Individual reflection.
Over the course of development the game has taken allot of turns and corners to get the game the way it is today. Many discussions, misunderstandings, frustration and success came from almost every day being with one another. I think the main things to take from the whole process would have to be a more clear and defined point and settling with things that I may not agree with but compromise with the group. There are times where I felt that I could have done more than what I had done. For instance the majority of my time was spent teaching and helping where I would rather have been making art assets for the game. I would have liked to create a wide variety of aliens and creatures that would be seen throughout the level, however I was busy with other things and development was rather slow. I hope to take what I have learned and proceed to take this new found knowledge into the next development cycle. I also feel like my writing skills hinder my ability to demonstrate the amount of work that I had done. I cannot remember every little thing that I do during the day which I usually broaden to cover tasks completed. I think keeping an active computer on with a notepad with things that I've done will prove beneficial for the second semester.
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Week 8, the final week, this week I was busy helping to find bugs within the games levels and address them appropriately. I worked with the team to correct the lighting in levels, I also recolored the first level and helped find bugs within levels. I helped to fix the guards files within the file construct. It was a busy week and art assets weren't the main focus this week as there wasn't much more we could do, so focusing on making the game work was the main priority. Since I have almost no access to the game files I helped out as much as I could in class. After one stable build was created I made a short video intro for the presentation that demonstrates the basic and core mechanics in the game.
This week was the week I got my hands dirty and cleaned up some lighting issues, Implemented post effects, small editing of animations/systems and creation of particle systems. I created a laser that has a small animation. I also worked close with Dylan to fix some issues with the grappling. I decided to make an announcement of sort and give a sneak peak to our followers on facebook. This post blew us away by reaching over 1800 people within 2 days. Compared to our other posts which average 150-200. We plan to create more amazing scenes to produce a greater fan base. In addition to the facebook post I also took the liberty to update the forum post on Blender artists you can view some of the comments here: blenderartists.org. Below this you will notice some Gifs of particle systems I edited. While I also edited the particle system that Scott had created for the Samurai prototype to fit into the game (the hit/sparks). The smoke/fire particles were made by simulating the effect in Blender and rendering them out into individual images and then later combined into an 8k texture map (this can be reduced in the quality settings of Unity).
This week I managed to get my sticky paws on a build that has the animation prerequisites that I had been asking to have for a while now. These included velocity parameters, turning angles and values for the grapple attachments and so fourth. I did have to tinker with some scripts to get the correct values that I was looking for which took a little longer than I would have liked. I also cleaned up the folder structure and realized that the player model that was being used was not the correct one. What was happening was that someone had been using an old model and importing the animations from another model meaning that animations would not align and get distorted. After cleaning the model up I threw the character back together with the correct player mesh and rig. Once there I could work on the animation pipeline. I removed some animations that weren't being used and added a bunch more. I further demonstrated by play testing and refining animation transitions and timing. I implemented the use of blend trees with blend trees inside of it. I changed the animations that Scott had created and refined them to loop better and structure better with the jump and landing animations. There is still more to be done on the player animations such as the grapple hook and timed animation states that activate at a certain time in the animation to make it feel better. None the less we are slowly getting a better and better character as the development time continues.
This week we prepare for Armageddon, and with it I tried to create something that the players there would be able to figure out. So I created a controller that would represent the buttons that are needed to use in that certain situation. The controller would appear in and out when the player is near and would disappear when the player completes the given task. We departed for wellington on the Wednesday so due to traveling and not being able to access my computer, things were limited to what I could do on my laptop. However the game was presented and played by many. The main feedback that was given about the game was mainly mechanics based. I would relay the feedback with the programmers so that we could make changes appropriately. Some of the feedback is what follows; * "The game feels slidey" * "It would be nice if the jumping would work better" * "It's hard to tell what button to press" I noticed that players sometimes got confused when entering the vents and would not know where to go and so i would help them generally. The overall trip was great to try and get it out there and have people test it, we had a few hiccups as every game does in critical time, but progress none the less.
Blog post for (6/06/2017)
This week I was sick and sitting at home trying to help as much as I can. I was mainly focusing on how the player would work within the game world and researching how other games do their mechanics and animations. Looking into Rachet and Clank and Jak and Daxter heavily for influences on these subjects. Nothing visual to provide from me, but more study by watching videos, I also looked at how squash and stretch how I might be able to implement that into the player rig. However; that was out of my capabilities this far into the vertical slice. Blog for (22/05/2017)
This week we discussed the problems to why a physics arm may not work or look aesthetically pleasing to the eye. However not hindered by the team I felt obligated to try and keep the arm working. The problem with the arm was that the rotations were not correct, Something between exporting from Blender to Unity. So when the arm was rotating towards the anchor point, the offsets would align the arm to be flat. So when looking at the arm from certain angles it would look bad. I tried to program a fix to keep the arm in a functional way but with other things happening I had no time to work on it to the extent of killing myself over it. We decided to turn the arm into a static mesh object and have that animate instead. Along side the arm not working we discussed why we would have the arm in the first place now that the whole physics side of things is not a thing. Since the physics made the character who he was. We decided it was too much work to get it to work and look nice so I managed to convert the old character Rig into a working IK handle that works within the animation controllers. For the second week of development, I had Created multiple heads which may be used for the character baring in mind the first concepts and other ideas from the previous ideas. I threw some basic colors on two concepts that may or may not have been used; From those I Created Variants and continued to ask the team which ones they liked best. And from those the flat head was chosen, however one of the members did not like the nose, so out with the nose it goes. Another member liked the look of the second down from the right with the brow antenna, so I merged the no nose with that and that brings us to that one which was the last in the line to be created. From that I then retopologised the head using Topogun to create geometry that would neatly fit into the neck hole of the characters body. From there I then worked on adding a functional mouth for the character. However the eyes needed to be able to move around and the eyes need to blink. I done some quick research on how this could be done. One way that was mentioned was that the eyes textures would move around inside the uv's, although that was a good fix, I wanted the eyes to react to the light properly. So I then modeled the eyes within the characters new eye holes. And so out of all this mess we are left with the final character which everyone agrees on, to a certain extent (some don't like the antenna), here is the final character.
When mid semester break finished, I gained a new talent called tonsillitis which meant that I was not present in body but on our group conversations. Being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of game play changes and a complete 360 turn from the original idea, I must admit I was hesitant to the scope. Sitting down and consulting the group as per usual teams discuss what they like and dislike, for me however I almost disliked the entire thing. So to combat the changes I had to self reflect and compromise with the team to get on some kind of a playing field. Once I had learned the full complexity of the game and demonstrated my dislikes and likes we then moved forward into creating something that I believe to be a little over scoped but still viable. I was contracted with the generation of the character and rig at this stage of development (day 5 or 6). Discussing and taking on board the ideas from fellow artists which had created concepts and ideas previously. I had asked to modify the character to suit the game genre we are now aiming towards (children). I threw a bunch of ideas into the pot which included neck breathing holes, some kind of jiggling thing on his head and put fourth multiple concepts of other peoples works from pinterest. We concluded on nothing and decided to wait for the next week to finalize the character. Also this week I worked with Dylan to create a semi attainable grappling hook of sort which works with the hand mechanic for the player. I guided him to create one that was similar to a sling shot rather than a grapple, since it would fling you from one direction to the other. This however was overruled and not used since we gained heavy influence from Ratchet and Clanks grapple system which keeps the player at a set distance.
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