Posts by Corwin

  • [Crysis] - The Call of the Fireflies

    The Call of the Fireflies has been released!

    MEDIA:

    [Blocked Image: http://fireflies.clement-melendez.com/pics/firefliesnew01_m.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://fireflies.clement-melendez.com/pics/firefliesnew03_m.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://fireflies.clement-melendez.com/pics/firefliesnew04_m.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://fireflies.clement-melendez.com/pics/firefliesnew02_m.jpg]

    DOWNLOAD:

    Mirrors are available on the official website

    Big thanks to Jenn0_Bing and 3Dnj for testing out the level.

  • Lara Croft and the guardian of light.

    I love it, there's definitely not enough of these games that let you play coop on a single (unsplitted) screen in a single computer or console. I've been enjoying it with my girlfriend for a few days, almost unlocked everything. Reminds me of Trine, which we enjoyed for the same reasons aswell. I'd buy ten more right away if they were to make sequels/addons to this.

  • Pirates of New Horizons

    I'm very impressed by the levels to be honest. Compared to the other aspects of the game that feel pretty rough, the environments are well-thought, detailed and colorful. Great stuff! The few nitpicking stuff I could report have been mentionned by others.

    I liked the ending,

    Quote

    riding on the gold tha'ts spilling into the ship was a great touch

    I really hope you guys end up making it into a full game, it's definitely has lots of potential!

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Quote from The Vulture

    Here's an earthquake scene I threw together real quick, so it's very WIP. I know the sky is overly bright.[Blocked Image: http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2761/00080c.jpg]

    Looking good, I like how much attention you put in the details, for instance the water coming out of that pipe.

    The thing that bothers me is the presence of vegetation in the gap between the cliff and the flat terrain. If the earthquake was recent enough to leave a car in flames and that noboby fixed the running pipes, I'd guess grass or ferns didn't have time to grow on a surface that was underground only moments ago. There should be only roots and rocks in there IMO, maybe a few fallen leaves too.

    Good work anyway, you've clearly got the knack for detailed sceneries. Keep them coming!

  • Clement Melendez - Level Designer

    Quote

    ":nspto5xp]Fantastic, one of the best portfolios I've ever had the pleasure of browsing.I would just change one little thing but it may make all the diference. At the moment when you open a project page you get a bit of text then a few thumbnails for the screenshots. To ensure everyone will see your images, just put all your images in there in a rather high res, that way the viewer will only have to scroll down, instead of having to click once to see each image.

    Thanks dude!

    That screenshot thing was one of the trickiest things to decide when creating the layout. I found that having these screenshots there helped cut the otherwise big chunk of text in two, and having the Challenges part at the bottom of 6 big screenshots would just mean many people wouldn't even notice it. Also, since the content area is only about 800px large, I don't know if that'd be enough for my latter projects (which shots are 1200*750px) and I'd still have to provide a link to a larger version.

    I think I'll create a temporary version to try it out the way you said, see if it makes for more comfortable browsing. Thanks for the advice

  • Clement Melendez - Level Designer

    Quote from seir

    Nice site, I've added your portfolio to the LEVEL-DESIGN.org portfolio list

    Cool, thanks!

    Quote from e-freak

    i LOVE your portfolio. seriously, the layout is awesome, the resume is short and informative and it reflects some very good work of yours! only thing that bothers me slightly is the hover effect of the thumbnails on the main page (the black horizontal bars) - i'd rather see the image brightend up or something that let me see more of the work instead of less.oh and ffs - apply at crytek! i just read across your post mortem again and that's like the most awesome article ever on a personal portfolio

    Good remark on the black bars, I used them so that the white text would be readable even if the picture under it was bright but there are other ways of achieving that. I'll look into it

    Thanks for the comment too! The plan is just to release that last project, add a couple videos and another post-mortem, correct a few things in Mandate of Heaven (I've finally found out why some objectives didn't record as completed) and I'll send that their way and cross my fingers.

  • Legal / copyright questions

    I'm not sure I'm willing to go down that path of legal battle and technicalities, I may end up loosing more money or time than I have invested in the first place.

    Most of my conversations with them were done by chat. When I confronted the CEO I also sent a cc to the art director (the only other person I had contact with) and I believe because of that witness the CEO tried to defend himself by saying stuff like "we never really told you we would pay, only that we would _like_ to pay you" and "I had no idea you didn't get the contract since you sent us no mails about it".

    So I sent him a copy-paste of most of our past chats, where he explicitely told me they'd pay me and how much, that he'd get me a contract on a precise date, and all the messages I sent him almost every day and that he ignored. I think he didn't know Gmail records all Gtalk chat history, must have caught him offguard, cause he didn't even bother explaining himself or arguing and just said "For me, this chapter is closed, thank you". That was a weak hint that maybe I could use that against them, although I have no idea if google account history can be used as proof in court.

    Anyway, the more I think about it, the more it would make sense that they just couldn't afford to pay me anytime soon and that the CryEngine license was just a trial version. That's no excuse however to keep me in the dark and ignoring me and eventually screwing me over. I would have settled for "we can't pay you right now but will do as soon as we can". It's not knowing what was going on that was killing me.

    I'm considering that stuff of writing down a warning to others. Since the company is very poorly known, I guess I could manage to reach the first or second page on google and avoid other people maybe falling into the same trap I did. I'll see, like I said I don't want to loose much more time and effort over this than I already have. I may just move on, life's too short to spend it hating people that did you wrong, I guess.

    The company is Trine Games (http://www.trinegames.com) by the way.

  • Legal / copyright questions

    Yeah, that's something I sort of forgot because of this whole mess. I should at least ask at Crytek, especially because of these assets that come as demo.

    Any of the mapcorians there would care to drop the question on whoever could answer it? No need to explain the situation, just in general would that be accepted for someone to release screenshots of an CE3 environment containing the demo assets? If you won't don't worry, I'll send a mail later.

  • Legal / copyright questions

    I'm not sure the problem is they don't have the money to get me paid, like I said they were willing to give it to me right away if I signed up with them. Plus they've got the CryEngine 3 license, and I don't think this comes cheap (although that may have been a sort of demo build for all I knew). I think it's more that it's easy to ignore me and not pay me, so why not do it? It would have been smarter to get them to pay me before I delivered the level, but they were supposedly in a hurry so I didn't want to act like a prick and withold it from them if that was critical. Meh.

    I think I'll wait a bit to see if the lawyer will answer my questions, and go ahead and feature it otherwise. But if anybody's in to that legal stuff, I'd appreciate the advices

  • Legal / copyright questions

    Last July I've been contacted by a game company to create a quick level prototype using the CryEngine 3 so that they could experiment with their assets in it and show it to publishers to strike a deal. They promised me money but I didn't get to sign any contract (I know, stupid of me to have accepted, but I was excited to discover the CryEngine 3 and the CEO seemed like a good guy). So I delivered it in time and they were happy about it.

    Well after two months I'm now sure they're not going to pay me for my trouble. They tried to use that money as leverage for me to sign up with them full-time, telling me that they'd give me the money as part of a bonus when I sign the contract, but fuck that. I told them I'd sign if and when I see the money they had promised me. They told me they'd get a contract done quick for that prototype then so they can pay me, but then they started ignoring me on chat for days.

    I finally sort of told them to go to hell and that I revoke their right to use my creation and their response was "meh, we were the ones who said we'd pay you in the first place, like you didn't want it, and we still haven't got a contract from you anyway". Doh, send it to me first. Anyway, I'm done wasting time over this, this is getting nowhere, I've been scammed, that's all.

    Nice first contact with that industry btw

    Anyway, I'm now wondering if I could use that level in my portfolio. Not put it up for download since you'd need the CryEngine 3 and all, but just pictures of it since it's not bad I think, to show that I have touched the CryEngine 3 and its new features as well as the 2nd. They gave me a couple models to put into the level but I woudn't show them on my website because I don't have the rights for them, and the rest was done with demo assets that came with the engine, or Crysis/mods stuff ported over.

    However, I signed a standard NDA form with them and after reading it I'm still unsure if I'm totally safe for showing this off. Could they have my ass on account that it reveals stuff about their upcoming unannounced game? (it doesn't, it's standard vegetation and a few buildings they haven't created). Or any other reason? Does anybody know something about that? I can send the NDA over by PM if anybody's willing to help.

    Thanks!

    PS:I also sent an email to that company's lawyer to ask the same questions but I'm afraid he/she may be biased, you know, like, of course he/she'd be.

  • [Crysis] - The Call of the Fireflies

    Quote from michi.be

    I really like how the vegetation looks. Never imagined that people will do such great stuff with my poor and crappy tree packs. Maybe you want to use a blurred light projector on the lamp screenshot. The shadows are very sharp and it ruins the scene a bit. But maybe you changed it Didnt read the whole thread.

    Thanks, your vegetation packs were a big help indeed, couldn't have done it without them!

    About the shadows, it's a tricky bit. You'll notice if you look intently that the light doesn't actually come from above but from around the middle of the cave, thus the light on the bottom of the rails and stuff like that. In my experience, projectors can only work with spotlights pointing in a particular direction, not affect the look an omni light entity, so to be able to use the projector (and unless there's some trick to get it working in all directions, cause the tickbox "ProjectInAllDirs" doesn't change a thing), I'd have to go back to the normal position for the light, coming from the top, and I think I prefer the one in place even though it's a trick and pretty unrealistic.

    Here's what it looks like now:

    [Blocked Image: http://fireflies.clement-melendez.com/pics/FirefliesM_0002.jpg]

    Here's what it'd look like with a projector from above instead of the middle-height light source:

    [Blocked Image: http://www.clement-melendez.com/temp/00034.jpg]

    What do you think?