Design Document
While investing a substantial amount of time becoming familiar with the myriad of new tools needed to create the Colosseum project, I began to create drafts of a basic design document that outlined the characters, props, architecture, textures and, most importantly, the story that would unfold.

A sample page from a design document iteration

Story
The game would take place in the early 2^nd century during the reign of emperor Trajan. The Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum) was already built by this time and Trajan used it to its full advantage by holding frequent games, some of which lasted for months.

The player would be put in the role of Gluteus, a dim-witted thief that begins the game in the Roman sewers making his way towards the Colosseum where he has heard there is treasure for the taking. After a scuffle with some Roman Centurions, he whacked on the head and wakes up in a daze as a prisoner in the basement of the Colosseum, awaiting execution.

During these adventures, Gluteus is presented with trivia, foreign languages and historical fact that educate the player about the context of the story being told. The educational shooter is on its way.

Custom Characters
I ultimately narrowed my cast down to four custom characters that I would build and texture myself. The time investment required to create, texture and import a model in-game made it difficult to do any more than this. Custom characters would include:

• Gluteus Maximus: The main character of the game.
• Legionnaire: The grunt of the Roman war machine.
• Thraex: Gladiator whose armaments and weaponry are based on the conquered Thracians.
• Retiarius: Uses a trident and a weighted net to battle his opponents.

Evolution of a character: concept, modeling, skinning and importing to game. Also see screenshots section

Modified Characters
Since modeling (and especially texturing and weighting) were very time consuming tasks, I decided to use modified models that shipped with Jedi Outcast for other characters in the story. These would be almost identical to the original Jedi Outcast models, but with modified textures (skins) that would create the illusion they were different people altogether. The Athena model skin was not modified at all from the original game character since her attire was adequately appropriate for the historical setting.

• Athena: Female gladiator based on the Tavion player model from JO.
• Owner: Gladiator owner based on the Monmothma player model from JO.
• Prisoner: Slave/prisoner based on the Luke model from JO.

Original characters from the Jedi Outcast game. Skins were modified only slightly.

Props
The characters required the following weapons to be built and textured in 3DS Max:

• Gladius: Traditional Roman short sword used by certain gladiators and the Roman legion.
• Trident: Three-pronged weapon of choice for the retiarius.
• Curved Sword: Traditionally used by the Thraex gladiator.

Colosseum weapon models. Also see screenshots section

Architecture
Since the majority of the action would take place in the arena, the structure of the Colosseum itself would be the focus of the level building. Once a convincing recreation could be demonstrated, I could then move onto the surrounding areas.

Game architecture. Also see screenshots section

Textures
As mentioned earlier, the illusion of detail in 3D games is often accomplished by mapping  two-dimensional textures onto geometry. This goes for both people and places, and it usually involves a fair amount of work (a bit more than I expected). Textures were created largely from scratch in Photoshop and Illustrator (and 3DS Max at times) and included the following:

• Seating and emperor’s box
• Inner and outer walls and columns
• Basement walls and supports

• Wood beams

• Ground and sky

• Grates, fences and doors

• Torches

• Crowd simulation texture

• All body parts and clothing for characters

• Weapons textures

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