3D artist, yet I’ve been attacking it with the same kind of fervor that created my first transformer.

Lots of underscores and numerical references in need of interpretation, which I was constantly hopping back and forth between tables for. Needless to say, I’ve learned a thing or too about dev commons cataloguing convention. I can imagine my programming lecturers back at Staffs can appreciate what it’s like going through these kinds of tables, and would probably chuckle when I say my head was down in these for about three full months.

Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) - Monolith Soft, is the same game which my INFERNO Skell 3D piece came from. It’s a game I’m intimate with, and for a Wii U JRPG, it's renowned for being a technical marvel, fitting a seamless open world, larger than the one in Breath of the Wild and as dramatic as Avatar’s Pandora, onto the Wii U hardware.

It’s also dense, brimming with micro-management philosophy, augmentation for every possible battle tactic, and featuring over 100 different kinds of fantastic enemies to fight. But at the time of delving into this datamine, big pieces of information about the creatures’ capabilities were simply not covered. You couldn’t pick up a guide or the in-game enemy index and find anything useful about them to help you plan a fight. And without that intimate knowledge, battles just devolve into damage sinks.

And this became the topic of my digging. I’ve played the game twice and run up against walls I couldn’t beat on both playthroughs. I refused to go to the effort of customising a build to beat tougher enemies without having all of the information I needed, and while plenty of guides exist on builds and gear, none exist for enemies, and the game’s in-built enemy index is functionally useless. I wanted to make my own enemy dex for Xenoblade, like the pokedex in Pokemon, so I could arm myself with that sense of knowledge and control.

But it goes deeper than just personal peace of mind. There’s a let’s player I follow - Chuggaaconroy, who’s known for in-depth let’s plays of games covering everything a game offers, particular JRPGs, who loves Xenoblade Chronicles. I was anticipating, and had seen evidence of, a let’s play of Xenoblade Chronicles X being planned by him. I wanted to see him NAIL this game, expose it for all of its richness and, knowing his calibre and the herculean task it would be to apply it to XCX, I became an editor on the game’s wiki in 2018 and reached out to Emile (Chuggaaconroy), asking to help with any info I could get my hands on. He told me a let’s play, were it to happen, would be some way away, likely after a Switch port. In hindsight I’m thankful it hasn’t happened yet, since a Masters has occured in my life between starting and finishing this endeavor.

Back then I’d originally planned to just grab the base stats for every species when the game’s index only displays a range specific to level-bracket. I thought it was something I could achieve with my available resources. But then, when the datamine was shared with me, my list lengthened to include:

- Arts – Attribute, Category, Hit No., Direction, Scaling, Cooldown, Effects - At least 3 of these per enemy, and increasing

- Appendages – Hardness, Skell Targetability and Exposure

- Battle Skills – Aura Effects, Tiers and Duration, Spike Scaling, Attribute, and Rate of Damage, and other invisible Skills and Enhancements

- Immunities & Resistances to Debuffs

- Size-Category

- Stats

& Drops – Armor, Weapons, Skell Armor, Skell Weapons, and Materials & their crafting use

For context on the quantity of information that amounts to, just add up the number of capitalised points on that list, multiply it by 110 or so, and then assume the time necessary to locate and translate the relevant information from the tables.

By May of 2018, I was organising the findings onto spreadsheets for the information, and translating it to a document guide. Then I started the Masters and it was put on hold, about a dozen species done, but some still with gaps and ?s that I hadn’t worked out from my digging. But in August of 2020, Emile teased a let’s play which had the potential to be Xenoblade Chronicles X, which spurred me to pick up the work while concluding my dissertation piece. It turned out to be a different Xenoblade, but then I was in the clear of the Masters and working in earnest, identifying everything I’d previously been unsure about and concluding first drafts of all 100+ entries going into December. The time since has been spent on a handful of further additions, then editing, until we come to February 2021, where everything is ready.

I did have some help from a collaborator by the online handle of Abarax for playtesting, and in the process of the digging I’ve also ended up building several more documents for look-up purposes. And I’ve produced a full set of clean portraits for the enemies which the wiki was previously lacking.

I know hundreds of players will be able to benefit from these guides. Truthfully, despite whatever preconceptions my portfolio pieces would have people believe, this project is just as in line with getting me closer to my dreams as building technically impressive transforming robots. My passion lies in JRPGS – Pokémon, Xenoblade, Final Fantasy, Persona, Kingdom Hearts. Getting to work with one during this project has been immensely fulfilling.

In total, my findings have produced a little less than 200 pages of new and clear information. I’ve already shared them both with the game’s wiki and made proposals to have the information in them implemented in their pages. I’ll let the guides speak for the rest.

PRESENTING NEW GAME GUIDES

- Xenoblade Chronicles X - Enemy Notes + Augment Crafting Guide

- Xenoblade Chronicles X - Enemy Info Sheets

And I’ll add this response I got from one of the moderators after they’d looked through it.

And a poster -

#xenoblade chronicles x #xenobladex #playerguide #game guide #pokedex #nintendo wiiu #wii u games #monolith soft

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starboltprojects · 4 years

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FEZ - Industrial Area Remix

A Hybrid environment, based on the industrial hub area from Polytron’s FEZ. My second go at producing an environment. This was made for Msc Advanced Environment Design and Research.

Down below this is a little look into how it’s been built.

I don’t pretend to know of any principles of stylisation. The aesthetic and workflow was paved as I translated the voxel environment. So for example, all of the repeatable geometry is built to fit inside a 1mx1m space, because that’s how I translated the pixel tiles to 3D space. I used snap settings appropriate to those units too. Later down the line, when the outliner grew crowded, I also built actor blueprints for clustered meshes such as the cables, the piping and other portions of the structure.

All of the materials derive their Normal maps and Ambient Occlusion either from trim sheets or combined UV maps, and they derive their colours and PBR from 3Vectors and Scalar paramaters rather than baked albedo/roughness/metalness. The details were grouped together based on their repetition in the level. The first trim sheet can be applied to over 70% of the level assets without changing anything except for colour or other scalar values. The final component in the master material is a mask, which gets used with linear interpolation to allow for a secondary set of values.

Masks play a key role in the whole aesthetic. The pixel style uses very spartan colour scheming; gradients, blending and grunge barely exist, but almost all of the tiles have an apparant primary and secondary material, which the masks are built as such to emulate. They denote differing areas of colour, opacity, emissiveness, roughness, metalness, even wear to apply additional normal data etc. The blueprint is simple but very easy to iterate with.

The resulting Material Instance is incredibly flexible. Every object in this environment, except for vegetation employs this master material in instanced capacities. It’s also given me the chance to play around with making my own material functions. Amongst what I’ve made are -

Functionality to manually adjust texture coordinates in the Instances

Functionality which handles the masking of the 3Vectors outside to the master material, streamlining the main workspace.

Functionality to adjust the intensity of normal maps, using a scalar parameter in the instance

My own Crevice shader, which uses the ambient occlusion to darken or lighten crevices.

None of this is made using a borrowed workflow available online, mind you, although it does use certain techniques. I’d never used Unreal Engine 4 in an art-based capacity before this. I hadn’t even built a working environment, period. The assets, blueprints and materials have all been built with the level they’re being used for in mind. The foliage, the decals, the clouds, the sky sphere, the masks, the snapping units. All of it was new to me before I made it.

I was almost tempted not to upload this, since it’s a very dubious piece when placed in the wider spectrum of industry. It could be a diorama as much as an environment, and it doesn’t follow any of the conventional rules. There’s no mind paid to texel density, or draw calls, or the player’s path, since I was already learning about blocking out, lightmaps, trim sheets, decals, foliage, scene lighting, the spawning functionality which makes the clouds, and all of that jazz as I went. It follows no established workflow, nor is it ‘game ready’, either visually or technically.

I also think, in hindsight its a bastardisation the original level. FEZ, a game which I have no limit of respect for, maximises the ability to play and manipulate the conventions of 2D pixel graphics and isometric camera, so creating a 3D environment with a perspective camera is disservicing the original. Phil Phish, if ever you see this, I apologise for what this is doing.

However, this environement also represents a great deal of progress in my own skills. And as a piece to look at, and pan around as I’ve edited, I still think it’s pretty gorgeous. I think I’d want to just take a nap here, then maybe see what was behind those doors.

This placed 13th in its category for the Staffordshire Unversity Final Year Students Showcase

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starboltprojects · 4 years

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From the models page

INFERNO Skell - Xenoblade Chronicles X

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Produced over a 16-week development cycle for a Masters module in 3D Game Design. Two years on from my previous attempt at a highly technical transforming robot, this one is inspired by the robots from Xenoblade Chronicles X, and is an attempt at recreating one of the Skell models from the game - the Inferno, within a current-generation games engine, along with some of his weapons.

I made the piece with the intention of improving everything I possibly could about the way I developed assets through the various stages of a hard-surface pipeline, particularly looking to produce excellent map bakes, versatile materials and a true lighting setup inside Unreal Engine, unlike the approach previously used where I relied on Sketchfab for presentation.

This model is capable of transforming into an armoured vehicle and has customisable paint and light colours on the armour and weapons. It’s as close to how it appears in-game, both in constructionally and technically as I could get it within my allotted time and skills.

Monolith Soft, if you see this, forgive me for not asking first if I could use Takayuki Yanase’s concepts and your designs, and if you’re looking for an artist to bring on for future Xenoblade games, do please consider me!

#3dsmax #3d model #unrealengine #skell #mecha #xenoblade #xenoblade chronicles x #fanart #xenobladex

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