Week Summary - BA2b Week 3

Collaborative Game Project

After the feedback we received in our tutorial on Monday we made some adjustments to our trello board; it now uses an agile workflow setup as well as having tasks for the entirety of the game added instead of just the ones currently in process. I found this setup much easier to make sense of and I can see it being a real help during the rest of the project.

As for actual asset creation, I spent the first part of this week recreating the main door according to the new design created by one of our team members. Working from someone else's design was a new experience for me, and the kind of problems I encountered with the process made me think a lot about my own work in relation to a 2D to 3D pipeline in the workplace. From the design below, things like elevation weren't readily apparent and I had to ask a fair amount of questions as I was working, making me realise how clear a design has to be when it's being passed to someone else. In addition, making sure my assets sit well with those others have made, making compromises with team members and making sure everyone's opinion is taken into consideration is a new way of working, and although it's sometimes tricky I think it will result in a better end product for everyone.

Below is my finished model and UV map for the door, and the textured model in Marmoset Toolbag and in-game. Making models with entirely hard edges is a slightly different kind of process than what I've been used to in the past, and the decisions I make about where to split my UV islands are more to do with how I can avoid overlaps and blurriness given the small texture size and how it's going to run over the model than about avoiding visible seams as it has been with other projects.

I feel like the game's aesthetic is really starting to come together, and hopefully as more textures and models are added the atmosphere will start to become more and more apparent.

At this point a start screen was needed for the game. I took inspiration from 90s kids' horror like Goosebumps and PC games like I Spy Spooky Mansion for the text - the kind of unashamed cheesiness present in these is something I think is at the core of this project for a lot of us, being used in a slightly ironic capacity.

I used the same assets for the start screen again for the game's end screen, again with a similar kind of nod to the sources mentioned before.

There were also some adjustments I needed to make to models made earlier in the project, things like adding bottom faces to objects which now had physics and could be flipped over. For things like this and in the project in general, I think having a group work environment is really important, allowing for easy and fast communication which allows issues to be addressed and blocks to be moved past very quickly. We've been working in the same room for most of this project, and I can see why many industry companies favour an open-plan office environment over closed-off offices.

Other work

I've been putting together an online portfolio over the last couple of weeks in time for EGX next week and London MCM later in the year. I asked a few different tutors for advice on this which was really helpful in putting together something rounded and appealing across the board. I settled on a few different categories to sort my work into for the moment, though these will probably change fairly constantly and significantly over time.
The live portfolio is available here: http://alexcorlett.artstation.com/

I also put together a simple business card, I imagine the design for this will also change pretty significantly as I go forward.