First concept art

Here's an awesome sketch of Ares done by Alberto, an old student of Tim's. You can see some more of his work at bertoloco.deviantart.com (though it hasn't been updated in awhile).

I figure we can kill two birds with one stone by using the same model for the gods as for their champion. The gods really only need exist in the background and as such we can create a high-poly version of Ares Champion, tweaked to look godly and capture some images. The images could then be used on billboards that have some sort of shader effect and possibly a particle effect.


On another note Travis asked about the possibility of some sort of introductory movie, seeing as how the motion capture lab now has rigid body stuff working. After some breif checking on the Garage Games website I found that TGEA supports Theora video.
Unfortunately creating a movie using Max is likely to be too time consuming. Alternately we could try capturing some gameplay video, but this also has problems as last semester we had a some troubles trying to capture video. A third option is to create a small level where bot versions of the Player Characters fight against the Boss or a small group of enemies. It is possible in fact to have this level simple running behind the menu interface for the game so that until the actual level a player has chosen needs to load (of course in our version there will only be one choice).

Also of note is the fact we will now be adding the Hindu pantheon of gods as a fourth selection. Dependent on time this would allow us to have a hybrid warrior/caster class character. Whether we will actually implement this class is questionable, but our UI and documentation will reflect the change regardless (i.e. the Hindu gods will appear on the character select screen but may or may not be actually selectable).
Currently I'm thinking of having Shiva, Ganesha, and one other as the Hindu gods. Shiva's champion would be a Hybrid class character of some type and Ganesha would be some sort of heavy type character of some class.